Liverpool

Liverpool began as a small settlement beside the Mersey, with fishing and farming communities and access to the Irish Sea. In 1207 King John granted it the privileges of a free borough, encouraging trade and settlement. For centuries it remained a modest Lancashire port. Its position, however, linked the river estuary with Ireland and the expanding markets of the Atlantic.

A new enclosed wet dock opened in 1715, giving ships a protected place to load and unload as the port grew. Liverpool merchants traded in sugar, tobacco and other goods produced by enslaved labour, and financed voyages that carried enslaved Africans across the Atlantic. Thomas Johnson, an early participant in that trade, also championed the dock's construction. The British slave trade was abolished in 1807, but slavery itself continued in British colonies until the 1830s, and the port's commercial connections with slave-produced goods endured. Docks and warehouses made the city a centre of trade whose wealth was inseparable from the unequal labour systems that supplied its cargoes.