This book aims to illuminate the social and economic history of Liverpool in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by focussing on one important merchant family, the Earles. This was a very exciting period in the history of the city. The book starts in 1688, when Liverpool was a small town of little significance, and ends in the 1830s, by which time the Merseyside town had a population approaching 180,000 and was one of the greatest ports in the world. This period covers the whole of Liverpool's involvement in the notorious slave trade, from its tentative beginnings in 1699 until its abolition by Act of Parliament in 1807. It also covers the heroic years of the revolution in transport, which saw improvements in roads, rivers, canals, railways and finally the steamship transform the movement of goods and people, at first in Britain and then throughout the world. The eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were also of course the years of the Industrial Revolution in which Liverpool, Merseyside and Lancashire were to have such important parts to play.

Social and economic historians tend to explain these great happenings in a rather impersonal way, by examining the movements of such abstractions as population, productivity and so on. Such an approach is clearly valuable, but it does tend to ignore the undoubted fact that in a capitalist society it is the capitalists who make the important economic decisions, such as whether to invest in this rather than that or not to invest at all. And, in a great port like Liverpool, it was the merchants who conducted overseas trades, such as those described in this book, who made these decisions. Why they made them is not often very apparent, but theory and common sense suggest that their main motivation was, in the short run, to make profits and, in the long run, to accumulate so much of these profits that it became possible to withdraw from the risky and rather vulgar world of commerce and live the life of a gentleman.

The fortunate survival of a collection of family papers makes it possible to explore both these themes, the extraordinary rise of Liverpool and, within Liverpool, the rise of one family, the Earles.