At the heart of the paradigm shift that has been taking place in urban studies since the early 1970s is the notion that a fundamental restructuring of previous urban hierarchies has taken place as a result of the dynamics of economic globalisation. It is well known that this restructuring has had major implications for the role of cities and that it has given rise to distinct sets of winners and losers. Indeed, a range of studies carried out in the Europe context concur that the world cities of Frankfurt, Paris, London, Brussels and Amsterdam are the key beneficiaries of this process, while the likes of Naples, Duisberg, Le Havre, Liège and Liverpool consistently rank among those cities that have suffered most extensively (Cheshire et al., 1986; Cheshire, 1990; 1999; Lever, 1999; Dematteis, 2000; Brenner, 2000). Yet, if one city epitomises the consequences of economic decline arising from the reordering of urban economic functions, it is Liverpool. As Ronaldo Munck notes in the introduction to this volume, Liverpool's place in the contemporary urban studies literature is as a site of entrenched social problems, a city almost entirely disconnected from the more glamorous study of world city formation. Yet, as Munck notes, Liverpool's claim to ‘world city status’ in the early twentieth century would have been second to none. Indeed, as this chapter will show, Liverpool was a key node in the global economy that grew up around the British Empire from 1870–1914, vying with London and New York for international significance. Few cities, if any, can match Liverpool's dubious claim to have descended from ‘world city’ to ‘pariah city’ during the course of the twentieth century.

With the notable exception of the work of Anthony King (1990a; 1990b), the vast literature on world cities has largely failed to provide us with an understanding of the historical reasons for world city formation. It tells us even less about the reason for world city decline. This dearth of historical accounts of world cities is surprising, particularly as there is a clear context for such work. Braudel (1983) has argued that cities have always constituted key nodes in the world economy, with the centre of gravity shifting from Genoa and Venice in the sixteenth century to Antwerp and Amsterdam in the seventeenth and to London in the eighteenth.