LIVERPOOL,E NGLAND.- A groundbreaking three-year project will lift the lid off the wheeling and dealing of Liverpool’s Victorian merchant community.
The Leverhulme Trust has announced a major research grant of £237,759 to fund the study, the first of its kind. Additional funding of £100,000 has come from English Heritage.
Work will be carried out under the direction of Dr Adrian Jarvis, of Merseyside Maritime Museum, and Professor Robert Lee, of the School of History at the University of Liverpool. Both are co-directors of the Centre for Port and Maritime History. Adrian says: “Liverpool is a city made by merchants because commerce built the city’s vast wealth and there cannot be trade without merchants. Yet these men – and a handful of women – the movers and shakers of Liverpool’s dynamic economy, are extremely obscure. These real-life Forsytes did their business through links of trust and networking which are lost to history. We simply do not know how they made their money – or their decisions.”
The research team will build a database which will start as a huge list of merchants in late 19th century Liverpool. They will then look for the social glue which held their networks together. This will be done by examining the records of churches, charities, clubs, public bodies such as the city council and other organisations.
Dr Sari Maenpaa, of the School of History, was research assistant on the pilot project: “This enabled us to test the methodology and create a database design. It was a key stage in developing this large-scale study.”
The pilot turned up some fascinating facts, says Robert: “We found, for example, that in 1871 most of the city’s corn merchants lived around Faulkner Square and that members of the Dock Board in 1891 were well-represented at the Royal Liverpool Golf Club. This must have been great for networking and wheeling and dealing!”
The project will include a fully-searchable website for use by reseachers, students and local schools. English Heritage will investigate the nature of the environment – houses, gardens, places of worship, clubs and so on – created by the merchants and will seek to show how their building activities shaped the city’s historic environment.