As Britain’s dominant port for the slave trade in the eighteenth century, Liverpool is crucial to the study of slavery. And as the engine behind Liverpool’s rapid growth and prosperity, slavery left an indelible mark on the history of the city. This collection of essays, boasting an international roster of leading scholars in the field, sets Liverpool in the wider context of transatlantic slavery. The contributors tackle a range of issues, including African agency, slave merchants and their society, and the abolitionist movement, always with an emphasis on the human impact of slavery.
The Persistence of Memory is a history of the public memory of transatlantic slavery in the largest slave-trading port city in Europe, from the end of the 18th century into the 21st century; from history to memory. Mapping this public memory over more than two centuries reveals the ways in which dissonant pasts, rather than being 'forgotten histories', persist over time as a contested public debate. This public memory, intimately intertwined with constructions of 'place' and 'identity', has been shaped by legacies of transatlantic slavery itself, as well as other events, contexts and phenomena along its trajectory, revealing the ways in which current narratives and debate around difficult histories have histories of their own. By the 21st century, Liverpool, once the 'slaving capital of the world', had more permanent and long-lasting memory work relating to transatlantic slavery than any other British city. The long history of how Liverpool, home to Britain's oldest continuous black presence, has publicly 'remembered' its own slaving past, how this has changed over time and why, is of central significance and relevance to current and ongoing efforts to face contested histories, particularly those surrounding race, slavery and empire.
One of the very few firsthand accounts written by a Liverpool slave ship captain to have survived, this unique and fascinating primary source navigates the reader through the remarkable story of James Irving, a Liverpool slave ship captain who was shipwrecked off the coast of Morocco and subsequently enslaved. Schwarz skillfully supplements Irving’s personal journal and letters with useful notes, making this an essential volume for anyone interested in the relationship between the slave trade and the British Empire. Slave Captain is a compelling narrative that will be welcomed by the general reader and scholars alike.
"Liverpool and the Slave Trade is the first comprehensive account of the city's role in the slave trade. Drawing on recent research, contemporary documents and illustrations, it provides a detailed account of how the trade operated and was eventually brought to an end"--
This collection brings together local case studies of Britain’s history and memory of transatlantic slavery and abolition, including the role of individuals and families, regional identity narratives, sites of memory and forgetting, and the financial, architectural and social legacies of slave-ownership.
Between 1500 and 1870, European traders transported millions of Africans to the Americas to work as slaves—yet despite the wealth of scholarship on this period, many people remain uninformed about the history of the slave trade and its implications for the modern black experience. Published to accompany a permanent gallery in the Merseyside Maritime Museum, Transatlantic Slavery documents this era through essays on women in slavery, the impact of slavery on West and Central Africa, and the African view of the slave trade. Richly illustrated, it reveals how the slave trade shaped the history of three continents—Africa, the Americas, and Europe—and how all of us continue to live with its consequences.
A gripping true account of African slaves and white slavers whose fates are seemingly reversed, shedding fascinating light on the early development of the nations of Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Australia, and on the role of former slaves in combatting the illegal trade.
In September 1781, the captain of the British slave ship Zong ordered 133 slaves thrown overboard, enabling the ship’s owners to file an insurance claim for their lost “cargo.” Accounts of this horrific event quickly became a staple of abolitionist discourse on both sides of the Atlantic. Ian Baucom revisits, in unprecedented detail, the Zong atrocity, the ensuing court cases, reactions to the event and trials, and the business and social dealings of the Liverpool merchants who owned the ship. Drawing on the work of an astonishing array of literary and social theorists, including Walter Benjamin, Giovanni Arrighi, Jacques Derrida, and many others, he argues that the tragedy is central not only to the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the political and cultural archives of the black Atlantic but also to the history of modern capital and ethics. To apprehend the Zong tragedy, Baucom suggests, is not to come to terms with an isolated atrocity but to encounter a logic of violence key to the unfolding history of Atlantic modernity. Baucom contends that the massacre and the trials that followed it bring to light an Atlantic cycle of capital accumulation based on speculative finance, an economic cycle that has not yet run its course. The extraordinarily abstract nature of today’s finance capital is the late-eighteenth-century system intensified. Yet, as Baucom highlights, since the late 1700s, this rapacious speculative culture has had detractors. He traces the emergence and development of a counter-discourse he calls melancholy realism through abolitionist and human-rights texts, British romantic poetry, Scottish moral philosophy, and the work of late-twentieth-century literary theorists. In revealing how the Zong tragedy resonates within contemporary financial systems and human-rights discourses, Baucom puts forth a deeply compelling, utterly original theory of history: one that insists that an eighteenth-century atrocity is not past but present within the future we now inhabit.
