The Story of Bryan Blundell
The Slave Trader: The Story of Bryan Blundell – Master Mariner, Philanthropist and Slave Trader
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. Rather than being simply a biography, the book challenges our understanding of Britain's past, examining the complex legacy of one of Liverpool's most influential early citizens and the moral questions surrounding the transatlantic slave trade.
Buy from Pen & SwordHardback · Pen & Sword History · Published 30 August 2026 · ISBN 9781036138035
Also available from Waterstones and all good bookshops.
The sea journal
At the heart of the book is Blundell's own remarkable sea journal, preserved in the Lancashire Archives: a practical working document charting his rise from cabin boy to master mariner, ship owner and merchant. He first crossed the Atlantic in 1687, aged twelve, aboard the Amity; by his early twenties he was master of his own vessel. The journal records not only his professional advancement but the extraordinary dangers faced by merchant seamen of the period, and, scattered among its matter-of-fact entries, moments of profound personal loss that reveal a very different side to the man.
The preacher's warning
In 1711, six years before Blundell first invested in the slave trade, the Nonconformist minister Christopher Bassnett preached a sermon to him warning of the moral and spiritual dangers that accompanied the pursuit of wealth. Knowing what Liverpool would later become, and the role Blundell would go on to play in the Atlantic slave trade, those words feel remarkably prescient. They also challenge the assumption that everyone at the time accepted the trade without question. Here was a contemporary voice urging caution, and Blundell chose his path anyway. The question that drives the book is simply: why?
The dark side
There is a dark side to this story. Blundell's wealth, the wealth that built the Blue Coat School and made him twice Mayor of Liverpool, was bound to the transatlantic slave trade. He began by shipping sugar and tobacco produced by enslaved labour, and went on to invest directly in slaving voyages. The book confronts that involvement head-on: the philanthropist and the slave trader were the same man, and understanding how that could be is essential to understanding Liverpool, and Britain, in the eighteenth century.
A family story
What began as an attempt to solve the mystery of a 1595 Breeches Bible led the author to the discovery that Bryan Blundell was his direct ancestor, and that he was related to Christopher Bassnett too: the preacher and the slave trader, united in one family tree. Years of historical and genealogical research culminated in this book.