Liverpool, the dominant port of the eighteenth-century triangular slave trade, became the great nineteenth-century port for the importation of slave-produced cotton. One commentator noted that, ‘When the Whigs . . . effected its abolition there were many who thought that the sun of Liverpool’s prosperity had set. [but] The cotton trade was to do a vast deal more for the great port of the Mersey than the trade in human flesh’.14 This was because, as was explained, ‘The same wind which bore a vessel from the Mersey would waft her across the Atlantic to the rich Sea Islands, or to New Orleans,
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