Liverpool and the Unmaking of Britain
This is a history of Liverpool since the Second World War. It is a story of vast docklands shrinking and eventually vanishing when corporations discovered they should shift goods in containers and dispense with human workers, of industries like car manufacturing mushrooming and disappearing, of huge new suburbs being built and neglected. It is a moving and horrifying narrative of casual racism - Chinese sailors deported en masse in the aftermath of the war, systematic discrimination against the city's Black population - and of resistance, culminating in the Toxteth riots of 1981. The de-industrialisation of the city under Margaret Thatcher's government, the various attempts to renew and gentrify the devastated waterfront, and the bizarre interlude of Militant control of the local council are all described unforgettably by Wetherell.
Liverpool becomes a prism through which recent British history is brought into a new focus. Sam Wetherell sharply criticises the obscenity of accepting human and urban 'obsolescence'. In his words, his book is 'also the history of the former shipbuilding economies of the north-east of England and the west of Scotland, the former coal-mining communities of South Wales, Yorkshire and the Midlands and the former car-making towns of Coventry and Luton. It is the story of Rotterdam, Marseille, Detroit, Baltimore and West Virginia'.
It is available to order here.
Reviews and publicity:
Karl Whitney, “Bracing and provocative,” The Financial Times
Joe Moran, “Wetherell’s careful research reveals neglected histories that escape clichéd framings of our national past.” Times Literary Supplement
Emily Baughan, “The major intervention made by Wetherell’s Liverpool and the Unmaking of Britain, a pacy and compassionate ode to Merseyside, is to flip our chronology: Liverpool is not a relic, the book argues, but a prophecy.” Boston Review
John Merrick, “[A] fascinating and quietly iconoclastic book,” History Today
A. J. Lees, “Wetherell believes that Liverpool’s recent past foreshadowed the challenges now facing the nation as a whole – including the proliferation of casual labour and low- paid jobs – just as the collapse of Detroit was a harbinger of the deindustrialisation of America in general.” Literary Review
“Liverpool and the Worldmakers,” Extended extract published in The New European
Chris Moss, “Engaging and enlightening… a radical history that brings marginalised stories and overlooked people and agencies to the centre” The Morning Star
Wetherell cleverly projects a diagnosis for Britain's post-industrial decline through the prism of Liverpool's hidden social histories. - Stephen McGann
Staggeringly good... the most thoughtful and creative history of modern Britain for a long, long time. - Bill Schwarz
This book is a persuasive argument for Liverpool as a lens through which to understand British history. The trajectory of this extraordinary port city, as a major node in the ignominious networks of slave trade and colonial commerce, a palimpsest of immigrant communities including the oldest Irish, Black and Chinese populations in England, a site of working-class revolt, a testing ground for Thatcherite policies, and a troubling example of 'managed' obsolescence. Wetherell demands that we see Liverpool as a prophecy of what might befall us all in Britain. - Laleh Khalili, author of Sinews of War and Trade
It is not an overstatement to say that this book will change the way we think about the history of modern Britain. - Emily Baughan, author of Saving the Children and 2024 BBC New Generation Thinker
Liverpool becomes an original and compelling lens through which Sam Wetherell reassesses our industrial, maritime and social history, and provides an arresting account of Britain’s decline and fall. - Will Hutton, author of This Time No Mistakes
In his absorbing and richly detailed new book, Sam Wetherell tells a Liverpool story which highlights Merseyside’s unique qualities while at the same time showing how the recent past of one particular city might foretell the future of Britain as a whole. - Alan Allport, author of Britain at Bay
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