Category: Work In Progress

Liverpool Trade 1853-4

Abby Vadeboncoeur and I have been working on digitizing a handwritten ledger I found at the Archives Centre at the Liverpool Maritime Museum. It was a part of a collection of material used to lobby Parliament for a bill to expand the docks in the mid-1850s. It recorded every port Liverpool traded within 1853-54 along with the number of ships, men and tons for both inward and outward trade. The handwriting is difficult to read at times and some of the port names were very obscure or generic, but Abby managed to locate 459 out of 507 ports which combined represented 99.5% of inward and outward tons. The map above shows the importance of trade with North America. New York, New Orleans, Quebec, Boston, Saint John, Philadelphia, Mobile, Melbourne, Bombay, and Calcutta round out the top ten. If we had the value of the trade the Indian ports would probably rise much higher in the rankings, but for environmental historians interested in the transfer of biomass around the world in the nineteenth century, it is clear that Liverpool was most reliant on North America for cotton, timber and food.

British Timber Imports 1861-1906

Butting square timber, Quebec City, QC, 1872. McCord Museum.

Michael Williams (2003) uses data from Arthur Lower (1973) to confirm Sven-Erik Åström’s (1970) conclusion that mid-nineteenth century British North American timber exports to Britain were only a temporary “episode” in the long term dominance of the British timber market by Northern Europe. William’s charts use Lower’s data from 1790 to 1870 suggest a significant decline in British North American exports by the start of the 1870s. However, British import statistics from the Nineteenth Century and Twentieth Century House of Commons Sessional Papers confirm British North America and later Canada (without Newfoundland) remained major exporters of fir through to the early twentieth century. British North America did drop behind Sweden and Russia to become the third leading exporter to the United Kingdom in 1886, and they remained third through to 1906. The end of the tariffs do appear to have helped Northern European exporters after the 1860s, but this did not cause a collapse in exports from British North America.

 

Click the expand button in the bottom right to see the full sized visualization.