Liverpool as an Emigration Port in the Nineteenth Century

Following abolition of the slave trade, the passage of migrants across the oceans contributed much to the economic growth of Victorian Liverpool, the ‘maritime metropolis of the world'. Migrants were valued as a form of outward ‘cargo’, as it were, balancing inbound commodity trades from the Americas and the colonies, as Liverpool became the premier human and commercial entrepôt linking the old world and the new. Achieved through continued investment in an ever more impressive dock system, pre-eminence was readily apparent by the mid-nineteenth century: in 1851 Liverpool sent 455 ships to New York carrying 159,480 passengers, while Le Havre sent 124 ships and 31,859 passengers, and Bremen 132 ships and 19,431 passengers. Railway development was another important factor with feeder services from the industrial areas of Britain and further afield: the rail link between Hull and Liverpool provided a convenient short route for Scandinavians and north Germans wishing to cross to America. Of the 5.5 million ‘moving Europeans’ who subsequently crossed the Atlantic between 1860 and 1900, 4.75 million sailed from Liverpool. All told, from the 1830s to the 1930s some nine million migrants passed through the port, the ‘flood-gate of the old world’. In its late-Victorian heyday, Liverpool, the great hub of trans-oceanic migration, was justifiably described as ‘the New York of Europe, a world-city rather than merely British provincial’.

While crucial to the economic model of Liverpool shipping (and to the prosperity of the many agents, lodging-house keepers, chandlers and other dealers servicing the needs of migrants and other passengers ahead of embarkation), the pattern of trade was not without risk and adverse domestic consequences. Liverpool had the unenviable reputation as ‘the black spot on the Mersey’ given the levels of disease and distress endemic among vast numbers of casual labourers crowded into low-lying insanitary accommodation close to the waterfront. External factors – most notably, potato famine in Ireland in the late 1840s, and the American Civil War and cotton famine of the early 1860s – brought stress and strain on the operation of trans-migration (and other traffic) through Liverpool, aggravating the town’s deleterious  ‘casualty statistics’. As Dr Trench observed in his report on the health of the borough in 1863, a time of high mortality: "Liverpool, the emporium of foreign trade and British industry, the port of intercommunication between the Old and the New World, contains a population whose material prosperity and sanitary well-being, are immediately affected by the social and political mutations of other States."