During the Romantic Age, the city of Liverpool was the main port of the English slave trade. In fact, according to Gomer Williams, between the years of 1795 and 1804, 46,405 slaves were brought in through London, while 380,893 were brought in via Liverpool (680), which clearly demonstrates the astounding magnitude of the cruel enterprise in this area. With this, “estimates suggest that one in eight of Liverpool’s population – 10,000 people – depended on trade with Africa and 40 per cent of its income derived from the trade” (Shaw 16), so, many of its citizens were, unfortunately, not very eager to embrace abolition. The Liverpudlian traders’ resistance was made apparent by the 64 petitions they sent to Parliament in 1788 (Shaw 17) in order to stop them from passing the Dolben’s Act which would limit the number of slaves each ship could carry (LoGerfo). Despite their efforts, the bill passed and served to cast a light on the “egregiously indecent conditions” (LoGerfo 431) the slaves were subjected to. So too did the Zong Massacre of 1783 which claimed 132 lives, as slaves were thrown overboard a Liverpudlian ship for the sake of insurance money (Williams 567-568). Despite all this, the trade carried on until March 25, 1807 when an act that made it so that “no vessel was to clear for slaves” after May 1^st of that year was passed (Trepp 284). Even after this date, though, there was a riot in which the slavers of Liverpool attempted to bludgeon the poet and banker William Roscoe due to his outspoken support for abolition (Trepp 284).

Roscoe’s expansive poem, The Wrongs of Africa, published in 1787 (Trepp 269) was just one of many literary works to comment on Liverpool’s role in the triangular slave trade. Jane Austen, too, touches on it through the character of Sir Thomas Bertram and his Antiguan estate from which he is at one point said to have “came directly from Liverpool” (204). In fact, at this time, abolitionist poetry was practically its own genre (Burke 250), and the injustices occurring along the docks of Liverpool were frequent fodder for versed appeals in the name of abolition.

Works Cited

Gomer Williams. History of the Liverpool Privateers and Letters of Marque with an Account of the Liverpool Slave Trade, 1744-1812. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=e025xna&AN=404291&site=eds-live.

LoGerfo, James W. “Sir William Dolben and ‘The Cause of Humanity’: The Passage of the Slave Trade Regulation Act of 1788.” Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 6, no. 4, 1973, pp. 431–451. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3031578. Accessed 3 Feb. 2021.

Shaw, Claire. “Liverpool’s Slave Trade Legacy.” History Today, vol. 70, no. 3, Mar. 2020, pp. 15–18. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hia&AN=141587428&site=eds-live.

Trepp, Jean. “The Liverpool Movement for the Abolition of the English Slave Trade.” The Journal of Negro History, vol. 13, no. 3, 1928, pp. 265–285. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2713980. Accessed 3 Feb. 2021.