Liverpool and Bristol Slave Trade Merchant Networks, 1725–1807

The port cities of Liverpool and Bristol enjoyed a commercial prosperity that was inextricably linked with its trade, and particularly that of the Atlantic slave trade. Liverpool surpassed Bristol as Britain’s premier slave trading port in the mid eighteenth century, but the reasons for Liverpool’s dominance are still a cause for great debate. This paper is derived from a larger PhD project that employs the theoretical framework of entrepreneurship and various notions of capital accessed within associational networks to determine whether or not Liverpool merchants had a ‘particular spirit of enterprise’ which enabled their success. Entrepreneurship has quickly become a popular field of study in economics, sociology and business, and provides a new avenue to explore the organization of the slave trade in both merchant communities.  Additionally, by applying the notion of entrepreneurship within Liverpool slave merchant networks, a more convincing and satisfying explanation for their success besides their often-argued but little-explained “business acumen” is offered. An examination of nominal data sources, including the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade Database as well as merchant correspondence, is used to map trends in organization between the two cities and over time, and to draw conclusions on the strength and nature of business partnerships. It is argued here that Liverpool merchants managed slaving voyages within comparatively larger investment groups; thus, the business network a Liverpool merchant was part of was also larger.  From these larger networks, Liverpool merchants had greater access to knowledge, skills and resources, collectively known as capital, and this larger pool of expertise offered more competitive advantages to their trade.  Because of this, Liverpool merchants, as entrepreneurs, were able to surpass their counterparts in Bristol to become the leaders in the slave trade.