Liverpool as a Diasporic City
John Herson
Liverpool John Moores University
‘The streets of Liverpool during the emigrant season present stirring spectacles
of cosmopolitan animation, and the city itself is the temporary resting place of
visitors from all parts of the hemisphere. Russians, suspicious and sullen, …
Finns and Poles, men of fierce and haughty natures, … Germans, quiet and
inoffensive, brave and determined … the flaxen-haired Scandinavians,
paragon of nature’s handiwork, erect and stately.’1
With these poetic, if crude, stereotypes the Liverpool Mercury sought to encapsulate
Liverpool’s emigrant trade in 1887. The paper’s correspondent described with pride
the city’s role ‘as the European centre of emigration’, and Liverpool’s importance in
the worldwide scattering of European peoples has been an element in its heritage ever
since. It is mainly in this sense that Liverpool is perceived as a diasporic city, but the
term diaspora must also include the city as the residence of diasporic settlers and
sojourners. This paper seeks to outline the scale and character of emigration through
Liverpool and its significance for the city. It also examines the impact of nineteenthcentury in-migration and questions whether it is useful to view Liverpool as a
diasporic city. It suggests that Liverpool’s ambiguous nineteenth-century identity
reflected the tensions of its complex migrant connections.
Emigrants through Liverpool, 1825-1913
It is easy to assume that the emigrant trade was important for Liverpool’s
economic and social development, but there has been little attempt to examine this
proposition in any depth. Furthermore, despite frequent references to the scale of
emigration through Liverpool in the nineteenth century, nobody seems to have
produced time series data on the actual numbers of emigrants passing through from
the 1820s to the Great War. Neither Liverpool’s changing position relative to other
UK ports, nor the significance of various emigrant destinations for Liverpool has been
documented. This section of the essay is based on data that remedies these
deficiencies.
Table 1 Extra-European passengers from British and Irish ports, 1825-1913
Port
Number
Liverpool
12,287,185
London
2,248,625
Plymouth
490,588
Southampton
1,812,414
Other English ports
295,644
Scottish ports
1,739,374
Irish ports
3,105,346
Total
21,979,175
Sources: see note 2.
1
%
55.90
10.23
2.23
8.25
1.35
7.91
14.13
100.00
Liverpool was the most important emigrant port in the British Isles and table 1
shows the extent of its dominance. Over twelve million passengers passed through the
city between 1825 and 1913, nearly 56 per cent of all those leaving UK ports.2
London, the next biggest, took less than a fifth of Liverpool’s total, and those
emigrating directly from Ireland were only a quarter of Liverpool’s number.
Liverpool’s top position amongst British ports was never challenged before 1914, but
there were some changes in the general picture. The port only achieved overall
domination – more than half the outward passengers – in 1843. Its heyday, when it
had more than 60 per cent of the traffic, lasted from 1850 to 1874. In the depressed
years of the late-1890s Liverpool’s proportion dropped below half, but it enjoyed one
last emigrant bonanza in the years before the Great War (figure 1). This again pushed
its proportion of passenger traffic over 50 per cent - and indeed beyond 60 per cent until 1912.
Table 2 Destinations of extra-European passengers from Liverpool, 1825-1913
Area
Total
%
United States
9,097,474
74.04
British North America
2,393,420
19.48
Australia/New Zealand
452,711
3.68
‘East Indies’
80,018
0.65
West Indies
9,521
0.08
South Africa
20,138
0.16
Central/South America
71,836
0.59
Unspecified destinations
162,067
1.32
Total
12,287,185
100.00
Sources: see note 2
Liverpool’s role in the emigrant trade was multi-facetted. Although dubbed the
‘second city of empire’, Liverpool’s main emigrant traffic was to the United States.
Over nine million people left Liverpool for the US, almost three-quarters of the total
passengers going to extra-European destinations (table 2 and figure 1). Two features
stand out in relation to the American traffic – its sheer size and its volatility. In all but
three years (1825 and 1911-12) more went to the US than to all the other destinations
combined. Even so, the demand for passages was so volatile that in peak periods it
was over four times as great as in the troughs. The port nevertheless played a
significant role in transporting people to the British empire and Liverpool’s secondranked emigrant traffic was generally that to British North America. Although this
was to British dominions, for most of the period the traffic was an adjunct to the
dominant US route and many of the migrants sooner or later crossed into the US.
This was particularly the case with the Irish famine emigrants around 1847.3 Canadian
traffic did not become significant on its own account until after Confederation in
1867. The numbers going to Canada never exceeded those going to the US, but they
came close in the four years before the Great War.
The only other large numbers of emigrants through Liverpool in the nineteenth
century were to Australia. Liverpool’s entry into the Australian market really came
with the gold rush of the 1850s, but the end of easy gold finds diminished numbers
after 1858 and Liverpool shipping lines left the trade between 1857 and 1866.4 The
traffic was effectively dead by 1873 and only revived to a very modest degree in the
1900s. London became the predominant port of embarkation for Australia. The
2
number of passengers travelling to destinations elsewhere was small in relation to the
big flows to North America and Australia. Even so, their political and economic
importance may have been greater than the numbers might suggest. From 1825 to
1913 nearly 344,000 passengers went to Central and South America, the East Indies,
West Indies, Africa and other unspecified destinations. Some would have been
permanent emigrants, but most were colonial administrators, troops, traders and
business representatives. The port was a significant conduit for these people, although
London and later Southampton were more important ports for imperial functionaries.
These traffics and the major emigrant flows to Canada and Australasia nevertheless
indicate Liverpool’s role in peopling the British empire. Between 1825 and 1910 just
over 60 per cent of passengers to British North America passed through Liverpool,
and the proportion was over 80 per cent from the 1880s to the mid-1900s. Over 40 per
cent of those going to Australia from the mid-1830s to the early-1860s left from
Liverpool.
Many emigrants were Irish and most went to the westward-colonising United
States. For those going to the British empire the journey was inherently more
ambiguous. As Alvin Jackson has argued, for the Irish ‘the empire was both an agent
of liberation and of oppression; it provided both the path to social advancement and
the shackles of incarceration.’5 Ironically, the Irish emigrants could be seen as
colonised and exiled people who became, in turn, colonisers, exploiters and enforcers
of British imperialism. Many, particularly those going to Canada, came from
Protestant loyalist backgrounds, but the Celtic-Catholic Irish also played a major role
in settling, administering and policing the self-governing dominions.6
Liverpool’s Irish connection has tended to obscure the port’s importance for
emigrants from Britain, particularly England and Wales, as well as from the continent
of Europe, and an estimate of the ethnic breakdown of Liverpool’s emigrants from
1853 to 1912 is shown in table 3.7 About 4.4 million continental transmigrants passed
through Liverpool. They formed under 10 per cent of passengers from 1853 to 1862,
between 20 and 50 per cent from 1863 to 1892 and over half from 1893 to 1912. The
transmigrants came from many parts of continental Europe, but the main flows were
from Scandinavia, Germany, Russia and Poland. Liverpool played a particularly
important role in the exodus of Jews from the Russian territories following the
pogroms of 1881-82.8
Table 3 Estimated origins of passengers through Liverpool, 1853-1912
Years
Irish
% Irish
Continental
%
British
Transmigrant Transmigrant
1853-62
606,292
50.38
110,055
9.15
487,005
1863-72
421,285
29.04
368,686
25.42
660,635
1873-82
215,255
15.46
580,355
41.68
596,907
1883-92
152,460
7.76
808,700
41.18 1,002,856
1893-1902
66,945
5.05
862,072
65.04
396,358
1903-12
63,692
2.13
1,710,364
57.14 1,219,456
Total
1,525,929
14.77
4,440,231
42.99 4,363,216
Source: see note 7
The Famine emigration dominates perceptions of Liverpool’s importance for
Irish overseas emigration. Over a million Irish passed through in the Famine decade
(1845-54) and in the 1850s more than three-quarters of the emigrant Irish made the
passage to Liverpool to pick up ships going overseas. This changed after 1859 when
3
% British
40.47
45.54
42.86
51.06
29.91
40.73
42.24
the Cunard and Inman lines began to call at Queenstown (Cobh). Most other lines
later stopped there or at Moville (Derry) for Irish passengers, and Liverpool’s hold on
the Irish trade was diminished. By the 1870s and 1880s only around 20,000 Irish
emigrants were passing through Liverpool each year, and the numbers dropped below
10,000 thereafter. The port’s role in the trauma of Famine emigration was a relatively
short phase that has distracted attention from the bigger picture.
The British, and particularly the English and Welsh, rivalled the transmigrants
as the bread and butter of Liverpool’s emigrant trade after the Famine crisis (table 3).
About 4.4 million British emigrants passed through between 1853 and 1912, nearly
three times the number of Irish. The emigration of British people was notably volatile,
with particularly steep declines in the mid-1870s and again in the second half of the
1890s. Liverpool disproportionately lost out in the late-1890s because of depression in
America and the relative growth of empire emigration to Australasia and South Africa
through Southampton and London. An increasing proportion of British passengers,
particularly to North America, were also transient workers seeking short-term jobs
overseas.9 They passed through Liverpool continuously as a generally invisible
stream.
The impact of the emigrant trade
Liverpool’s importance for emigrants was one element in its complex and
dynamic nineteenth-century identity. The city’s shippers sought passengers from
Britain, Ireland and all the countries of continental Europe and transported them to
both imperial and foreign destinations. The balance of passengers’ origins and
destinations was never stable, however, and the trade often shifted in orientation in
response to changes in its world market. Although the statistics amply demonstrate
Liverpool’s dominant role in the emigrant trade, assessing its impact on the city is
more difficult. The first issue to be considered is the handling of emigrants as they
passed through the city. Liverpool’s notorious treatment of emigrants, especially the
Irish, in the mid-nineteenth century has received much attention. People arriving in
Liverpool had to find accommodation, book an onward passage and provision
themselves for the voyage. Passages were sold by emigrant brokers who charged a
commission of 10 to 15 per cent, and the brokers spawned a network of ‘runners’ who
competed to channel emigrants to them.10 Often the runners and their associates were
lodging house keepers and they commonly ran stores selling shoddy and over-priced
provisions to travellers. The whole system battened on the ignorance and vulnerability
of travellers, particularly the Irish. Many were captured by such people, imprisoned in
squalid lodgings, relieved of their money and sold passages that might be fraudulent
or subject to interminable delays. Terry Coleman and others have documented the
scandal of the Liverpool system.11 The aim here is to arrive at some estimate of its
size.
In 1851 Sir George Stern, ‘resident at Liverpool’, estimated there were 673
registered lodging houses in Liverpool, of which he thought 286 were occupied by
emigrants.12 The Irish were dominant in the trade, as they were amongst the runners,
and emigrant lodgings were particularly concentrated in the slums behind Clarence
Dock and near Princes Dock.13 It is difficult to say how many runners there were, but
in 1851 William Tapscott, a passage broker with a dubious reputation, hazarded that
‘there are thousands of such persons.’14 Then there were the so-called dealers who
specialised in exploiting emigrants. John Bramley Moore, a magistrate, gave evidence
that of 900 he had convicted for short weights and cheating, between 500 and 600
4
were provision dealers and grocers guilty of ‘impositions on emigrants. They are a
class quite apart from the respectable tradesmen of the town’.15 All these frauds
brought significant funds into the Liverpool economy and particularly to parts of its
Irish population. In 1851 there were 206,015 recorded emigrants, most of them Irish.
On average the runners received 7½ per cent of each six pound fare totalling £92,707
15s 0d. Each emigrant might be divested of around ten shillings for accommodation
and provisions by Irish compatriots, which meant another £103,007 10s entered the
economy. The total of £195,715 5s amounts to about £2 6s per Irish-born resident of
Liverpool at that time. Thousands of people in mid-century Liverpool could therefore
make money from the informal economy of the emigrant trade, though the profits
were unevenly spread.
Steamships took over most of the North Atlantic routes in the 1860s and the
shipping lines took bookings directly through agents in the exporting regions. This
reduced opportunities for fraud in Liverpool. Transmigrants from Europe, as well as
emigrants from Britain and Ireland, increasingly had an integrated passage from their
home area to Liverpool and thence overseas. Lodgings were arranged in the city and
the spectre of runners suborning frightened, gullible, travellers faded away. Ship
departures became more reliable and the time that had to be spent in Liverpool was
reduced. Accommodation was in commercial hotels and hostels rather than the
squalid lodgings of the 1850s. On census night in 1881, for example, eight premises
were clearly accommodating European transmigrants and they housed a total of 402
people from the countries shown in table 4. Lodgings became larger and more
organised and they provided an entrepreneurial niche for foreigners. Gore’s Directory
listed fifty two commercial boarding houses in Liverpool in 1881 of which sixteen
had proprietors with continental European names. They were probably engaged in the
emigrant trade, though some also catered for foreign seamen. By 1910 there were
ninety two such establishments, a growth that reflected the boom in transmigrant
traffic in the 1900s.
Most emigrants now passed rapidly through Liverpool but some were forced
into the Poor Law system. Between 1881 and 1888 812 emigrants, mostly sick, were
admitted to Liverpool Workhouse. Shipping companies paid for their relief.
Table 4 European transmigrants in Liverpool, 3 April 1881
Country of birth
No.
Sweden
158
Norway
34
Germany/Prussia
56
Denmark
13
Poland
93
Switzerland
34
Italy
11
France
3
Total
402
Source: Census enumeration returns, 1881, Liverpool
Others posed more of a problem. Sometime in the 1880s, a group of ‘Syrian Arabs’
ended up in Liverpool. They had paid in Marseilles for a passage to New York via Le
Havre and Liverpool, but had been refused permission to land in the US. They were
sent back to Le Havre and the authorities there ‘coaxed some captain of a British
vessel to bring them back to Liverpool.’ They were sent to the Workhouse and spent
5
five months there - ‘we had the greatest possible difficulty getting rid of them’
according to the Liverpool Vestry clerk.16 Neither the steamship lines nor the Board
of Guardians willingly took responsibility for emigrants in distress, an example being
Cunard’s treatment in 1892 of 140 Jews stranded in Liverpool by an outbreak of
cholera. After four weeks the company turned them out of their lodgings and
disclaimed any further responsibility for their maintenance. The Board of Guardians
refused to take them into the Workhouse and the Liverpool Jewish Board of
Guardians ended up supporting them over the winter.17
Jobs and entrepreneurial opportunities were created in Liverpool to cater for
the emigrants, but their number relative to the size of the city was not great. Liverpool
was analogous to a great railway station. Thousands passed through but relatively
small numbers were needed to process them. Unlike cargoes, the migrants could
transport themselves and many of their belongings. Porters and carriers were casually
employed moving people and luggage from the stations and lodgings to the landing
stages, but it is difficult to say how many depended on the emigrant trade. Some extra
railwaymen dealt with transmigrants on trains from Hull, Grimsby and London. The
North Eastern Railway transported at least 636,000 emigrants from Hull to Liverpool
between 1890 and 1910 and in 1895 the London & North Western Railway opened
Riverside Station for boat trains.18
The emigrant traffic was an element in the endemic controversy over
Liverpool’s dock facilities that reflected ambiguity in the role of the port. Competition
between the passenger lines resulted in bigger ships, and there were conflicting
pressures from passenger lines wanting bigger facilities and cargo lines resisting them
as unnecessary and expensive.19 As a result, the facilities were perennially inadequate
for the passenger liners, though enough was invested to more or less keep up with
basic needs.20 This created transient construction work and more permanent jobs on
the waterfront. Conversely, the move of the White Star liners to Southampton in 1907
was an economic loss to the port and the city.
Much of the early traffic in sailing ships to North America had been in the
hands of US companies, though firms based mainly in Liverpool ran the Australian
trade of the 1850s and 1860s. The rise of the steamship lines brought a good deal of
nominal control back to Britain, and the key players of the 1870s and 1880s – Inman,
Cunard, White Star, National and Guion – were mostly based in Liverpool.21 In that
sense, the profit they made from the passenger trade flowed through Liverpool, but as
public limited companies most of the dividends went to shareholders scattered
throughout the country, the empire and elsewhere. The volatility of the emigrant trade
meant that profits were by no means guaranteed.22 Some indication of the fare
income from emigrants is shown in table 5.23 It suggests the North American emigrant
trade from Liverpool earned fares of over £56 million in the whole period, well over
Table 5 Estimated fare revenue from North American emigrants, 1825-1913
Years
Revenue
Avg. per Year
1825-44
£1,576,997
£78,850
1845-64
£12,794,299
£639,715
1865-84
£15,575,334
£778,767
1885-1904
£13,901,922
£695,097
1905-13
£12,412,890
£1,379,210
Total
£56,261,442
£632,151
Source: see note 23
6
£600,000 per year. The years from 1905 to 1913 stand out as Liverpool shipping’s
final emigrant bonanza. A lot of this money entered the Liverpool economy in terms
of seamen’s wages, port charges, insurance premiums, office expenses, purchase of
ships’ provisions, laundries and so on. The money spent willingly or otherwise in
Liverpool by emigrants themselves must be added to this figure. Nevertheless, the
overall impression is that the economic impact of the emigrant trade on Liverpool was
less than might be imagined. Liverpool was the focus of a world-wide emigrant
complex, but for most of the city’s inhabitants the passenger liners at the landing stage
were a showy presence of little relevance to their daily lives.
Liverpool’s immigrants
What of the city as the recipient of immigrants? They did have a substantial
impact on Liverpool’s social character throughout the nineteenth century. It is
important to remember that in-migrants from other parts of Britain were the biggest
group of outsiders - in 1851 nearly 47 per cent of Liverpool’s adult population had
been born in Britain but outside Liverpool. Historians have neglected the experience
and identity of these people, particularly those from other parts of England. The Irish
have attracted more attention. The Famine increased Liverpool’s Irish-born
population to 83,813 in 1851 (22.3 per cent of the total) and Irish people continued to
settle for the rest of the period, although their numbers dropped. By 1911 the Irishborn were down to 34,632 (4.6 per cent), but they still outnumbered Liverpool’s other
overseas immigrants by more than eight to one and there were, in addition, tens of
thousands with Irish or part-Irish descent. It might be assumed that the Irish who
settled in Liverpool were those too destitute, ill or unskilled to go any further – a sort
of flotsam left from the two million or so who passed through on the way to other
places. At the time of the Famine there was doubtless some truth in this, but Liverpool
had major advantages as a destination for the Irish. It was close to home and contacts
could be maintained easily. The city’s trade provided many opportunities for Irish
entrepreneurs in both the informal economy and in more ‘respectable’ occupations, a
class deserving of further study.24 The docks, construction, domestic service and
transport offered thousands of jobs for the unskilled, though with poor conditions, low
pay and little security.
The identity of the Irish was ambiguous. They originated in that part of the
United Kingdom whose status was part colonial and part metropolitan.25 Many if not
most of the Catholic Irish had a conditional or even hostile relationship with the
British population. Nevertheless, for good or ill they generally spoke the common
language and shared major elements of the same cultural tradition.26 This
differentiated them from most of the other immigrants who came to Liverpool.
Table 6 Foreign and empire-born, Liverpool, Manchester and London, 1901
Liverpool
Manchester
London
Origin
No.
%
No.
%
No.
%
Russia/Poland
3,894
33.5
7,138
53.4
53,537
31.8
Other Europe
4,054
34.8
4,137
31.0
74,758
44.4
Overseas Foreign
940
8.1
446
3.3
6,773
4.0
British empire
2,740
23.6
1,636
12.3
33,350
19.8
Total
11,628
13,357
168,418
Source: 1901 Census County Tables, Lancashire & London, Tables 36-7
7
It is easy to form the impression that Liverpool had an exceptionally large
cosmopolitan element in its population in the nineteenth century, and that this
distinguished it from other British cities. In 1907 Ramsey Muir observed that ‘those
who inhabit this vast congeries of streets are of an extraordinary diversity of races –
few towns in the world are more cosmopolitan,’ and the theme of cosmopolitanism,
albeit critically assessed, runs through the latest history of the city.27 Liverpool was
indeed host to people from all over the world, but census statistics suggest the need
for caution in estimating their impact on the city’s social fabric. The key elements are
shown on table 6. In 1901 only 1.7 per cent of Liverpool’s population had been born
outside Britain and Ireland. This was lower than the 2.5 per cent in Manchester and
under half the 3.7 per cent of London. Furthermore, the biggest proportion of foreign
and empire-born in each city came from mainland Europe, not from overseas, and it
ranged from two thirds in Liverpool through three-quarters in London to 84 per cent
in Manchester.
Foreign sailors were continually coming and going from Liverpool and were
part of what Muir described as the ‘amazingly polyglot and cosmopolitan
population’.28 Although some came from distant locations, the origin of most sailors
tended to be nearer to home. Table 7 shows that on census night in 1881 nearly threequarters of the recorded overseas sailors in Liverpool came from continental Europe,
mainly Germany, Scandinavia and Spain.29 In 1911 sailors probably made up about
12 to 15 per cent of the European-born in the city.30 The second body of Europeans in
Liverpool was composed of settlers from continental countries excluding Russia and
Poland. They were a miscellaneous population, many doubtless a residue of the
transmigrants who had passed through the port. Germans were the biggest single
group, 1,493 by 1911 and many of them had come to the city in the late-nineteenth
century to work in the sugar refineries.31
The third European group was made up of Jewish immigrants, mainly from
Russia and Russian Poland. By 1911 the 5,237 Russian empire Jews were much the
biggest single group of overseas settlers. They had increased three-fold since 1891.
Liverpool’s Jewish community had originated in the mid-eighteenth century and by
the 1870s the city had the largest Jewish presence in the provinces – about 2,500
people.32 The flight of Jews from Russian anti-Semitism after 1880 massively
increased the number passing through Britain, and Nick Kokosalakis has described
Liverpool as ‘a kind of bottleneck’ in the process of emigration.33 During the 1882
pogroms the Liverpool Jewish Board of Guardians assisted over 6,000 transit
refugees. East European Jews who settled
Table 7 Birthplaces of sailors in Liverpool, 3 April 1881 (10 per cent sample)
Birthplace
% of total
% of overseas sailors
Liverpool
20.1
Rest of Great Britain
35.0
Ireland
18.2
Mainland Europe
19.2
72.3
North America
4.7
17.7
Elsewhere overseas
1.8
6.9
At sea/unknown
0.8
3.1
No.
488
130
Source: see note 29
8
augmented the city’s Jewish community, and by 1905 it numbered about 7,000, most
of whom had arrived in the previous twenty five years.34 Liverpool’s emigrant trade
had therefore played a significant role in changing this element of the city’s social and
cultural fabric, but the overall result did not make Liverpool exceptional. Manchester
and London’s Jewish communities grew similarly and by the late-nineteenth century
both were bigger than that in Liverpool in both sheer numbers and as a proportion of
the foreign-born in each city.
In 1901 around 30 per cent of Liverpool’s foreign-born, 3,680 people,
originated outside Europe and they were split roughly three to one between the British
empire and foreign countries. They formed a distinctively higher proportion of the
city’s immigrant population than in London or Manchester (table 6) and this reflected
Liverpool’s overseas and imperial links. Even so, analysis of enumerators’ returns
suggests the need for a certain caution in assessing their contribution to cosmopolitan
Liverpool. Comparatively few indigenous people from the empire and foreign
countries overseas settled in Liverpool in the nineteenth century. In 1881 there were,
for example, 234 people in Liverpool and Toxteth Park whose place of birth was
either in ‘India’ or the ‘East Indies’, but at the most only nineteen appear to have been
people indigenous to those areas. The overwhelming number, 148 (63 per cent), were
ethnically British and fifty-eight, or a quarter, were probably of Irish origin. Many
were sometime soldiers, traders and administrators or the wives and children of such
people. The imperial background and connections of these Liverpool residents were
clearly significant, and would be an interesting subject of research. Even in Frederick
Street, which ‘down to the early-twentieth century ….continued to represent the
cosmopolitan essence of seaport Liverpool’, most people had been born in Britain or
Ireland, though a minority of these were the descendants of immigrants. 35 Under a
fifth were continental Europeans and more than a fifth came from overseas (table 8).
Liverpool’s black population had originated in the eighteenth century as a
direct result of the city’s role in the slave trade. Many came as servants or slaves but
others were sent to school in Britain. There were also black soldiers who had fought
for the British during the American War of Independence. Sailors from the West
Table 8 Frederick Street – birthplaces of people aged over sixteen, 1881 and 1901
Birthplace
1881
1901
%
%
Britain and Ireland
59.9
61.2
Continental Europe
19.3
15.5
USA/Canada/Aust/NZ
5.2
4.7
West Indies
3.6
1.6
E. Indies/Manilla/China
10.9
15.5
Africa
1.0
1.6
Number of people aged 16+
192
129
Note: Totals do not equal 100 due to rounding
Source: census enumeration returns, Frederick Street, Liverpool, 1881/1901
Indies, Africa and elsewhere nevertheless formed the majority of the city’s AfroCaribbean immigrants in the nineteenth century.36 The black population grew both
through the descendants of early settlers as well as by fresh immigration, and has been
estimated at around 3,000 in 1911, about 0.4 per cent of the total.37
The concentration of the black population in the South Docks/Park Lane area
made it very apparent, but in sheer numbers it was small in relation to the city as a
9
whole. There were concentrations of other overseas and European immigrants in the
areas behind the docks like Frederick Street, but, again, their actual numbers were
quite small. Liverpool’s minority populations were highly visible in the localities they
frequented, and their foreign compatriots who, as sailors, hit town in search of
entertainment, drink and women accentuated their apparent presence. Nevertheless,
Liverpool’s dominant social character was white and determined by its synthesis of
British and Irish peoples.
The relatively small numbers of non-white people did not stop elements in the
white population exaggerating their significance for their own ends, and this leads
John Belchem and Donald MacRaild to argue that Liverpool’s ‘very cosmopolitanism
contributed to its propensity to racism’.38 The Chinese were the most obvious group to
suffer before 1914. There were very few Chinese in Liverpool before the last decade
of the nineteenth century, but from 1892 the Blue Funnel Line began to take on
Chinese seamen.39 Some settled in Liverpool, but even by 1911 there were only just
over 400 Chinese-born people in the city.40 As Maria Lin Wong says, ‘the Chinese
Community in Liverpool remained very small, one might even say minute, for many
years.’41 Even so, in the 1900s politicians and white activists stereotyped them as
culturally alien cheap labour, and their concentration around Frederick Street,
Cleveland Square and Pitt Street made them an easily identifiable target. 42
It is questionable whether, in the nineteenth century, the mixture of
immigrants in Liverpool actually created a cosmopolitan culture. Rather, the city was
dominated by a fractured white majority from Britain and Ireland amongst whom
various continental and overseas minorities inserted themselves. The result was an
uneasy mix of peoples with neither hard-edged ghettoes nor a new melting pot
cultural synthesis, though there were blended edges as a result of inter-marriage and
inter-ethnic relationships. The distinctiveness of Liverpool’s resultant culture and
character proved remarkably difficult to define and has continued to be so to the
present day.43
Liverpool: a diasporic city?
This paper has reinforced the evidence for Liverpool’s pre-eminent role in the
worldwide scattering of European peoples in the nineteenth century and surveyed the
in-migrant peoples attracted by its dynamic growth, by its worldwide connections or
who were a residue from the emigrant traffic. It is this migrant conjuncture that tempts
use of the term ‘diasporic city’ for Liverpool, and the concluding section offers some
thoughts on this topic.
In the last forty years of the twentieth century use of the term ‘diaspora’
broadened from its specific origins in Greek colonisation and the biblical exile of the
Jews.44 As a consequence there has been considerable debate about concepts and
typologies of diaspora, and at its worst the term is now applied descriptively to any
dispersal of peoples, whatever the circumstances.45 In this broad sense Liverpool in
the nineteenth century was demonstrably a ‘diasporic space’, a ‘contact zone between
different ethnic groups with differing needs and intentions’, but such a statement is
essentially descriptive and unhelpful.46 We need to consider whether the experience of
Liverpool played an active role in defining, modifying or even destroying peoples’
diasporic identities. Conversely, we need to consider whether diasporic peoples
significantly influenced the city’s social, political and cultural life.
A minority of self-conscious and articulate groups within a diasporic people
may express diasporic identity publicly, but it is always difficult to estimate the
10
strength of diasporic identity amongst a mass of mostly poor migrants. Kevin Kenny
has emphasised the need to be wary of evidence from the ethnic press or in popular
literature and culture, and the same also applies to associational manifestations of
ethnic identity. It may not be representative of the mass but rather of articulate and
unrepresentative minorities within it. He suggests the need to consider diasporic
groups in terms of a three-fold typology. Firstly there was origin: was the population
movement voluntary or involuntary? Secondly, articulation: did members of a
dispersed population see themselves in diasporic terms, articulating a sense of
common identity amongst themselves as well as with their ‘homelands’? Finally,
temporality: how did the group’s experience and self-understanding change over
time?47 It is possible to consider the peoples passing through, and settling in,
nineteenth-century Liverpool using this typology. The results are inevitably crude
since they suffer from two interrelated problems. Firstly, we know very little about
how people in the nineteenth century visualised their own identity and their diasporic
position. The vast majority of Liverpool’s migrants were poor, often more or less
destitute, and they left scant testimony of their feelings and experiences. Secondly, we
are forced to apply stereotypical perceptions to these people en masse. These are
inherently crude and miss the variations within peoples. The ‘Irish’, for example, are
often presented as a monolithic mass but they were actually a diverse ethnic, regional
and religious mix, and even amongst the Catholic Irish there was diversity of origins,
status, experiences, family strategies and identities. In day-to-day existence, identities
amongst diasporic peoples were inevitably contested to a greater or lesser degree. The
diasporic identity might count for much or for little but it was always in tension with
the countervailing forces of class, religion, status, culture and British nationalism.48
With these provisos in mind, it is possible to consider the potential diasporic
status of Liverpool’s various migrant groups in the nineteenth century. In table 9 they
have been divided into the emigrants, settlers and transients. The various groups in
each class are then considered in terms of Kenny’s three criteria – origins, articulation
and temporality. Two other elements have been added. The first, the significance of
Liverpool, attempts to estimate the influence contact with Liverpool may have had on
the diasporic experience or identity of each group. What role did the city play in the
experience or trauma of diasporic movement and settlement? The second considers
the migrants’ possible influence on Liverpool’s society, culture and politics.
The emigrants are the easiest to consider since for them Liverpool was a brief
staging post on a longer journey. The peoples passing through had widely differing
degrees of diasporic identity. Whilst other factors may have been at work, voluntary
economic migrants made decisions on the relative merits of staying or going in the
light of job prospects at home and overseas. Both the British and continental
European emigrants (excluding the Jews) were voluntary migrants whose articulation
of diasporic identity and connection with an ancestral homeland were weak. The
British, the Scandinavians, the Germans and other Europeans ultimately lost any
significant diasporic identity and increasingly identified with the emergent social
synthesis of their adopted countries.49 This is not to say that they and their
descendants gave up all links with their homelands, but, to be historically significant,
consciousness of a diasporic inheritance has to define the basic identity, attitudes and
behaviour of people down the generations. A folksy interest in culture and family
history is not enough.
Passage of the British and continental Europeans through Liverpool was
historically insignificant for these people and the only imprint they left on the city was
as part of its publicly-presented world heritage. The position of Irish emigrants was
11
more complex. Even before the Famine, emigration was borderline between voluntary
and involuntary. The Famine crisis, with its evictions and ‘landlord assisted
emigration’, was an involuntary expulsion of people. Nevertheless, debates continue
as to whether emigration after the Famine should be seen as involuntary exile or as
voluntary and purposive movement in search of better prospects.50 It is for this reason
that the Irish have been identified as both voluntary and involuntary emigrants in table
9.
Transit through Liverpool, particularly until the 1860s, probably had some
long-term significance for Irish emigrants. The fraud, squalor and chaos of the
Liverpool emigrant trade was a final searing experience of Britain. It was,
nevertheless, contradictory since most of those who directly exploited the emigrants
were also Irish. Many Irish and their descendants who grew up in America had a
diasporic identity defined partly by hostility to Britain and all its works, and memories
of Liverpool may have been a minor element in that synthesis. For most Eastern
European Jews, on the other hand, Liverpool was a stop on the way to yet more
diaspora destinations overseas. Passage through the city had little significance in
comparison with the anti-semitism that provoked their move; the Jewish diasporic
identity was sustained by far greater traumas.
We now come to the characteristics of the groups who settled in nineteenthcentury Liverpool. The majority came from other parts of Britain. Those from
England were settling in an English city. Though they may have brought their preindustrial culture and memories with them, they became a dominant part of whatever
was the new urban cultural synthesis of Victorian and Edwardian Liverpool. The
Scots, Manx and especially the Welsh were from more distinct ethnic and cultural
backgrounds. Their diasporic identities were undoubtedly affected by the Liverpool
experience and their redefined identities may have contributed to Liverpool’s dynamic
cultural synthesis, but more research is needed to define the resultant impacts more
effectively. They have been rather overlooked.51
The same cannot be said about the Irish. There has been extensive discussion
of the experience of the Catholic Irish in Victorian Liverpool, but little agreement
about the nature of their long-term diasporic identity.52 It is popularly supposed that
Irish emigrants articulated their diasporic identity strongly and retained a tight, if
changing, cultural connection with their homeland. Whilst there is evidence of this,
much less is known about those Irish and their descendants, from various
backgrounds, whose ties with the home country weakened and who merged more or
less willingly into the cultural synthesis of their adopted countries.53 It seems clear
that the articulation of Irish identity down the generations was increasingly contested,
and weakened, by the pressures of employment, housing and religion, together with
local and class-based politics. The Irish had a major influence on Liverpool but, in
turn, Liverpool acted on the Irish and their descendants. These are issues recently
addressed to some degree in John Belchem’s synthesis of the long-term Catholic
Liverpool-Irish experience.54
Articulation of common diasporic identity was clearly strong, though diverse,
amongst Liverpool’s Jews and it remained so despite the ultimate dilution of the
community through marrying out and migration from Liverpool. Their influence on
Liverpool life was limited but in some areas, such as business, noticeable. They
contrasted with Liverpool’s non-Jewish immigrants from Europe whose diasporic
identity dwindled. They largely merged with the mainstream population after the
second generation. It is difficult to generalise about the diasporic identities of
Liverpool’s Afro-Caribbean population except to speculate that the sheer diversity of
12
Liverpool’s black peoples must have initially militated against a common articulation.
Nevertheless, over time that population as well as its mixed-race descendants
increasingly developed a new identity in opposition to the racism it experienced in
white Liverpool. The notion of ‘scouseness’ excluded them despite the fact that their
roots often lay further back than many of the city’s white immigrants.55
Were Liverpool’s Chinese part of a meaningful diaspora? Only a small
community before 1914, they are best classed as part of a voluntary labour diaspora.
Their cultural and linguistic apartness initially sustained a continued articulation of
diasporic identity, but more research is needed to explore the extent to which that
identity was changed by living in Liverpool. Such transformations would largely have
occurred beyond the time period covered by this essay.
This review of Liverpool’s nineteenth-century immigrants serves primarily to
expose the need for a more searching analysis of the significance of diasporic
awareness in the various groups making up Liverpool’s population. It is also
important to note again that peoples’ diasporic identities were neither fixed nor onedimensional. Their experience in Liverpool was subject to complex pressures and
took place within a wider national and world context. It is also impossible to assess
whether the diasporic histories of people in Liverpool were exceptional without
comparing them in cities elsewhere. As Kenny has argued, ‘a prime subject for
historical inquiry is how the diasporic sensibilities of a given migrant people vary
according to the places where they reside.’56
The significance of Liverpool’s transient migrants is the final aspect of
Liverpool’s diasporic nature to be considered. They went in two directions.
Thousands of foreign sailors came into Liverpool, and in a wide definition of diaspora
they originated in the voluntary pursuit of work on the sea. They had no particular
commitment to the city and their identification remained primarily with the societies
from which they came. Liverpool had little influence on them but they may have
influenced Liverpool. Their input to the city’s entertainment economy was obvious,
whereas their infusion of foreign cultural influences was more intangible but probably
longer lasting. More work is needed here. Even more important, perhaps, were
Liverpool’s own transient migrants – the sailors and other workers who went overseas
but returned to homes, families and associates in the city. There were tens of
thousands down the years, and their experience of other countries and cultures must
have had a small influence on their own identities and been an element in the city’s
evolving culture. Research is needed here also, but we should perhaps be cautious
about over-estimating their influence.
So was Liverpool a diasporic city in the nineteenth century? This paper has
considered its most obvious manifestation in showing that the city played a major role
‘as a sort of highway of emigration’ in the scattering of European peoples.57 It has
also suggested that the emigrant trade contributed less to the city’s economy, than
might be imagined. It also argues that, in respect of the social impact of immigration,
the city exercised little influence on the diasporic identities of the emigrants. British
and Irish immigrants were dominant in determining Liverpool’s character and culture
and the influence of other groups was marginal, despite the cosmopolitan character
they gave to some of the city’s neighbourhoods. In the end it does not seem useful to
define nineteenth-century Liverpool generally as a diasporic city. It had a complex
and ambiguous identity which reflected interactions and tensions between its various
migrant groups, and more comparative work is needed on how these factors
influenced the identities of its diasporic peoples.
13
Figure 1
Destinations of passengers from Liverpool, 1825-1913
250000
200000
150000
BNA
100000
50000
Other
Aust/NZ
0
18
25
18
28
18
31
18
34
18
37
18
40
18
43
18
46
18
49
18
52
18
55
18
58
18
61
18
64
18
67
18
70
18
73
18
76
18
79
18
82
18
85
18
88
18
91
18
94
18
97
19
00
19
03
19
06
19
09
19
12
Passengers
USA
For source of data: see footnote 2
14
Years
Table 9 Diasporic typology of Liverpool’s nineteenth century peoples
Groups
Origins
Emigrants
British
Vol
Irish
Invol/Vol
Jewish
Largely invol
Other European
Vol
Settlers
British
Vol
Irish
Invol/vol
Jewish
Invol/vol
Other European
Vol
Afro-Caribbean
Invol/vol
Chinese
Vol
Transients
Abroad→Lpl→abroad
Vol
Lpl→abroad→Lpl
Vol
Vol = voluntary; Invol = Involuntary
For explanation see text
Articulation
Diasporic identity over time
Significance of Liverpool
Influence on Liverpool
Weak
Strong/weak
Strong
Weak
Lost
Weakening
Retained but marrying out
Lost
Nil
Some
Little
Nil
Nil
Nil
Nil
Nil
Mod/weak
Strong/weak
Strong
Weak
Strong
Strong
Largely lost except Welsh?
Weakened & transformed →Catholic/class identities?
Largely retained but weakening
Weakening
Retained and/or transformed
Retained but some loss?
Strong
Strong
Fairly strong
Strong
Strong but oppositional
Medium
Strong
Strong
Some
Some
Some
Some
Strong
Strong
Irrelevant
Irrelevant
Weak
Strong
Some
Minimal
15
1
Liverpool Mercury (12 May 1887).
The statistics mostly relate to passengers rather than emigrants. Before 1913 no
successful distinction was made between emigrants and ordinary cabin passengers.
Previous writers have wrestled with the problem of British emigrant statistics, notably
I. Ferenczi and W. F. Willcox, International Migrations (New York: National Bureau
of Economic Research inc.,1929), Vol. 1, pp. 619-625; N. H. Carrier and J. R. Jeffery,
External Migration: A Study of Available Statistics, 1815-1950 (London:
HMSO,1953) passim but especially Appendix 2; O. MacDonagh, A Pattern of
Government Growth, 1800-1860:The Passenger Acts and their Enforcement (London:
McGibbon and Kee, 1961), passim; Brinley Thomas, Migration and Economic
Growth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd edn, 1973), chapter 4; J. D.
Gould, ‘European Inter-Continental Emigration, 1815-1914: Patterns and Causes’
Journal of European Economic History, 8:3 (1979),. 593-602; D. E. Baines,
Migration in a Mature Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp.
47-54.
The port data is from Parliamentary Papers (hereafter PP) as follows:1825-32 – ‘Return of the number of persons who have emigrated from Britain and
Ireland, 1825-32’, Report of the Colonial Land and Emigration Commissioners
(1833)
1833-54 – Annual reports of the Colonial Land and Emigration Commissioners
1855-72 - General reports of the Emigration Commissioners
1876-1913 – Board of Trade returns on emigration and immigration.
No port figures have been found for 1836, 1838 and 1873-5; these years are estimated
from trends in adjacent years. In the statistics the destination zones identified varied
over time and often were not clearly defined. The ‘East Indies’ generally referred to
the Indian Empire and south-east Asia.
3
T. Coleman, Passage to America (London: Hutchinson, 1972), pp. 134-37; C.
Woodham-Smith, The Great Hunger (London: Hamish Hamilton, New English
Library, 1977), pp. 212-32.
4
D. Hollett, Fast Passage to Australia (London: Fairplay, 1986), chapter 11; M. K.
Stammers, The Passage Makers (Brighton: Teredo, 1978), pp. 109-18.
5
A. Jackson, ‘Ireland, the Union and the Empire’, in K. Kenny (ed.), Ireland and the
British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 123-53, p. 123.
6
K. Kenny, ‘The Irish in the Empire’, in K. Kenny (ed.), Ireland and the British
Empire, pp. 90-122; D. Fitzpatrick, ‘Ireland and the Empire’, in A. Porter (ed.), The
Oxford History of the British Empire, Volume III, The Nineteenth Century (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 494-521; D. H. Akenson, ‘Irish migration to
North America, 1800-1920’ and A. Bielenberg, ‘Irish emigration to the British
Empire, 1700-1914’, in A. Bielenberg (ed.), The Irish Diaspora (Harlow: Longman,
2000), pp. 111-38 and 215-34.
7
After 1853 there are national statistics on the origin of passengers. The figures on
table 3 were produced in three stages. First, the known number of Irish leaving from
Irish ports was subtracted from the known number departing from the UK, leaving the
total from British ports. It was estimated that 90 per cent left from Liverpool. Second,
it was estimated that 90 per cent of the aliens leaving the British Isles also travelled
through Liverpool. The resultant totals of transmigrants and Irish were then subtracted
2
16
from the total passengers leaving Liverpool, giving the residue of British emigrants.
The estimates are very plausible but should not be seen as numerically definitive.
8
A. Newman, ‘Trains, Shelter and Ships’, unpublished paper presented at Jewish
Genealogical Society of Great Britain seminar, April 2000.
9
Baines, Migration, pp. 77-82.
10
PP, HC1851, Select Committee on the Passenger Act, evidence of William
Tapscott, Shipping Agent, Liverpool, Qs. 2740-2819 and George Saul, passenger
broker, Q. 3184.
11
Coleman, Passage, chapters 5 and 13.
12
His figures were certainly an underestimate. PP, HC1851, Passenger Act, Q. 2875.
13
PP, HC1857: Session 1 & 2: Return on the number of licenced passage brokers in
the Port of Liverpool.
14
PP, HC1851, Passenger Act, Q. 2794.
15
Ibid., Q. 4824.
16
PP, HC1888: XI:419, Select Committee on Emigration and Immigration
(Foreigners), Henry Joseph Hagger, Vestry Clerk, Parish of Liverpool, paras. 314320.
17
The Times (28 and 29 September 1892).
18
Evans, Indirect Passage: G. O. Holt, A Regional History of the Railways of Great
Britain: Volume X :The North West (Newton Abbott: David and Charles, 1978), p. 55.
19
F. E. Hyde, Liverpool and the Mersey (Newton Abbott: David and Charles, 1971) p.
114; R. Bastin, ‘Cunard and the Liverpool emigrant traffic’, (MA dissertation,
University of Liverpool, 1971), p.132.
20
Hyde, Liverpool and the Mersey, p. 124; G. J. Milne, ‘Maritime Liverpool’, in J.
Belchem (ed.), Liverpool 800: Culture, Character and History (Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press, 2006), pp. 274-80.
21
A. J. Maginnis, The Atlantic Ferry: Its Ships, Men and Working (London:
Whittaker and Co., 1900), pp. 24-118.
22
Bastin, ‘Cunard’, chapter 5.
23
The table uses quoted steerage fares from various secondary and primary sources,
as follows: 1825-30: £3; 1830-39: £3 10s; 1840-45: £4; 1846-53: £6; 1854-59: £4 5s;
1860-73: £6 6s; 1874-82: £5; 1883-89: £4 4s; 1890-99: £5; 1900-05: £3; 1906-13: £5.
The totals of passengers to USA and Canada have been multiplied by these fares. No
allowance is made for children or for cabin passengers paying higher fares; they may
cancel each other out.
24
See J. Belchem, ‘Class, creed and country: the Irish middle class in Victorian
Liverpool’, in R. Swift and S. Gilley (eds), The Irish in Victorian Britain: The Local
Dimension (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1999), pp. 190-211.
25
Jackson, ‘Ireland, the Union and the Empire’, p. 124.
26
In his well known book Pat O’Mara illustrated the complexities of this identity in
1900s Liverpool. His own background was three-quarters Irish. He was ‘sternly
Irishized’ at home but developed ‘an intense love for the British Empire and an
equally intense hatred for England’ through his Catholic ‘English-Irish schooling’. P.
O’Mara, The Autobiography of a Liverpool Slummy (Liverpool: Bluecoat Press,
1995), pp. 56-7.
27
Ramsey Muir, A History of Liverpool (London: Williams and Norgate, 1907), p.
304. J. Belchem and D. M. MacRaild, ‘Cosmopolitan Liverpool’, in Belchem,
Liverpool 800, chapter 5, esp., p. 320.
28
Muir, Liverpool, p. 305.
17
A 10 per cent systematic sample was taken of all ‘sailors’, ‘seamen’ and ‘mariners’
in the Liverpool Borough enumeration returns including 10 per cent of all people
(apart from passengers) on vessels in port and in the Sailors’ Home, Canning Place.
The census probably under-recorded transient sailors in brothels and drinking dens,
but there is no reason to think the proportions of different nationalities were distorted.
30
Given that Manchester had more European immigrants than Liverpool (13,104 to
9,775 in 1911), it has been assumed that in those countries which had more
representatives in Liverpool than Manchester the surplus consisted of sailors. There
was an excess of 1,184 from such countries in 1911, 12.1% of the European total.
31
PP, HC1888, X.265, Select Committee on emigration, Hagger evidence , para. 292.
32
N. Kokosalakis, Ethnic Identity and Religion: Tradition and Change in Liverpool
Jewry (Washington: University Press of America, 1982), pp. 43-4, 50-1, 154.
33
Ibid., p. 99.
34
Ibid., p. 154.
35
Belchem and MacRaild, ‘Cosmopolitan Liverpool’, p. 318.
36
R. Costello, Black Liverpool: The Early History of Britain’s Oldest Black
Community, 1730-1918 (Liverpool: Picton, 2001), pp. 8-19.
37
I. Law and J. Henfrey, A History of Race and Racism in Liverpool, 1660-1950
(Liverpool: Merseyside Community Relations Council, 1981), pp. 15, 25; Costello,
Black Liverpool, p. 69.
38
Belchem and MacRaild, ‘Cosmopolitan Liverpool’, p. 320.
39
M.L. Wong, Chinese Liverpudlians: The History of the Chinese Community in
Liverpool (Birkenhead: Liver Press, 1989), pp. 4-6.
40
A further 268 people were born in ‘Other Colonies in Asia’. Some may have been
Chinese from Hong Kong and other places in the British empire. If all these are
assumed to have been Chinese, which is unlikely, the Chinese total was no more than
672.
41
Wong, Chinese, p. 8.
42
P. J. Waller, Democracy and Sectarianism: A Social and Political History of
Liverpool, 1868-1939 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1981) pp. 217, 220,
224-6.
43
The themes of cosmopolitanism, exceptionalism and distinctiveness run through
Belchem (ed.), Liverpool 800, notably in chapters three and five, but the precise
nature of the Liverpool’s distinctive synthesis remains elusive.
44
R. Cohen, Global Diasporas (London: University College of London Press, 1997),
p. 2.
45
Ibid., is the best overall summary.
46
Belchem, Liverpool 800, p. 14.
47
K. Kenny, ‘Diaspora and comparison: the global Irish as a case study’, Journal of
American History, 90:1 (June 2003), pp. 134-62, (e-version on
http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jah/90.1/kenny.html, pp. 4-6, accessed 26
November 2003.)
48
S. Fielding, Class and Identity: Irish Catholics in England, 1880-1939
(Buckingham: Open University Press, 1993), pp. 10-18.
49
The Scottish victims of the Highland Clearances were also ‘involuntary’ emigrants.
There are probably continental exceptions too.
50
See the perspectives of Kerby Miller and Donald Akenson. K. Miller, Emigrants
and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (New York: Oxford
29
18
University Press,1985); D. H. Akenson, The Irish Diaspora: A Primer (Toronto: P. D.
Meany Company Inc., 1993).
51
Belchem and MacRaild present vignettes of Liverpool’s Welsh, Scots and Manx
peoples which cover their more obvious cultural and social manifestations. Belchem
and MacRaild, ‘Cosmopolitan Liverpool’, pp. 344-58.
52
Belchem’s Merseypride argues for the continuing apartness of the ‘Irish Catholic
enclave’ in Liverpool. This contrasts with work arguing for increasing integration
such as C. Pooley, ‘Segregation or integration? The residential experience of the Irish
in mid-Victorian Britain’, in R. Swift and S. Gilley (eds), The Irish in Britain, 18151939 (London: Pinter Publishers, 1989), pp 61-81.
53
Two studies with oral and family history evidence are: R. Byron, Irish America
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999) and J. Herson, ‘Family history and memory in Irish
immigrant families’ in K. Burrell and P. Panayi (eds), Histories and Memories:
Migrants and their History in Britain (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2006), pp.
210-233.
54
J. Belchem, Irish, Catholic and Scouse: the History of the Liverpool-Irish, 18001939, (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007).
55
D. Frost, ‘West Africans, Black Scousers and the colour problem in Inter-War
Liverpool’, North-West Labour History, 20 (1995-6), pp. 50-57, p. 56. Belchem and
MacRaild, ‘Cosmopolitan Liverpool’, pp. 368-88.
56
Kenny, ‘Diaspora and comparison’, p. 19.
57
The comment was made by Herman John Falk, a German industrialist in the
Cheshire salt trade, in 1888. PP, HC1888, Select Committee on emigration, para.
3478.
19