Centre for Port and Maritime History projects and exhibitions

Liverpool Mercantile Database

The Liverpool Mercantile Database is the latest in the Centre’s archive development projects. We are in the process of refining the database’s search capabilities but it can be accessed online.

The Project was a huge undertaking, funded by the Leverhulme Trust and carried out by a team of researchers at the University of Liverpool under the direction of the principal investigator, Professor Robert Lee. Professor Lee, now sadly deceased, was a former director of the Centre for Port and Maritime History (CPMH) and it was his wish that the database, which was created as part of the project, be donated to CPMH at LJMU. Funding was raised to convert the database into this online resource, including a generous donation by Andrew Douglas, a former University of Liverpool student.

The database

The Liverpool Mercantile Database is a relational database incorporating nominative information from a range of sources between the mid-nineteenth century and 1914. The database consists of approximately 350,000 records, of which 170,000 derive directly from five principal sources, including census returns, directories, club and associational records. The remainder represent relationships between the different records. The database covers almost 27,000 members of Liverpool’s business community who traded in 15,883 firms, partnerships or companies. It was designed to generate information on the changing size and composition of Liverpool’s merchant community, in terms of the development of specific trades, as well as the spatial origins, associational profile, residential location, denominational affiliation, family and household composition, and relative wealth of individual members. The database offers a unique means of examining in detail processes of compositional and structural change within the merchant community of Liverpool (and on Merseyside more widely).

Our sources

The principal sources are as follows:

• Gore's Liverpool Street Directories at ten-year intervals (1882, 1892 and such), including data from both the alphabetical sections and the lists of classified trades.
• The decennial census returns between 1851 and 1901 (inclusive).
• Nominative data relating to merchants involved in local associations, clubs, societies, schools and religious communities, including the Liverpool Athenaeum, the Wellington Club, the YZ Club, the Royal Liverpool Golf Club, the Royal Mersey Yacht Club, the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, and the Liverpool Philomathic Society. Data was also included from the Merchants' Lodge, the only Freemason establishment where merchants represented 25 per cent of the total membership.

Publications

Members of the research team at the University of Liverpool published an edited collection which used the Liverpool Mercantile Database:

• Lee, Robert (ed.) Networks of Interest and Power: Business, Culture and Identity in Liverpool's Merchant Community, c.1800 to 1914 (London: Routledge) 2023, pp. 522.

For LJMU members, the book is available at the Mount Pleasant Campus Library and is also available open access through your institutional login, it is otherwise available to order in hardback or download in eBook format.

Exhibiting Empire in Nineteenth Century Liverpool: Project Launch

On 9th December 2025, Dr Isabel Robinson (History) officially launched the website for Exhibiting Empire, a new digital resource exploring nineteenth-century exhibitions in Liverpool and their connections to Britain’s imperial past.

The project, which takes the form of a digital hub, offers public access to rare archival material, together with historical context on the Liverpool Mechanics’ Institution, one of LJMU’s founding bodies, and the ‘World Fair Movement.’ Although a boon to the developing creative and commercial identity of LJMU, these fairs also had a darker side, often promoting visions of racial superiority and imperial grandeur.

The material digitised as part of this project therefore sheds fresh light on how art, industry, and global objects were displayed in Liverpool as a means to shape public knowledge and to support imperial attitudes at a time when LJMU was establishing itself as a centre of learning.

Visitors to the site, which was funded by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, are invited to interactively engage with the content in new and dynamic ways. Text based materials have been indexed to facilitate keyword search techniques and magnification tools employed to enhance image manipulation. Licensed under a Creative Commons agreement, the website also facilitates the downloading and sharing of content.

It is hoped that by putting these materials online, LJMU can better understand how British imperial objectives lay the centre of its developmental history, as well as opening up new avenues of research in the history of art, education, and British imperialism.

The Exhibiting Empire project forms part of LJMU’s broader LJMU Enslavement and Empire Project, which investigates the university’s historical connections with slavery, empire, and the dissemination of racial science.

For more information, visit our Exhibiting Empire webpages.

Finding Captain Morgan: The Captain James Morgan Collection and Exhibition

James Patrick Morgan was born in London in 1943 and was raised in the South of England. He first joined the Merchant Navy in 1961 as a cadet and ascended through the ranks to Captain. He sailed extensively to Europe and Africa, which was served by Elder Dempster Lines, and throughout his career, he acquired an array of artifacts which provide a detailed collection of Elder Dempster shipping history. The Captain James Morgan Collection contains over 1500 photographs and postcards, paintings and prints, personal correspondence, and a selection of printed ephemera, such as magazines.

The collection was donated to LJMU by his widow Mrs Joyce Morgan in 2020. LJMU student interns, Julie Cain, Jenny Cooper, Kate Hudson, and Rosie Nock have catalogued and digitised the collection with the support of the Special Collections and Archives Team at LJMU. Funding to support the intern project was also donated by the Elder Dempster Pensioners’ Association.

Julie, Kate and Rosie curated an exhibition for the Special Collections and Archives and a launch event was held on 16 May 2023.  The exhibition will run throughout the summer in the Mount Pleasant Campus Library but is also available to view online. The online exhibition is a first for the Special Collections and Archives and CPMH is very grateful to Anne Foulkes and Emily Parsons in particular, for making this possible. Many with digital images of the items can be found on the full online catalogue.

The Centre for Port and Maritime History has a complementary site about Elder Dempster Lines. The Heritage Lottery funded projected, Homeward Bound: A Liverpool-West Africa Heritage, can be accessed on the Elder Dempster website.

Jamaican art exhibition

Curated by Dr. Emma Roberts - 19 February 2022 at the Victoria Gallery and Museum

CPMH Board member, Dr. Emma Roberts, curated an exhibition of Jamaican art which opened at the Victoria Gallery and Museum on 19 February 2022 and ran until 9 July 2022. This was the first exhibition wholly of Jamaican art to appear in the north-west of the UK and it celebrated the 60^th anniversary of Independence in Jamaica in 1962, as all of the art works were made by artists since that date. The art works are the collection of Theresa Roberts, a Jamaican-born businesswoman and philanthropist, and they are all high-quality examples of art by key important Jamaican artists. Theresa now lives in London and owns The Jamaica Patty Co. in Covent Garden. She has allowed Emma Roberts to select the art works for this exhibition from her extensive art collection for the benefit of visitors from the Merseyside region. Theresa was also involved with the instatement of the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool in 2007.

To accompany the exhibition, Emma Roberts has edited and written the main essay of a book that also acts as a catalogue for the exhibition. The book includes an essay by Andrew Holness, the Prime Minister of Jamaica, as well as another by iconic art historian, Edward Lucie-Smith (and other essays whose authors address issues of colonisation and diaspora). This book is published by Liverpool University Press and an online book launch occurred on 17 February, organised by Liverpool John Moores University.

Artist-in-Residence, Desanna Watson, visited from Jamaica and stayed for one month in order to work alongside the exhibition. One of her own art works was part of the exhibition, but was displayed in the satellite site of the John Lennon Art and Design Building (Liverpool John Moores University). Desanna is an artist and art teacher in Kingston, Jamaica, and she will be running workshops with schools, community groups and university students to illuminate the themes of the exhibition. Her own art work is about the impact of colonisation in Jamaica (for example streets bearing the names of slavers), and her work in this area preceded the recent discussions on this topic that were part of the #BlackLivesMatter movement.

Three Queens Celebration Event

Merseyside Maritime Museum 24-26 May 2015