ABSTRACT
Alfred Booth and Company is, in its origins and for most of its subsequent existence, part of the history of Liverpool. Liverpool merchants represented a quarter of the membership of the Royal African Company, and their interests in the West Indies and America were already considerable. In their rate of growth, Liverpool and Manchester were the outstanding expressions of the industrialism ‘which had been coming over England like a climatic change’. Thomas Booth, the grandfather of Alfred and Charles Booth, arrived in Liverpool in 1767, when the tide of this expansion was running strongly. Recognition as spokesmen for the grain trade was but the beginning of a long activity in the town's economic, social and political life. Neither the beginnings of the firm nor the social work of the Booth family can be fully understood except in its Nonconformist background.
