:Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery

This book is a collection of essays from a conference held at the Merseyside Maritime Museum in 2005. The volume focuses largely on the rise of Liverpool as the pre-eminent slave trading port in Europe. Five of the ten essays examine in minute details particular factors that contributed to Liverpool's dominance in the Atlantic slave trade in the eighteenth century. Four other chapters focus, respectively, on wealth generated by the trade and its influence on the socioeconomic life of the port and on the port's role in abolition (two each). Only one essay seems to stand alone on the important subject of African ethnicities in the Americas. In general, the essays in the volume embody excellent historical scholarship both in data collection and in analysis. The rise-of-Liverpool explanations, which imply relatively weak mobility of factors and products in eighteenth-century England, are generally consistent with the view expressed by other scholars that before the railway age there was no integrated national economy in England and that regionalism was dominant, although this point is not explicitly made in the volume. While appreciating the excellent qualities of the essays, I want to point out some limitations readers must know.