The eight-hundredth anniversary of Liverpool's founding charter commemorated by this book has come at a propitious moment. Success in securing the title of European Capital of Culture for 2008 and the designation of the Liverpool Maritime Mercantile City as a UNESCO World Heritage Site have underscored the remarkable (if still partial) regeneration of the city in the past decade. That so much can happen in ten years, however, highlights the problem of dealing with changes over eight hundred.

John Belchem meets this challenge by eschewing both the single-voice chronological narrative and the extended suite of topic-based essays that form the standard models for city histories. Instead, seven essays seek to provide “a form of urban biography … concerned with continuity and change in Liverpool's culture and character, image and identity” (6). In physical terms, the book (one or two scrambled or repeated pieces of text aside) is a joy to behold and, overall, can be fairly judged by its dramatic cover. Belchem's introductory essay offers, again, not the standard overview, but a fruitful survey of the city's many and varied attempts at civic boosterism, and one marked by healthy skepticism about a process of regeneration apparently creating a “gentrifying urban core surrounded by a ring of intensely disadvantaged residential areas” (56). Three further essays are essentially chronological overviews surveying multiple elements of Liverpool's history. Jenny Kermode, Janet Hollinshead, and Malcolm Gratton collaborate on the city's “small beginnings” between 1207 and 1680, providing an engaging account of a marginal place in a marginal region that only came “within sight of economic and political opportunity that had been impossible since its thirteenth-century foundation” (111) as the seventeenth century came to a close. The role and structure of an adventurous Corporation that gained significant independence from key Lancashire landowners, battles with the rival port of Chester (silt came to the rescue), and Liverpool's ultimately mutually reinforcing economic relationships with its hinterland form the core of their study. Jane Longmore, on 1680–1800, focuses on the mercantile elite's role in transforming Liverpool's economy, politics, and culture as it became England's largest provincial port. Her emphasis on the “humble” coasting trade that “provided an element of underlying commercial strength throughout the peaks and troughs of the more highly visible international trades in tobacco, slaves and, later, cotton” (129) is most welcome, as is her attempt to see civic pride as being as much a Georgian as a Victorian phenomenon. Her claim that “Liverpool appeared to have a closer relationship with its international contacts than its hinterland and to lie outside the culture of Lancashire” (154) suggests early roots for the “Liverpool exceptionalism” that concerns most of the contributors, although it contradicts some her own and the previous chapter's economic evidence. Closing the book, Jon Murden skillfully tackles the city's history from 1945 to the present. Particularly good on trade union and labor history, presented here from a left-of-center perspective, and on Merseyside's rich popular culture, his enthusiasm for contemporary regeneration might, however, have benefited from a little of his editor's caution noted above.

The three remaining essays are essentially thematic. Colin Pooley's impressive survey of “Living in Liverpool” from 1800 marries quantitative and qualitative sources and an invaluable set of maps and tables to illuminate patterns of work, home life, migration, and leisure. He argues that the city exhibits both a distinctiveness that flows from “the interrelations between people and place” (172) and a marked continuity over time, particularly in regard to “patterns and processes of inequality in everyday life” (173). Graeme Milne's thoughtful account of “Maritime Liverpool” sets out to reconnect the histories of “port” and “city,” so often uncoupled in existing studies. He analyzes perceptively the (beneficial) impact of the Crimean and American Civil Wars on Liverpool's economy, the emergence of the “showy modernism” that characterized the waterfront from the late nineteenth century, the management of the Dock Board, and, particularly successfully, the multifaceted labor force that made its living from the uncertain world of ships and shipping. Finally, Belchem and Donald MacRaild on “Cosmopolitan Liverpool” give the expected weight of attention to the Irish, Afro-Caribbean, and Chinese communities (the politics of Black Liverpool are expertly dealt with) but also enhance understanding of the Welsh, Scots, and Manx populations as well as those of a number of other European and non-European groupings. They argue convincingly that it was the cosmopolitanism of this “the most un-English of Victorian provincial cities” that gave Liverpool many of its “metropolitan pretensions” in the period to 1914 (311) but that the City of Culture strapline, “The world in one city,” is one that “draws upon Liverpool's historical legacy … rather than its contemporary complexion” (57).

All contributions are well written and contain highly significant new research, although the differences in approach do lead to a certain unevenness of tone and variation in accessibility; Belchem's chapters in particular, because of their more specialist nature, tend to demand significant background knowledge. Given the ambition of this project it is almost churlish to play the game of spotting the inevitable omissions or supposed imbalances, but the temptation cannot be resisted wholly. The bicentenary of the slave trade's abolition inevitably invites scrutiny of the book's treatment of the city's part in it. In many ways, the topic is deftly handled, thoughtfully kept in its place as but one, albeit crucial, narrative strand in a wider history. Nevertheless, the book would have benefited from a closer engagement with the historiographical debate, thus setting Liverpool in a broader context. Elsewhere, while post-1945 working-class politics feature strongly, earlier manifestations are poorly covered, and, given the emphasis on “image and identity,” space might have been found for a longer importation of Belchem's earlier groundbreaking work on that key marker of “exceptionalism,” the “scouse” voice. With due allowance for personal interest, professional football, critical in shaping both positive and negative perceptions of the city, is also poorly served. A negative note at the end of this review would, however, be unjust. Teaching us a great deal about Liverpool specifically and the writing of city histories and the nature of urban history more widely, this is an important work that demands the widest readership.