The full and grim story of Liverpool's dominant role in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, during the 18th and early 19th centuries. This talk also highlights how modern slavery still thrives, right around the world ~ including in Britain!
By the late 1600s, Bristol held the slave-trading monopoly having replaced London as the most significant British Slave-Trading port. Merchants from Bristol oversaw the exporting of slaves from West Africa to the Windward Islands in the Caribbean, and to Virginia in the slave states of America. Then, however, the merchants of Liverpool wanted to take advantage of what was becoming a very lucrative business, and sought to dominate it.
Known as 'The Triangular Trade', because it consisted of three legs of a triangular sea-trading route. Ships first sailed from Liverpool to the coast of West Africa. From there ships now laden with captive men, women, and children, were carried across the Atlantic Ocean, to slave plantations, mills, frams, and factories. The third leg then carried slave-produced goods back to Liverpool.
In this talk Ken tells the history of the Trade, and of how Liverpool and its merchants quickly and successfully commanded transatlantic slavery and became exceptionally wealthy as a result. They did so by callously and brutally kidnapping, abusing, imprisoning, and working to death, millions of African men, women, and children:
This is amongst the most shameful chapters in Britain's and Liverpool's history.