Liverpool is a city of historical and contemporary paradox. In the global imagination, Liverpool is associated with the world famous Albert Dock and the Beatles. While it occupied a place of significance in the national imagination of Britain as the 2008 European Capital of Culture, which was aimed at economic regeneration through the arts to promote its image as a European city ‘representing Britain’, earlier in August 2007 it gained prominence in national heritage discourse when the International Museum of Slavery opened on the International Day for Remembrance of the Slave Trade and Abolition.
The story of Liverpool is quintessentially one of the ongoing tension between looking forward, but in so doing having constantly to look backward to embrace its ghosts. For instance, the Liverpool Football club has in recent years been associated with growing racial intolerance in the city. Yet in 1999, Liverpool City Council made a formal apology for the slave trade and in 2005 the city was traumatized by the racially motivated pre-meditated axe-murder of the black British student, Anthony Walker, by two white youths in Merseyside. This major city, steeped in an early black African and Asian presence, is ironically no longer the former ‘cosmopolitan’ hub that once it was.
In this historical reappraisal of Liverpool, leading historian Belchem provides an in-depth scholarly treatment of empire ‘coming home’ and its historical context and perspective that makes a compelling argument on the dangers of ethnic essentialism, cultural purity and biological racism, thereby also questioning the fundamental contemporary notions of ‘Britishness’. In order to understand racialized relations in present-day Britain, one has to have an understanding of how empire ‘came home’. The political scientist Mahmood Mamdani makes a similar point that in order to appreciate racialized relations in the ‘post colony’ one has to understand how colonialists ruled.
How did it happen that the once ‘racially’ diverse and ‘multicultural’ Liverpool ended up as ‘horrifically’ racist in the aftermath of the Toxteth riots of 1981 and as one of the least ‘ethnically varied’ cities in Britain? In attempting to answer this question in a variety of ways, Belchem discusses how, for instance, the First Colonial Products Exhibition of 1904 at the Liverpool Museum put on exhibition the ‘exotic’, where white people's artefacts occupied pride of place while those of ‘black’ people were housed in the basement and labelled ‘ethnographical collections of barbaric races’ and ‘arts and crafts of primitive races’. The ghostly influence of this exhibition (impacting as ongoing virtual archive in everyday public consciousness) on present-day racism in Liverpool, is ever present.
In the process of troubling certainties and assumptions for the reader through the use of the archive, Belchem makes detailed use of primary sources, including parliamentary papers and official reports. Full biographical details of secondary materials consulted are given in the footnotes. Primary sources include extensive use of records and reports in Colonial Office, Home Office, Parliamentary Papers and Official Reports and makes revelatory reading in its exposure of truths and myths on ‘race’ and ‘race relations’ in Britain.
Powerful memories of the slave trade continue in present-day Liverpool as ‘community relations’ continue to fail. Belchem makes the point that ‘race relations’ found its way into post-World War II Britain (with prejudice towards black people escalating particularly after the empire, Windrush arriving in June 1948). One cannot help but observe that ‘race relations’ was already a concept promoted by British missionaries in colonies like South Africa a couple of decades before in the context of increasingly economically polarized racialized groups. Groups in Britain, not previously defined as ‘races’, came to be identified similarly in this way. This in-depth archival study on Liverpool's ‘race relations in the twentieth century’ successfully challenges the orthodox chronology of ‘race relations’. Belchem acknowledges the work and contributions of the ‘doyen of black Liverpool family history’, Ray Costello, and of Dorothy Kuya as a central figure as community relations officer in the 1970s. Kuya led the campaign to expose and expunge racial bias from children's literature. The work also traces the historical making of the stereotyped troubled and delinquent ‘half caste’ youth (the products of mixed marriages in Britain); the roots of the trouble of black youth with the police of becoming ‘the problem’ and the formation of militant black identities amongst youth due to over policing in black areas, unfair arrests, harassment and police violence.
This work makes an engaging study with its variety of interesting illustrations and photographs from the archive, such as of John Archer (born in Liverpool), the first black mayor in Battersea, London, in 1913, who has now recently been recognized for inclusion in the ‘Great Britons’ postage stamp issued by the Royal Mail.
The strength of this book is its rich archival material and the power it gives to the interested scholar to conduct further research. In a sense, it is a major work which effectively uses the power of the archive to promote justice for marginalized black communities in racialized Britain. A detailed archival study with comprehensive, much detailed archival notes and further suggested biography and references on each chapter, this major work is invaluable for any scholar on urban black youth and identity, black British history and the demographic history of British slave trade ports.
Jacques Derrida argued that the archive produces more archive; that the archive is never closed, it opens out of the future; that nothing is therefore more troubled and more troubling than the archive. This is an indispensable book to educate and inform those who are charged with the responsibility to build peaceful ‘community relations’ in Britain.
