2 - ‘Citizens of the World’: The Earle Family’s Leghorn and Venetian Business, 1751–1808

Summary

Studies of Liverpool slave-traders’ account books have allowed us identify suppliers of trade goods and processors and refiners of slave-produced goods: they have demonstrated that the reach of the transatlantic slave trade went far beyond the local hinterland of port cities and that hinterland producers were in fact deeply embedded in transnational trade. The evidence offered by this study of the Earle Papers affords an opportunity to locate the activities of this slave-trading family beyond Liverpool and to identify the reach of that hinterland. Traditionally the slave trade has been seen as ‘Atlantic’ or ‘colonial’: this study of the Earles’ Leghorn business makes a new case which supports the interpretation of the eighteenth century as a time of globalisation, in a world in which Liverpool and its slaving merchants are a driving force and, self-consciously, ‘citizens of the world’. The trajectory of the Earle family's progress exemplifies the degree to which the slave trade was closely bound up with ancillary trades – that is, the production and procurement of trade goods and the refining and distribution of slave-produced goods – which penetrated not only the economy of the Atlantic basin but that of continental Europe and the proto-global economy altogether.

The main focus of this case study is the Leghorn business which was started up in 1751 – a key moment in Liverpool's rise and an indication of the self-confidence of the founding partners, Thomas Earle and Thomas Hodgson; Liverpool merchants had come of age. The decision of leading Liverpool slave-traders to establish merchant houses first in Livorno, and then in Genoa and Civitavecchia, may throw light not only on the continental European reach of the slave trade but also offers an example of the emergence of a new model of integration. The company was to become the leading British merchant house in Livorno. Equally, the founding of a subsequent company, in partnership with William Davenport, which would source beads from Venice used to buy men and women in Africa, is another example of an Italian connection with the slave trade. A word about the sources: the Earle papers were collected in the late nineteenth century by T. Algernon Earle and donated to the Merseyside Maritime Museum in 1993.