Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface. Liverpool: language, culture and history
- 1 The sea, slavery and strangers: observations on the making of early modern Liverpool and its culture
- 2 Language in Liverpool: the received history and an alternative thesis
- 3 Language and a sense of place: the beginnings of ‘Scouse’
- 4 Frank Shaw and the founding of the ‘Scouse industry’
- 5 What is ‘Scouse’? Historical and theoretical issues
- 6 Liverpools: places, histories, differences
- Appendix Stories of words: naming the place, naming the people
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - The sea, slavery and strangers: observations on the making of early modern Liverpool and its culture
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface. Liverpool: language, culture and history
- 1 The sea, slavery and strangers: observations on the making of early modern Liverpool and its culture
- 2 Language in Liverpool: the received history and an alternative thesis
- 3 Language and a sense of place: the beginnings of ‘Scouse’
- 4 Frank Shaw and the founding of the ‘Scouse industry’
- 5 What is ‘Scouse’? Historical and theoretical issues
- 6 Liverpools: places, histories, differences
- Appendix Stories of words: naming the place, naming the people
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
To which is Liverpool most indebted for its present commercial importance, the salt trade, the African trade or the admission of strangers? (Title of one of Thomas Banner's Great Room Debates, late eighteenth century)
The aim of this chapter will be to lay the groundwork for the analysis of various aspects of language in Liverpool that will be the central concern of this book. To do this, it will be helpful to begin by outlining how early observers made sense of the enormous economic, social and cultural changes that took place in Liverpool in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Needless to say, the intention is not to render an exhaustive account of the history itself (an impossibility given the space constraints), but to present a sketch of responses to the alterations brought about by the development of the town as a major site of national and global trade and commerce. Of course certain aspects of Liverpool's history are familiar; even the most rudimentary account will draw attention to the town's role in the slave trade and its function as one of the most important centres of immigration and emigration. Less well-known, however, are the ways in which contemporary historians and commentators interpreted and evaluated the results of the change in the town's long-standing status from relatively minor backwater (except in times of war) to its role as a international port that trafficked the oceans. Thus the focus in this first chapter will be on the critical narratives produced by early commentators on the emergence of modern Liverpool. Of particular interest in these first historical accounts is the apparent sense of the town as not just an economic force within the Atlantic and indeed world systems of commerce, but as a location that was both typical and distinctive in relation to the political and cultural effects that the developments of mercantile capitalism and industrialization brought about. For in many respects Liverpool was a place like many others in Britain at this time: it was subject to the consequences of changes in patterns of capital accumulation and distribution, technological developments and their uses, and demographic shifts of an extent previously unknown.
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- ScouseA Social and Cultural History, pp. 1 - 14Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2012