In the early summer of 1754, Bryan Blundell stood at Liverpool's bustling waterfront, a man whose life traced the town's rise from market town to maritime powerhouse. He had first crossed the Atlantic in 1687, a twelve-year-old cabin boy aboard the Amity. He rose to master mariner, ship owner, merchant, and twice Mayor of Liverpool; he co-founded the Blue Coat School and served it devotedly for the rest of his life. And his fortune was bound to the transatlantic slave trade.
The Slave Trader is more than a biography. Drawing on Blundell's own remarkable sea journal, it examines the complex legacy of one of Liverpool's most influential early citizens, the philanthropy and the brutality together, and the moral questions that his story still poses about Britain's past.
For the author the story is also personal: Bryan Blundell is a direct ancestor, and the book grew out of years of family history research that began with a mysterious 1595 Breeches Bible.