Lancaster was the fourth largest slave port in Britain and although its contribution to the peculiar trade was dwarfed by that of its close neighbour Liverpool, which became the largest slave port in the world in the late eighteenth century, it was responsible for around 200 voyages and the transportation of around 30,000 enslaved Africans to the Americas. Lubaina Himid's characterisation of the city in her catalogue essay to her 2007 show Swallow Hard: The Lancaster Dinner Service is astute, outlining the strange admixtures caused by its provincial character and port city worldliness, its gentility forged at the same time as it engaged in the harshest of trades in human cargo. Like all British slave ports, there has historically been a wilful amnesia about its contribution to human misery: while many of its citizens trousered their profits to build elegant mansions and establish local political careers as mayors or leaders of commerce, the source of that wealth was elided by vague discussions about trade with the colonies and profits from the plantations of the Caribbean, and more recently right up until the late 1990s by an almost universal reluctance to face up to the city's dark history. The context of this refusal is, of course, a national problem around the construction and interpretations of archives and the histories that they contain. As Jean Fisher contends,