The years of the French Revolution and First Empire are remembered as much for war and imperial expansion as for the great political and social reforms they introduced. The Revolutionaries saw themselves as sons of the Enlightenment, devoted to ideals of freedom and the betterment of humanity. Yet they unleashed a long period of almost continuous warfare, fought across the European continent and beyond, in North Africa and the Near East, in North America, Asia, and the Caribbean. In Europe, France faced a succession of coalitions of other European powers, from the First Coalition of 1792–7 – an international alliance that included Austria, Prussia, Britain, Spain, Piedmont, Naples, and Sardinia – through to the final coalition, the Seventh, which wearily regrouped to defeat Napoleon after his ill-judged return to France in 1815. The other governments of Europe feared France’s political ambitions as much as its military might, and they invariably saw themselves as the victims of French aggression, forced to make war to protect their territory from attack. Britain also feared the challenge to its naval and colonial supremacy which a revitalised France would pose; for London the war was as much about Jamaica and India as the balance of power in Continental Europe, about global competition for resources as much as the ideas of the Revolution in France.

The opening chapter emphasises the author’s personal and family LFC history. This history – from the father born in the L4 district of Liverpool to the son who follows the team from afar in Germany and Canada – embodies the relationship between local and global that underpins both support for the club in the modern era and this book.

This chapter uses Jürgen Klopp’s resignation in 2024 as a jumping off point for reflections on the author’s ‘long distance love’ for LFC, drawing on his experiences watching LFC and LFCW in 2023/24 and his return to Toronto at the end of the season.

In this chapter, the founding of the magazine The End and the Toxteth riots are twin jumping off points for a history of Liverpool’s subcultural resistance to Thatcherism via music, fanzines, and football in the 1980s. The chapter analyses the tensions between race, class, and politics, which profoundly shaped the history of the club and the city during this troubled decade.

Chapter 3 uses the most iconic figure in LFC’s pre-Shankly history, the Scottish winger Billy Liddell, as the jumping off point for a study of a club, and a city, in apparent post-war decline. Topics range from Liverpool’s early de-industrialisation to LFC’s local rivalry with the ‘Mersey Millionaires’, Everton.

This chapter tackles the complex social history of the darkest moment in LFC history, the Heysel disaster. It examines Heysel as a disaster in its own right, rather than as a foreshadowing of Hillsborough. Moving beyond tired narratives about the ‘English disease’ of hooliganism, it focuses on how the disaster was experienced, understood, remembered, and perhaps most often forgotten, in the LFC family.

This chapter is dedicated to Bill Shankly’s sudden retirement, and the letters it inspired, as a window into a history of emotions among Liverpool supporters in the mid-1970s. These hitherto unseen letters, from the Shankly Family Archive, are written manifestations of the club’s increased ability to appeal across lines of class, gender, nationality, and race, particularly via its most beloved figure, the charismatic Scottish socialist, Shankly.

This chapter uses the short but toxic ownership tenure of American businessmen Tom Hicks and George Gillett (2007-10) as a window onto the tensions between activism and commercialism, and between the local and the international, at LFC in the twenty-first century. Drawing on testimony from members of the supporters’ union Spirit of Shankly, Chapter 13 analyses the power, and the limits, of fan protest in ‘the age of football’.

This chapter is the first attempt to incorporate the history of Liverpool FC Women into the previously male-dominated history of LFC. Using oral history, and a range of sources dating to the late nineteenth century, it examines the hidden histories of the women’s game on Merseyside, paying particular attention to the struggles of coaches, players, and adminstrators to overcome male hostility and indifference - including from LFC itself.

This chapter examines the Jürgen Klopp era, focusing on nine key moments in his hugely successful time as LFC manager (2015-24). It culminates in the near-tragedy at the Champions League final in Paris in 2022, when Liverpool supporters drew lessons from history that UEFA failed to draw. In the process, they saved European football’s showpiece event from a disaster on the scale of Heysel and reaffirmed a post-Hillsborough reputation for holding the establishment to account for dangers and untruths that still too often threaten the modern fan.