Author Description

Liverpool has been shaped by its historic dependence on ships and seaborne trade to an extent unequalled anywhere else in Britain. This history has left its birthmark on the present. In a unique analytical essay blending economic and social history with sociology, Tony Lane shows how the structures and the everyday life experiences of shipowners and seafarers, merchants and dockers have together produced a city with a distinctive social character. The city’s dependence on shipping and commerce has ended, but it passing is recent enough for it still to exert a powerful influence and give this remarkable city a "feel" of being noticeably different from anywhere else in England. This book is a second fully revised and updated edition of Tony Lane’s Liverpool: Gateway of Empire (Lawrence and Wishart, 1987).