This book has to be the urban history bargain of the year: a nicely produced, well-illustrated hardback by an eminent scholar about an important port city for a mere £15. The book uses recently discovered documents to chart in some detail the proceedings of the Liverpool Chamber at a time between the American War of Independence and the start of the Napoleonic Wars. The Chamber failed about 1796 and was only re-established many years later. This study, funded by the successor organization, focuses purely on these early years.

The book summarizes the constitution and governance of the Chamber, and the activities of its committee members and secretary over a 23-year period. It examines in detail the issues on which the Chamber lobbied government, and its conflicts with the Corporation. Its members were a subset of the merchant elite, who were concerned about the taxes, tariffs and fees imposed upon them, both by the Corporation and by other organizations at home and abroad. Like several other organized groups in Liverpool, they resented the Corporation, and in particular its Common Council, as a corrupt organization serving the vested interests of a closed property-owning elite. Members of the Chamber were not exactly imbued with an interest in the public good themselves, however. They resented paying a duty on slaves imported into Jamaica, they objected to the payments demanded by Trinity House for lighthouses and they complained about the postal service. They believed that Trinity House was little more than a drinking club, although the author does not tell us how far the membership of the Chamber acted as a drinking club itself. Although the Chamber lobbied the national government from time to time, it did not lobby over abolition. The committee seems to have been aware of divisions within its membership over the issue. Whilst abolitionist sympathizers were sufficiently intimidated by local sentiment to keep their opinions mainly to themselves, they were sufficiently resolute to prevent the Chamber following the example of the Corporation and the Bristol merchants in opposing abolition publicly.

Having reviewed the extant evidence, the book concludes with four analytical chapters. One discusses the membership, and provides an intriguing estimate of total membership from an incomplete set of data. One adds to recent work by Haggerty and others on Liverpool business networks by showing how membership of the Chamber overlapped with membership of the Athenaeum, the Unanimous Society, the Sefton Mock Corporation and the Subscription Library. It also considers the business interests of the members – their partnerships, their lines of businesses and their connections (if any) to the slave trade and the Africa Company. Political activism by members is then addressed, and the book ends with an analysis of the reasons for the early demise of the Chamber. The conflict with the Corporation, which stimulated the founding of the Chamber, was to some extent resolved, the activist founders retired, trade was disrupted by the war with France and new organizations began to emerge to tackle new issues. The Chamber had served its purpose in meeting the needs of the day but, it seems, once these needs changed it simply withered away. This book, however, is an impressive record of its achievements – and its shortcomings. It records its activities, and sheds new light on key issues regarding the economy, polity and social structure of an important city.