ABSTRACT

The ideologies and profi ts of slavery and the history of black settlements in many English cities have intimate connections. In 1699, the Liverpool Merchant sailed from the River Mersey for what maps of the day called ‘Negroland’, thus becoming the fi rst identifi able British slave ship. The city of Liverpool’s intensive involvement in the slave trade meant that by the mid-eighteenth century, many fashionable, wealthy households in the city could boast black servants, and associations between “blackness” and the urban morphology of Liverpool were already well-established, with the early designation of one local south dockside area in the city as ‘Negro Row’ (Costello 2001, Belchem and MacRaild 2006). George Frederick Cooke, an acerbic eighteenth century dramatist, once famously responded to boos in a Liverpool theatre with the retort: ‘I have not come here to be insulted by a set of wretches, of which every brick in your infernal town is cemented by an African’s blood’ (cited in Hill 1989: 72). Undaunted,

Liverpool’s well-established US trading links and its lucrative involvement in the international cotton business meant that the city’s commercial interests in supporting slavery across the Atlantic remained prominent well into the nineteenth century. Indeed, many nineteenth century Liverpool cotton merchants unashamedly and publicly sided with the pro-slave Confederate South during the American Civil War (Belchem and MacRaild 2006). Nevertheless, reformist commentators on Merseyside at the end of the nineteenth century, and after the Great Famine infl ux from Ireland, were keen to point out that Liverpool was actually a successful “melting pot” for migrants, whilst emphasising the philanthropy and ostentatious “high-mindedness” of the Liverpool families and fi rms who had made their huge wealth via the port’s various sea-trading businesses (Lane 1997). But the clear polarity expressed here, between the ideal of a city of liberal cosmopolitanism-the prosperous Liverpool as second city of empire, a welcoming gathering point for black, Irish, Chinese and Welsh migrantsset against the history of slavery and the ugly racism which characterised local ethnic relations and public discourses in the city, means Liverpool is probably best described as being ‘dominated by a fractured white majority . . . an uneasy mix of peoples with neither hard-edged ghettos nor a new melting pot cultural synthesis’ (Herson 2008: 69).