Liverpool’s Asian networks, 1800-1914

"Liverpool’s role in the Atlantic trade, especially in slaves and sugar, has been well documented by historians. Rather less attention however has been given to the growth of Liverpool’s extensive trade with the ports of India, south east Asia and China during the nineteenth century – yet as early as the 1830s, the tonnage of shipping leaving from and arriving in Liverpool to and from ports in the east vastly exceeded that at other British “outports”. Liverpool was second only in this trade to London. Liverpool became important as the main outlet to India and the east for Lancashire cotton goods, and as a major point of entry for tea, East Indian sugar and a wide range of Asian produce. In this respect, the Asian trade underlined the importance of Liverpool as a truly imperial and global port. But Liverpool’s role in the development of Britain’s eastern imperial interests was important politically as well as commercially. Liverpool merchants were instrumental in organising and leading the provincial lobbying which led to the abolition of the East India Company’s monopoly of trade with India in 1813, and later the Charter Act of 1833, which also ended the Company’s monopoly of the China trade. Indeed the Liverpool East India and China Association, formed in the heated agitation before 1813, survived into the 1870s, only then being absorbed into the Liverpool Chamber of Commerce. Not only was it the earliest East India and China Association – it was also the longest surviving. Its counterparts in Glasgow and London had shorter lives (from 1830 till 18148 and 1836 to c1860 respectively) and on a number of occasions followed the initiative of the Liverpool organisation. Through this organisation, and after 1850 increasingly through the Liverpool Chamber of Commerce, the merchants of the city came to not only exert a profound influence over British imperial and foreign policy in Asia, but also to develop important political and commercial connexions with chambers of commerce and other mercantile organisations in Singapore, Penang, Malacca Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, Canton and Hong Kong. These supplemented the already close links the Liverpool men enjoyed with other British mercantile organisations in the field of Asian affairs; which included Manchester, Glasgow and London. These trans-imperial political links enabled Liverpool merchants to have a significant impact on policy in a number of areas. For example, these Asian networks were instrumental during the 1830s and 1840sin breaking down the system of protective tariffs which tended to favour West Indian over East Indian sugar, as well as operating to attack the last vestiges of East India Company commercial privilege in India and south east Asia. Efforts by London merchants to establish a London based central bank for India in the 1830s and 1840s were also thwarted by trans-imperial collaboration in which Liverpool was an active participant. Later in the century, these networks were exercised on such questions as British intervention in Burma between the 1860s and 1890s, the efforts to secure access to the Chinese market and the threat posed to British commercial interests in Siam by French expansionism in Indo-China. Liverpool opinion was eagerly sought by imperial agencies. Following the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 (at the inaugural ceremony of which representatives from the Liverpool Chamber of Commerce attended), the Liverpool Chamber was consulted on a number of occasions by the Board of Trade for information on the volume of British trade using the canal. All in all, Liverpool maintained a significant presence in the process of British policy formation in respect of Asia during the period. In general terms, the paper offers two principal arguments. First, in respect of the history of Liverpool, it contends that in the Asian sphere of commercial politics, Liverpool was an active organiser and participant in a trans-imperial lobby. As such, the commercial interests of the City saw themselves as part of a much wider national and imperial community of interests, the defence of which was best effected by conscious collaboration and negotiation between the respective imperial cities and commercial communities. To some extent this is a necessary counterweight to much recent writing on the history of Liverpool, which has tended to stress Liverpool “exceptionalism” and to downplay connections with empire. Secondly, the paper offers the phenomenon of trans-imperial commercial collaboration, through chambers of commerce and similar organisations, as a topic for further consideration in light on the ongoing debate about “Gentlemanly Capitalism”. The emphasis in the work of Cain and Hopkins upon the importance of the City of London as the main source of political and economic influence shaping the British Empire is challenged to some degree here, by demonstrating that provincial interests had other, collaborative and trans-imperial channels through which they could exert influence. Of course such channels were also open to City of London interests, and the argument is not that Liverpool or other provincial cities were equal to the capital’s commercial elite in the area of policy formation; rather that their presence was much more pronounced than the thesis, as originally cast, contends. "