Search Results

This chapter elaborates on the anecdotal evidence of the previous chapter. It includes a study of members of the Liverpool Cotton Brokers’ Association and how they operated. The most powerful factions in Britain’s raw cotton trade were the selling brokers and the bankers. This is corroborated by a study of the B Lists of the customs Bills of Entry for Liverpool, which provide a complete inventory of who received every consignment into the port. All cotton consignments for 1860 and 1864 have been tabulated. Data are produced which show the changes wrought by the civil war to cotton shipments, and which prove that 91 per cent of LCBA members were direct recipients of cotton from Liverpool docks. This is the final blow to the notion that there was a scrupulous dividing line between buying and selling brokers. Almost all cotton brokers were traders, but not necessarily successful ones. The chapter concludes with an account of some of the bankruptcies and suggests that Thomas Ellison knowingly falsified the historical record.

This chapter describes how the raw cotton trade was financed, before showing that – despite a drastically reduced volume – the vast rise in price meant that the value of raw cotton imports was greater than at any time in the 19th century and, in terms of the cotton traded, possibly the greatest ever. The implications for the earnings of the cotton brokers are demonstrated, together with the fury in Manchester that Liverpool was enriching itself while the rest of the industry starved. Two elements of Thomas Ellison’s etiquette are considered: that cotton brokers were not simultaneously buying and selling brokers, and that they did not trade cotton on their own account. Evidence is produced to suggest that both contentions are false. The chapter shows how cotton speculation infested the market during the war, but also how the spinners were implicated in it themselves. It concludes with the conflict that erupted towards the end of the war between the Liverpool Cotton Brokers’ Association and the Cotton Spinners’ Association, led by Hugh Mason.

This chapter describes the objectives of the book. No full-length work exists on the crisis in the British cotton trade during the American Civil War, and the only substantial study of the raw cotton market in Liverpool was made by Thomas Ellison 130 years ago. The book remedies these omissions. It has two objectives. First, to establish the factual record of Britain’s raw cotton supply during the civil war. Second, to examine the impact of the civil war on Liverpool, and on the operation of the raw cotton trade there, with specific reference to the role of the cotton brokers. The chapter discusses the existing historiography and its deficiencies, and describes the primary sources that underpin this study. It establishes the crucial, and neglected, importance of price to the trade in raw cotton.