Liverpool’s Local Tints: Drowning Memory and ‘Maritimising’ Slavery in a Seaport City

The national public memory of Britain’s involvement in transatlantic slavery has been framed by a maritime-themed lens; it is confined to the activities and movements of ships across the Atlantic Ocean, having broken memorial ties with more land-based operations and consequences. John Beech has argued that this maritimisation of slavery, as he terms it, has placed a commemorative focus on the transatlantic slavetrade, as opposed to enslavement itself, obscuring broader histories of the slavery business, and indeed of its wider economic, social and cultural impacts and legacies on British soil.³ Much of the weight of Beech’s maritimisation argument rests