Liverpool as a Diasporic City

"Liverpool played a pre-eminent role in the worldwide scattering of European peoples in the nineteenth century and it attracted in-migrant peoples through its dynamic growth, its worldwide connections or as residues from its emigrant traffic. This migrant conjuncture tempts use of the term ‘diasporic city’ for Liverpool, and this paper is designed to offer some thoughts on this topic. Liverpool in the nineteenth century was demonstrably a ‘diasporic space’, a ‘contact zone between different ethnic groups with differing needs and intentions’, but such a statement is essentially descriptive. The paper considers the extent to which experience of Liverpool played an active role in defining, modifying or even destroying peoples’ diasporic identities. Conversely, it also considers the extent to which the specifically diasporic characteristics of migrant groups may have influenced the city’s social, political and cultural life. In other words, the paper considers the impact of diasporic groups on Liverpool, and Liverpool on diasporic groups, in terms of their origin, the extent to which their diasporic identity was articulated and how that articulation may have changed over time. The focus is on the immigrant peoples as well as on the twelve million emigrants who passed through the port between 1825 and 1913. The paper also reviews the many transients and sojourners, both Liverpool-based and incomers, who may also have been subject to diasporic influences. A minority of self-conscious and articulate groups within a diasporic people may express diasporic identity publicly, but it is always difficult to estimate the strength of such an identity amongst a mass of mostly poor migrants. In day-to-day existence, identities amongst diasporic peoples were inevitably contested to a greater or lesser degree and the diasporic identity might count for much or for little. It was always in tension with the countervailing forces of class, religion, status, culture and British nationalism. The paper questions whether it is useful to define Liverpool generally as a diasporic city. It had a complex and ambiguous identity which reflected interactions and tensions between its various migrant groups, and more comparative work is needed on how these factors influenced the identities of specific diasporic peoples. Consideration of the diasporic influences is linked inextricably to theme of cosmopolitanism, and the paper concludes with some comments on the extent and nature of cosmopolitan culture in Liverpool and Merseyside during its period of most dynamic growth."