Developments Of The Slave Trade In Liverpool

426 Words2 Pages
Liverpool was granted its town charter in 1207 by King John I, who realised its potential as a seaport, both commercially and militarily. Due to its geographical location, Liverpool was well placed for trade, given its proximity to the Irish Sea and also the Atlantic Ocean. Although Liverpool established some successful trade with Ireland, it for the most part remained a relatively small and insignificant port, as evidenced by the fact that from 1207 up until the inception of the Civil War in 1642, it experienced a negligible population growth of a mere 1000 people. The considerable damage that Liverpool experienced during the Civil War, concomitant with the Irish Rebellion of the early 1640’s, ruined the already tenuous trade with Ireland, which in turn meant that Liverpool, more than ever, was rendered a port town struggling to survive. However, a mere 150 years later, Liverpool had been elevated to undoubtedly one of the greatest and most prosperous trading centres in Europe, if not the world. Its population, by the commencement of the nineteenth century numbered some 77,000 people, and Liverpool was responsible for 16 percent of the overall tonnage that left English ports. The town boasted several prominent industries, including a thriving shipbuilding industry and it was the centre of a national stage-coach network. It exported goods regularly across the Atlantic as compared to the Irish Sea alone, and was prosperous enough to be labelled “the second city of the Empire”. The question that remains to be answered is what caused, or contributed to, this astronomical development, raising Liverpool from an obscure and insignificant port town to a significant and gigantic nexus of trading importance, with global connections. It is the contemporary view that the Slave Trade was the sole factor in Liverpool’s expansion and rapidly gained prosperity. The aim of this
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