Introduction

In 1769 Joseph Wright of Derby painted an unusual portrait of Thomas Staniforth, a Liverpool merchant with interests in rope-making, Greenland whaling and the African slave trade (see Image 3.1). The face has livid hues of yellows, reds and pinks, an artistic experiment that Wright rarely repeated. Apart from this astonishing portrait, Staniforth disappeared from the mainstream historical record along with many of his mercantile contemporaries from eighteenth-century Liverpool. Even when the portrait was displayed at the Tate Gallery after its purchase in 1965 there was only an oblique reference to Staniforth's mercantile concerns, exemplifying the somewhat myopic public attitude to the slave trade which remained widespread until the bicentenary of its abolition in 2007. By May 2007 there had been a significant shift, the display caption on the Tate's website noting:

These speculative observations underline the fact that remarkably little is known about the mentality of these key agents in the transfer of thousands of Africans into slavery in the second half of the eighteenth century. Although Liverpool dominated the slave trade in this period, the attitudes of the core of major investors are difficult to discern, despite the fact that slavery became an increasingly contested issue from the 1780s. David Pope has analysed 1,724 investors in Liverpool slaving vessels in the period 1750–1807 and identified approximately 247 individuals who were involved in 20 or more voyages. Pope's meticulous scholarship has also revealed some of the biographical details of his core group of leading slave traders, including their parentage, the value of their personal estates on death and property ownership indicated by the Lists of Lancashire Freeholders of 1794–1795 and the Land Tax Assessments of 1798. Yet, despite this wealth of data, frustratingly little is revealed about the mindset of the Liverpool slave trader, especially major investors such as Thomas Staniforth, who was among the group of the 70 largest traders with 50 or more voyages.