"Liverpool's slave trade was the centre of a global commerce and an important factor in British economic growth." To what extent would you agree with this opinion?

   This heightened activity was due in part to Liverpool’s geographical location – she was situated close to Britain’s main manufacturing areas in the North and Northwest. The Lord Mayor of Liverpool, William Forwood, claimed in 1881 “[Liverpool’s] prosperity is entirely dependant on [it’s] close proximity to the great manufacturing centres of Lancashire, Yorkshire, Staffordshire and Shropshire”. But was this the entire reason for Liverpool’s growing involvement in the slave trade a century before? Daniel Mannix and Malcolm Cowley argue that not only “larger and faster ships” were built on Merseyside, but also “the notorious parsimony of Lancashire merchants” was the main advantage Liverpool had over her rivals. P. E. H. Hair believes that Liverpool was favoured over other European ports, mainly because of the quality of its shipping industry. The slave trade needed, he writes, “private shippers of high efficiency” to reduce economic factors such as “shipping and trading costs (including high ship-depreciation and high mortality of crews and traders)”

   These factors appear to have combined, and there remains little doubt over Liverpool’s becoming the biggest slave trading port in the world throughout this century.

   

   So was all this “an important factor” for the economic development of the rest of Britain? In his 1944 book, Capitalism and Slavery, Eric Williams was the first to put forward the idea of a link between the spoils of Britain’s colonies and the start of industrialisation, stating that the profits from slavery were channelled into domestic industrial enterprises. These profits, according to Williams, were the main source of capital accumulation that funded the nascent Industrial Revolution. But Kenneth Morgan argues against this. Annual profits from Britain’s slave trade were on average less than 10%, this small profit being largely due to the attendant risks. Also, between 1688 and 1800, writes Morgan, the British national income from slave trade profits was small – almost always less than 0.5% of the total. The plantation owners certainly made large profits – the West Indies were the richest area in the British Empire – but it is unclear exactly how much of this went into domestic industrial development.

   Joel Mokyr also refutes Williams’ claims. According to him, the slave trade was highly profitable for those directly linked to it “and the towns of Bristol and Liverpool Consequently grew”, but its effects on British economic prosperity were “negligible”. Mokyr writes: “In the absence of West Indian Slavery, Britain would have had to drink bitter tea, but it still would have had an Industrial Revolution, if perhaps at a marginally slower pace”. Sugar was one thing, but he doesn’t mention other luxuries such as tobacco, coffee and cocoa. He goes on to state that it was slavery in America, not the “18th Century triangular trade”, which had the real impact on Britain’s economy after 1790, when the cotton industry needed the raw materials from the southern states. This was especially true in the following century, when the Industrial Revolution was in full flow. The US-based cotton industry could supply its own labour force “through the reproduction of its gender-balanced slave population”.

   Another historian, Paul Mantoux, believes that Liverpool’s rapid prosperity occurred before the rest of the country – around 1770, Liverpool was famous in the world of trading – when towns such as Manchester were nowhere near what they would later become, as British cotton goods were still no match for those from India. Mantoux makes a link between the slave trade and Liverpool’s wealth during this pre-industrial time, implying that the slave trade was an important factor in Liverpool’s economic growth, but not necessarily Britain’s.

   But Mantoux acknowledges that Lancashire’s later development into what he termed “the cradle of the factory system” owed everything to the earlier success of Liverpool, and the establishment of her trade.

   In Sinews of Empire, Michael Craton states that “the African and West Indian trades never represented much more than a tenth of total British trade”…”even the largest estimates of profits from slave trade and plantations are insufficient to account fully for the industrial “take-off” that occurred in the later 18th Century”. The tremendous growth of the Lancashire cotton industries after 1800 meant that new markets were soon needed, wider horizons than Africa and the West Indies. According to Craton, the American “new south” revitalised slavery in America, and “Liverpool gained greatly in importance even as the slave trade on which it was founded was officially abolished”. The “respectability” of the cotton industry was conveniently used to obscure Liverpool’s disreputable past. But it was still slavery, not the slave trade, which continued to be a main support for both Liverpool’s prosperity and Lancashire’s industries. These two factors “provided such a large component of Britain’s 19th Century [world] supremacy”

   So it would appear that Eric Williams is in something of an isolated position – other historians are able to provide evidence to the contrary. Liverpool certainly became the hub of the 18th Century West Indian slave trade, which was in turn “the centre of a global commerce”. But this had very little bearing on Britain’s economy. Rather, Liverpool herself was the main beneficiary, and it was the use of slaves in the 19th Century cotton industry, which better fits the description of “an important factor in British economic growth”.

Word Count = 1293

Bibliography

Walvin, J : “Making the Black Atlantic – Britain and the African Diaspora”, Cassell (2000)

Mannix, D. and Cowley, M : “Black Cargoes – A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1518-1865”, Penguin (1962)

Blackburn, R : “The Making of New World Slavery, From the Baroque to the Modern 1492 – 1800”, Verso (1997)

Morgan, K : “The Birth of Industrial Britain – Economic Change 1750 – 1850”, Longman (1999)

Wilson, C. H : “England’s Apprenticeship”, Longman (1965)

Morgan, K : “Slavery, Atlantic Trade and the British Economy 1660 – 1800”, Cambridge University Press (2000)

Mokyr, J : “The British Industrial Revolution – an Economic Perspective”, Westview Press (1993)

Rule, J : “The Vital Century – England’s Developing Economy 1714 – 1815”, Longman (1992)

Mantoux, P : “The Industrial Revolution in the 18th Century”, Cape (1961)

Craton, P : “Sinews of Empire”, Temple Smith (1974)

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