3. Double Lever Bridge raised. Proposals for Liverpool ' s Canning Dock © Asif Khan Studio
was able to claim that every brick in Liverpool was cemented by the‘ blood and sweat’ of the enslaved labour of black Africans.
However, even after the 1807 abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire, and the 1833 abolition of slave-owning, the port and its associated trade connected Liverpool to the wider British Empire, as well as to goods produced by enslaved people in the Americas( for example, many merchants in Liverpool supported the Confederacy in the US Civil war). This ensured that Liverpool’ s population was more diverse than many other British cities. The city has some of the longest-established populations of Black, Chinese and South-East Asian residents in the UK, combined with earlier communities of seafarers from Russia, Scandinavia and elsewhere in Europe. Liverpool was, by the early-twentieth century, one of the British Empire’ s pre-eminent cities – historian and Director of London’ s V & A Museum Tristram Hunt listed it in his 2014 book as one of the ten cities which‘ made’ the British Empire.
Like many UK cities with diverse populations, Liverpool has a complex history of solidarity and community resilience punctuated by moments of violence and despair. These include, but are not limited to, the 1919 port city riots where thousands of the white-majority population attacked the blackminority community and murdered a Bermudan seafarer named Charles Wotten in the waters of the docks, as well as the forced deportation of around 2,000 Chinese men from the city in 1945-6, permanently splitting fathers from their wives and children and which was only acknowledged in 2022. Liverpool’ s twentieth-century economic decline is intertwined with these stories, and its public institutions have often ignored or marginalised these inconvenient imperial histories and the impacts they had on the various communities in the city. As such, many minority and working-class communities within the city are often sceptical of the intentions of local and national authorities.
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Observing Memories ISSUE 9