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Cotton
Trade
Liverpool has been shaped by the many people and
places involved in the cotton trade. Liverpool is a
cosmopolitan city and the global nature of the cotton trade contributed to
this. There were brokers from all over the world based here in the 19th
century, including Germany,
Prussia, Russia, Greece, the
USA and India.
Many
of Liverpool’s famous names were made from cotton,
including the Rathbones and the Holts. Wealthy cotton merchants and brokers who
lived in the finest houses.
The
first American cotton was unloaded in Liverpool in 1784.
There were only eight bags. Less than forty years later, half a million bales
were arriving each year from America..
The
finished goods from Lancashire mills were also exported from Liverpool, accounting
for almost half of the total exports in 1901.
Exchange FlagsThe
cotton merchants and brokers met on Exchange Flags to do their buying and
selling.
In
1808, an Exchange Building opened, but
while cotton brokers took offices there, they preferred to conduct their
business in the open square.
The
cotton market continued to meet out of doors until the 1880s. The Flags were a
place to meet and swap information about the cotton market. New technology like
the telegraph and telephone played a major part in moving the cotton men
indoors.
A
purpose-built Cotton Exchange was commissioned and completed in 1906. This was
a state of the art building, with telephones and direct cables to the New York,
Bremen and Bombay cotton
exchanges.
Liverpool acted as a central
clearing house and market for USA raw cotton by importing all supplies and then
re-exporting to other countries that raw cotton not required by the English
market.
The Cotton Trade in Liverpool is now
confined to international brokerage.