How important was Lancaster in Britain's trans-Atlantic trade? Some thoughts on finding an answer

"A View of Roaring River Estate, Jamaica"

It's been a busy four weeks since my last blog post, with some family history discoveries, research into the Cobham family, my Scotforth enclosure article taking shape, and my postgraduate applications, among other things.

A question that has been preying on my mind for some time, however, is the following: how important was Lancaster in Britain's trans-Atlantic trade? It is a question fundamental to the economic history of Lancaster in the eighteenth century, but what exactly does it mean, and what is the answer?

I believe the 'importance' of Lancaster is something that has to be relative: it has to be placed within a context, specifically, in relation to other ports in the Atlantic world. But what has to be placed in the context of where?

What: There are a number of things that can be measured to show the 'importance' of Lancaster's trans-Atlantic trade. Schofield 1946 looked at the volume and tonnage of shipping from 1757-1800 via the Lancaster Port Commission tonnage registers; Elder 1992 looked at the volume of shipping from 1755-1780 via the Seamen's Sixpence Accounts. What hasn't been examined in the context of Lancaster's trade is the volume of the commodities being imported/exported, or who imported them. Imports were principally recorded in the town's port books, which recorded customs duties paid on overseas trade (E 190 in the National Archives). However, for Lancaster, the complete run stops in 1724, with a few more books covering 1728-29 and 1736-37. This is no good for a study of a trade which was most prominent in the second half of the eighteenth century. So, is all lost? Perhaps not. Krichtal 2013 made use of newspaper reports to look at cotton imports into Liverpool between 1775 and 1815. Newspaper reports on imports were copied from the port books. It turns out, as I explored in a previous blog, reports for Lancaster exist in various newspapers between 1774 and 1815, and beyond. This, therefore, constitutes a very valuable untapped source of information, which can be placed into a certain context.

Where: I believe one answer might be found in CUST 3 in the National Archives, the Ledgers of Imports and Exports. This digitised series recorded imports to and exports from London versus the "outports" to/from countries and colonies across the world. If newspaper records can be used to calculate the number of hogsheads of sugar, for instance, imported into Lancaster in the year 1780, and can also be used to determine where they came from, this data can be compared with the imports into British outports + London for 1780, and a percentage share of the imports for Lancaster can be determined. Circuitous, perhaps, but the easiest way I have thought of so far.

What will the answer be?

It's quite easy to guess based on what we already know, although history is based on evidence not on guesses. We already know Lancaster had the fourth largest share of the trade in enslaved Africans of any British port, and that data is easily accessible on https://www.slavevoyages.org/ for all to see. No such database exists for the West Indies or colonial/independent American trade, the two other strands that I would argue make up Britain's "trans-Atlantic trade" in its totality.

There are also some already-published figures that we can consult (and could contribute to a final study). One example can be found on pages 105-106 of John Gardner Kemeys' Free and Candid Reflections. In this book, Kemeys provides the number of ships and their tonnage clearing each British port for each Atlantic destination in the year 1778, compiled "with exactness from authentic accounts." The following table contains just the figures for ships clearing Lancaster:

Destination	Ships	Tonnage	Ranking
Jamaica	17	2420	5th
Barbados	5	500	5th
Antigua	3	265	6th
St Christopher or St Kitts	6	800	4th
Grenada and the Grenadines	5	740	4th (tied)
Dominica	2	240	5th (tied)
St Vincent	1	140	5th

This table shows that, in the year 1778, Lancaster was a formidable participant in the West Indies trade. There may be similar snippets buried in resources like parliamentary papers and in the Board of Trade papers in the National Archives.

In my view, it is probable that the findings of the exercise outlined above will be Lancaster as the fourth most important port for trans-Atlantic trade in Great Britain during the eighteenth century, after London, Liverpool, and Bristol (and outside GB, after Cork). So what? Well, I think the role of Lancaster in eighteenth century commerce beyond the slave trade has been overlooked by historians. There is a gap in the historiography, and this work would set that right, which is especially important as public interest in this area turns to not just the trade in enslaved Africans, but the trade in the commodities they were forced to produce.