Session Abstract

“Liverpool’s maritime communities and networks, 1750-1815” examines new research into Liverpool’s maritime/commercial networks within the Merseyside’s growing port and with port communities in Atlantic Africa and the West Indies. Dr. Jane Longmore analyses a database of 80,000 Liverpool inhabitants, information culled from trade directories and parish registers, 1766-1827, to demonstrate Liverpool’s growing commercial dynamism after the ending of the Seven Years’ War in 1763. Liverpool’s post-1763 growth came at the expense of competitors from Bristol, an issue addressed by Katie McDade in her study on Liverpool’s entrepreneurship and business acumen—increased levels of “human capital” that Bristol, as the eighteenth century progressed, lacked. Nick Radburn demonstrates how a group of Liverpool merchants aged 30-45, some former slaving captains, created new networks of transatlantic trade between Liverpool, the Bight of Biafra, and French West India islands ceded to the British in 1763. All three papers point to reasons to explain Liverpool’s dramatic growth in Atlantic trades in the two generations after 1763.