FOR ALL ITS COSMOPOLITAN and imperial pretensions, the great Victorian seaport of Liverpool was often depicted and perceived as ‘Irish’. The self-proclaimed second city of empire, Liverpool was also known as the capital of Ireland in England, in A.M. Sullivan's words, ‘a piece cut off from the old sod itself’. By the early years of the twentieth century, Liverpool's climacteric, the numbers of Irish and Catholics, regarded as synonymous terms at the time, was calculated at up to 200,000: roughly one-third of the population. This sizeable presence notwithstanding, there is as yet no full-scale history of the Liverpool-Irish and their distinctive hyphenated identity. Studies abound of the sufferings and tensions of the Famine influx from Ireland in the late 1840s, offering a short-term ‘crisis’ perspective on such issues as health, housing, welfare, crime and sectarian violence in this main port of entry. There is an urgent need for a longer-term assessment of crisis, continuity and change as the Liverpool-Irish, the most significant ‘minority’ community in pre-multi-cultural Britain, adjusted to what T.P. O'Connor described as their ‘curious middle place’.

The chronological boundaries adopted here are political: from the Act of Union to the supposed ‘final settlement’ between Britain and Eire in the late 1930s, a time-span which highlights the constitutional complexities, confusion and controversy over the status of Irish migrants first within the United Kingdom and then as a ‘free state’ dominion with the British Empire. Attitudes towards the Irish tended to harden at times of political crisis and tension, a variable not entirely independent, however, of fluctuations in the trade cycle and labour market. The economic consequences of the Act of Union became apparent once free trade, implemented in phases, took full (and devastating) effect in the 1820s: domestic industries went into rapid decline; Ireland became a country exporting food and cheap labour. A fortuitous conjuncture, transport developments facilitated the mass migration outflow, a major advance in global communications ignored by sociologists who date and attribute transnationalism to the late-twentieth-century advent of cheap air travel. With the introduction of steam navigation in the 1820s, fares fell sharply for the passage across the Irish Sea and, if desired, for subsequent trans-shipment on the new ‘Atlantic ferry’. Passenger traffic contributed much to Liverpool's growth and prosperity in the nineteenth century as it sought new markets and a re-branded ‘cosmopolitan’ image following abolition of the infamous slave trade in 1807.