Liverpool as a trading port: Sailors’ residences, African migrants, occupational change and probated wealth

Abstract

This report updates results from www.liverpoolmaritime.org , Liverpool as a Trading Port, 1704–1840. Baptism, marriage and burial records from Liverpool parish church registers, rather than census data or street directory entries, provide information about individuals in Liverpool, including enslaved and free African migrants. Wealth valuations from the Consistory Court of Chester provide data on estate valuations from Lancashire as a whole. Preliminary results demonstrate that many sailors resided on a small number of Liverpool streets as well as along the docks. Liverpool’s important maritime sector declined through the nineteenth century, in part because of the abolition of the British slave trade, as fewer surgeons and carpenters sailed from Liverpool, and because Liverpool’s service sector advanced. A disproportionate number of probates concerned shipboard personnel in the slave trade due to the Guinea trade’s comparatively high mortality. Captains who survived slaving voyages accumulated three times as much wealth as they would have earned in alternative maritime trades. Similarly, merchants who invested in slaving voyages usually accumulated more wealth than other Lancashire merchants, though there were increasing numbers of Lancastrians who profited from cotton trades and manufacturing.