ICA | Thursday 12 November 2020

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Digital

William Rathbone and Sons was a timber merchant company founded in Liverpool in 1746. “[T]he foundation of the Rathbone fortune and business was built on the Africa slave trade.”[1] During the 18th century, they imported timber felled and milled by slaves in the West Indies and operated a number of trading ships that sailed to West Indian colonies as well as the Southern States of America.[2] Rathbone and Sons’ yard occupied a large portion of the Liverpool South Docks.[3] Rathbone and Sons supplied timber for slave ship builders in Liverpool until at least 1783.[4] These ships carried enslaved black people who were sold in the West Indies and in British North America. Ships built in Liverpool also carried the slaves who were sold on Negro Row at the Liverpool South Docks.[5]

Liverpool built the world’s first wet dock in 1716, allowing cargo ships to dock directly at the port. By 1796, Liverpool had built 28 acres of docks.

Liverpool’s proximity to Ireland also not only facilitated a profitable trade, but provided a relatively safer route that allowed Liverpool ships less chance to be captured by French privateers. Additionally, the copper and brass manufactures in Lancashire and Ireland allowed for local companies that manufactured African trade goods such as manillas to carry on a prosperous export trade, further giving Liverpool a competitive edge. The relationships forged with nearby merchants not only helped secure trade goods, but also valuable credit terms.[6]

In 1784, Rathbone and Sons imported the first consignment of raw cotton to England from the United States.[7] From this point, they became stated abolitionists and free trade advocates.[8] The abolition of the “West Indian monopoly” on the import of goods to the British Isles would allow for the expansion of U.S. cotton trading. Liverpool became the primary port of 19th-century cotton importation to England. Rathbone and Sons imported American cotton to Liverpool through the American Civil War.[9] The company continues to operate as the investment and wealth management firm Rathbone Brothers Plc.

The mooring at the Albert Dock: AB-001-013 is on the former location of the Rathbone warehouse. This mooring has been rented for the purpose of not being used.

1. Jehanne Wake, Kleinwort Benson: The History of Two Families in Banking (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 15.
2. Wake, 16.
3. Adam Bowett, “The Jamaica Trade: Gillow and the Use of Mahogany in the Eighteenth Century,” Regional Furniture 12 (1998): 22.
4. Wake, 16.
5. Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, 2nd ed. (1944; repr. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 52.
6. McDade, 1094.
7. Eleanor F. Rathbone, William Rathbone: A Memoir (London: Macmillan and Co. Limited, 1905), 11.
8. Wake, 15, 31.
9. Sheila Marriner, “Rathbones’ Trading Activities in the Middle of the Nineteenth Century,” Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire & Cheshire 108 (1956): 118.

Forthcoming Online Programmes

In conjunction with Cameron Rowland’s exhibition 3 & 4 Will. IV c. 73, the ICA presents events with Derica Shields on Friday 20 November and Saidiya Hartman on Wednesday 9 December.

Due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic and our concern for the safety of staff, artists and visitors, the ICA building remains temporarily closed, with these talks occurring online. They are free to attend, but booking is required through the ICA website. Speech to text captioning of both talks will be available.

For those interested in more information on 3 & 4 Will. IV c. 73, the screen reader compatible exhibition pamphlet is downloadable here.

Derica Shields

Cleave to the Black: Transcript of a Lecture in Three Parts

Friday 20 November, 7pm, online

In the years following the 1807 Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, the ‘failure’ of enslaved women to replenish the plantation population through childbirth became a subject of avid debate in the Houses of Parliament. Energised by their shared obsession with securing ‘natural increase’, the planter class joined with abolitionists to write open letters (William Wilberforce insisted that ‘planters set themselves in earnest to produce an increase by breeding’ as early as 1780), treatises, medical studies and, finally, legislation. The Amelioration Act of 1798 introduced anti-contraceptive measures and offered enslaved mothers monetary rewards for every live birth. Against these coercive pronatalist efforts, the birth rate on Britain’s West Indian plantations fell steadily until the passing of the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act when the birth rate sprang up, despite no material improvement in conditions for the formerly enslaved.

Derica Shields presents ‘Cleave to the Black: Transcript of a Lecture in Three Parts’, an experimental text based on historical, archival and herbal medicine research that attends to the abortive practices of enslaved herbalists, and to the radical embodied epistemologies and value systems that produced them. The text is from Shields’s forthcoming Bad Practice (Book Works, 2020), a book on black failure – what it permits, refuses, provides cover for and makes possible.

Saidiya Hartman

Wednesday 9 December, 7pm, online

The final event related to 3 & 4 Will. IV c. 73 with writer and cultural historian Saidiya Hartman. For forthcoming details on this talk and to book a place, please check the ICA website closer to the time.