About The Liverpool Mercantile Database

The Project

The Liverpool Mercantile Project was a huge undertaking, funded by the Leverhulme Trust and carried out by a team of researchers at the University of Liverpool under the direction of the principal investigator, Professor Robert Lee. Professor Lee, now sadly deceased, was a former director of the Centre for Port and Maritime History (CPMH) and it was his wish that the database, which was created as part of the project, be donated to CPMH at LJMU. Funding was raised to convert the database into this online resource, including a generous donation by Andrew Douglas, a former University of Liverpool student.

The Database

The Liverpool Mercantile Database is a relational database incorporating nominative information from a range of sources between the mid-nineteenth century and 1914. The database consists of approximately 350,000 records, of which 170,000 derive directly from five principal sources, including census returns, directories, club and associational records. The remainder represent relationships between the different records. The database covers almost 27,000 members of Liverpool’s business community who traded in 15,883 firms, partnerships or companies. It was designed to generate information on the changing size and composition of Liverpool’s merchant community, in terms of the development of specific trades, as well as the spatial origins, associational profile, residential location, denominational affiliation, family and household composition, and relative wealth of individual members. The database offers a unique means of examining in detail processes of compositional and structural change within the merchant community of Liverpool (and on Merseyside more widely).

Our Sources

The principal sources are as follows:

1. Gore's Liverpool Street Directories at ten-year intervals (1882, 1892 etc.), including data from both the alphabetical sections and the lists of classified trades.
2. The decennial census returns between 1851 and 1901 (inclusive).
3. Nominative data relating to merchants involved in local associations, clubs, societies, schools and religious communities, including the Liverpool Athenaeum, the Wellington Club, the YZ Club, the Royal Liverpool Golf Club, the Royal Mersey Yacht Club, the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, and the Liverpool Philomathic Society. Data was also included from the Merchants' Lodge, the only Freemason establishment where merchants represented 25 per cent of the total membership.

Publications

Members of the research team at the University of Liverpool published an edited collection which used the Liverpool Mercantile Database:

Lee, Robert (ed.) Networks of Interest and Power: Business, Culture and Identity in Liverpool's Merchant Community, c.1800 to 1914 (London: Routledge) 2023, pp. 522.

For LJMU members, the book is available at Aldham Robarts Library and is also available open access through your institutional login here, it is otherwise available to order in hardback or download in eBook format here.