In 1725 Daniel Defoe completed the second volume of his Tour, in which he took his readers down the Great West Road to Bristol. He had been to Bristol before and had contacts in the city, so his literary visit was not something he simply cobbled together from histories and travel books. Defoe was well aware of Bristol's reputation: ‘the greatest, richest, and the best port of Trade in Great Britain’, he declared, ‘London only excepted’. This was a pretty accurate assessment. Bristol had just surpassed Norwich in the provincial league tables, and was certainly the leading western port. With its expanding commerce to North America and the Caribbean it had surged ahead of other prominent early modern cities, such as York and Exeter, and remained the foremost provincial centre in England for the next half-century. The statistics for transatlantic trade also reveal that Bristol was well ahead of its rival ports. At the time Defoe was writing, Bristol's tonnage from mainland America was conspicuously higher than Liverpool and Glasgow. In 1725 fifty-five ships entered Bristol carrying 4417 tons of merchandise. The corresponding figures for Liverpool were fifteen and 1175, and for Glasgow, which was making strong inroads into the Chesapeake tobacco trade, twenty-six ships carrying 1625 tons. Bristol's trade in the Caribbean was even more impressive. Its cargoes of rum, sugar, indigo and logwood were greater than Liverpool, Whitehaven and Glasgow combined. And in the slave trade Bristol had outpaced London as the premier slave-trading port, sending forty-eight ships annually to Africa and delivering over 10,000 slaves to the West Indies. In the 1740s, Bristol's ships delivered 36,700 slaves to the plantations compared to Liverpool's 21,500 and London's 4800.

Visitors to Bristol were very aware of the hive of activity on the streets and quays. When Alexander Pope approached the city on his way to take the waters at Hotwell, he noted