The slave trade touched everything in Liverpool, but you’d be hard-pressed to find evidence of this in history books.
Charles Dickens made himself extremely unpopular with the local worthies by speaking out against the slave trade when he was on one of his reading tours to the city of Liverpool in the 19th century.
He made so bold as to state that there was not a street in Liverpool that was not running with the blood of African slaves. Then, as now, the wealthy merchants who had benefited from that trade in human cargoes preferred not to talk about it.
Liverpool was transformed from a minor northern town to a major city because its port provided a safe haven for British vessels in the endless naval wars that country was fighting, particularly with Napoleonic France, for control of key shipping lanes. As competition hotted up for the lucrative triangular Atlantic trade, London in the south-east, and then Bristol in the south-west, became increasingly vulnerable to attack. Liverpool extended its docks and warehouses and stepped into the breach.
The first slaver to sail out of Liverpool was the , which headed for Africa’s Guinea Coast in 1699, bearing a cargo of European goods for exchange and barter. It sailed on across the Atlantic to the West Indies with a cargo of 250 black slaves and came home to Liverpool some months later having made a handsome profit of £7 000 on the transaction – the equivalent of millions in those days.
Slave trading was the making of Liverpool, but you would be hard pressed to find evidence of this in the history books, or in the oral histories of the city’s modern-day inhabitants. You have to be taken on a ‘Hidden History’ tour by an expert. And then, suddenly, it is all laid out in front of you, as plain as a pikestaff.
The slave trade touched everything. My tour guide, an engagingly garrulous old lady of Nigerian and Irish parentage, pure Scouse (the Liverpool dialect) through and through, started off by pointing out the monstrous Victorian facade of Lime Street station, built in 1830, where all the trains from the south arrive. Liverpool’s traders invested heavily in the infrastructure of railways and canals that would move the precious goods that would be brought into the docks from the transatlantic trade – particularly sugar from the Caribbean and cotton from the American deep south, all cultivated and harvested by African slaves and their descendants – to London, where the all-important stock exchanges had been established.
William Gladstone, celebrated for holding the prime ministership of England no fewer than four times, hailed from Liverpool. His family were early investors in the railway, and his forbears had made their money in the slave trade.
Gladstone’s stern, unwavering gaze stares down at you from various statues and plaques around the city, but no mention of the ‘s’ word is ever associated with his noble list of achievements.
As well as investors in railways and canals, the Liverpool merchants were the key shipbuilders and ship owners whose vessels criss-crossed the Atlantic. They would trade the goods destined for the Guinea Coast. And, of course, many of them became plantation owners in the West Indies.
The grand buildings of Liverpool were all built during this time – the banks, the buildings housing the companies that would insure the human and other cargoes, the massive warehouses.
Here and there, if you are lucky to have someone point them out to you, there are discrete references to where all this money came from – the head of an African woman, alongside a representation of a rampaging elephant, are sculpted high along the eaves of the roof of the city hall, among other symbolic references to the city’s history. And the carved image of the African lion, now co-opted into the British royal coat of arms, is everywhere.
Liverpool was made rich by the slave trade, but didn’t become a major manufacturing centre or an important stock market. Those key wealth-creating functions remained the privilege of the wealthy south, which gobbled up Liverpool’s goods as fast as they could be sent down the railway line or along the canals. It therefore remained a place with a wealthy centre entirely based on trade from the docks – and an otherwise proletarian town of dockers, sailors, petty traders and their dependants. The wealthy merchants gradually moved across the Mersey river to the more salubrious new suburbs of Birkenhead and the Wirral, or left the area entirely to go and set up new dynasties in the south.
The clamour of today’s Western leaders against the idea of restitution for Africa’s trauma during the slave trade and colonialism has an interesting resonance from another part of Liverpool’s hidden slave history. The trading in slaves by British merchants was banned in 1807. It took many more decades for the ownership of slaves in the Americas and the Caribbean to be abolished, during which time, of course, British plantation owners continued to profit from the institution.
When they were finally deprived of this source of livelihood, the Liverpool merchants were indignant, and demanded compensation. Compensation was finally granted by the Royal Treasury to the tune of £20 000 000. That would amount to several billion pounds at today’s rates.
Compensation was cool for those who indulged in the evil trade, but out of the question for those who were stranded on the outskirts of history as a result.
So you see, it is, after all, always them that’s got that get. The rest of us have to stand outside and shout until we’re blue in the face, to very little avail.
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