This volume developed from papers presented at the “Liverpool and Empire, 1700–1970” conference held at the Merseyside Maritime Museum in April 2006, at a time of plans to mark anniversaries in 2007 (the 800th anniversary of Liverpool; the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the British slave trade) and Liverpool's year as the European Capital of Culture in 2008. The book aims to remind readers about Liverpool's significant role in the British Empire—a role, the contributors contend, overlooked by scholars who focus on London's financial, political, and cultural dominance. The introduction, nine chapters, and afterword define “empire” broadly, from Britain's Atlantic empire in the mid-1700s, to the period of free-trade imperialism in the mid-nineteenth century; to “New Imperialism,” 1884–1914; and finally to imperial readjustment during post-1945 decolonization. Protagonists include shipowners, merchants, and financiers; those in racially mixed relationships; art collectors; and everyday people who cheered the empire.

In their introductory essay the editors contend that Liverpool's imperial past occupies an “inconvenient” position. P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins's British Imperialism, 1688–2000 (London, 1993) centered the empire on London and the City's financial and service elites (“gentlemanly capitalism”), sidelining the supposed central role of Midland industrialists. Liverpool's empire celebrations—nationalistic, conservative, and patriotic—are inconvenient to scholars who believe that working-class and ethnic conflicts dominated Merseyside's nineteenth-century history. Liverpool's “exceptionalism” during the Victorian era, featured in John Belchem's Merseypride: Essays in Liverpool Exceptionalism (Liverpool, 2000), ignores Liverpudlians who became Britons in jubilees, Empire Day festivities, and wartime remembrances. Those who characterize Liverpool's oceanic ties as “global,” the editors argue, have downplayed “the intertwining of the interests of all its social groups with those of the empire” (13).

The essays that intertwine Liverpool with empire present a fuller picture of the port's history, but some conclusions are unremarkable. Sheryllyne Haggerty demonstrates how mid-1700s British slaving merchants diversified their portfolios to minimize risk—a strategy one might predict, since contemporaries viewed slave trade investments as a lottery. Given that by the mid-1800s Liverpool's population numbered 400,000, and the port cleared 5,000 ships each year (half Liverpool registered), one would expect that many of the 2,000 Merseyside firms would trade with Britain's informal and formal empire. Anthony Webster's chapter on Liverpool's expanding trade to Asia, 1800–1850, confirms that the port's merchants shifted monies eastward when Parliament ended the East India Company monopoly in 1813 and 1833. Rory Miller and Robert Greenhill's essay on Liverpool–South American trade, 1850–1930, expands on published studies, some of which link a redirection of Liverpool's post-1807 slave trading interest toward Brazil and commodity trades. In the second half of the nineteenth century, London, not Liverpool, strengthened investment and banking with South America, relegating Merseyside to its traditional role as a bulk goods importer.

Four chapters explore Liverpool's empire at home. Murray Steele demonstrates that Liverpool celebrated royal visits, Empire Day, and coronations with particular fervor, but by the early 1950s domestic concerns and cold war geopolitics contributed to a “collective amnesia about empire.” His evidence suggests a different “transmission of Empire” between Liverpool and Glasgow, rival “second cities of Empire” (138). John Herson examines Liverpool's 1825–1913 demographic history, spotlighting 1881 and 1901, to suggest that instead of a cosmopolitan melting pot, by 1913 Liverpool residents were an “uneasy mix of peoples,” a “fractured white majority from Britain and Ireland amongst whom various continental and overseas minorities inserted themselves” (69). Zachary Kingdon and Dmitri van den Bersselaar's “Collecting Empire?” would have benefited from information on African gifts and trade tokens circa 1600–1850 to set the context for the African objects held by the Liverpool Museum. Diane Frost spotlights interracial relationships in Liverpool, a consequence of empire, focusing on post-1945. Not surprisingly, many disapproved of these relationships, particularly between “respectable” white women and black men.

The final two chapters examine Liverpool shipping companies that traded with developing Asian and African states. Nicholas J. White demonstrates how the Ocean Steam Ship Company profited by successfully navigating through political turbulence in Southeast Asia, 1945–1960, but that their push into West Africa in 1965 signaled a decisive shift from Asia. Within a decade they managed British landed and North Sea/Middle East oil investments. Stephanie Decker researched how John Holt and Company, major European traders with West Africa, unusually became a freestanding company after operating as a family-based colonial and then multinational firm. By 2001, while headquartered in Liverpool, all Holt's business operations were in Nigeria, a market where personal network–based “economies of reputation” proved all important (202).

In considering Liverpool's position in the British informal and formal empire, White and Decker's essays remind one that Merseyside's competitive advantage lay in Atlantic Africa. Liverpool emerged as the leading European slaving port by 1750, and the port's merchants continued their dominance in many African markets for 200 years. John M. Mackenzie's afterword compares Liverpool and Glasgow's imperial pasts; Glasgow merchants, like those from London, also failed to compete in African markets dominated by Merseyside men who maintained tight transatlantic networks. Liverpool's other links to empire, whether forged through trade or witnessed at home, are less exceptional.