Merchant City: the Manchester business community, the trade cycle, and commercial policy, c. 1820–1846 : The Manchester business community, the trade cycle and commercial policy, c.1820–

doi:10.4324/9780203023273-11

Chapter

Merchant City: the Manchester business community, the trade cycle, and commercial policy, c. 1820–1846

ABSTRACT

In 1843 W.J.Fox, a London free trader and Unitarian churchman, wrote somewhat despairingly: The League office is becoming perfectly horrible since the main body of the Goths and the Vandals came down from Manchester: it is worse than living in a factory.’1 Manchester men may have been despised by their ‘sophisticated’ London friends and hated by their enemies; but they were also feared and by the 1830s and 1840s certainly could not be ignored.2