London

In 1450 London already had a thousand years of history as a port. England's capital, it had benefited from its inland site on the tidal river Thames, within easy reach of the European continent and with road and sea transport links to the rest of the country. London was ideally placed to handle cloth and wool, which dominated England's late medieval export trade. London linked particularly with Antwerp, the then-dynamic hub of northern Europe's trade, which supplied in return a mix of foodstuffs, raw materials, cheap consumer goods, and luxuries. An English consortium, the Merchant Adventurers, controlled the cross-channel route, but the complex network of credit and connection underpinning London's wider trade depended much on foreign merchants and financiers. English merchants seemingly lacked comparable business sophistication and enterprise.

Under Elizabeth I (1533–1603) and James I (1566–1625) London began to come into its own as a commercial city. With the closure of Antwerp (1568) and religious strife on the Continent, London was well placed to become the new European entrepôt and to exploit opportunities across the Atlantic and in the East. London-based chartered companies, including the East India Company (1600) and the Virginia Company (1606), financed overseas ventures. Such enterprise forged strong links in London between government, finance, trade, and shipping—connections further strengthened by eighteenth-century colonial expansion. By 1700 London handled over two-thirds of England's imports, four-fifths of its exports, and an even greater share of re-exports. Over the following century its overseas trade tripled. Such growth was not just a consequence of a widening international economy. Measured by the standards of the day, London was a huge city, approaching a million inhabitants in 1800. As well as its developing demand for the new luxuries, sugar, tea, and tobacco, the metropolis provided a ready market for basic foodstuffs, wines, timber, tallow, and other overseas products. By the nineteenth century London's earlier concentration on the export of domestic textile products had given way to a specialization in imports for its own consumers, or for transhipment to other parts of Britain or abroad.

These developments were linked to others. Markets and profit provided the motive for trade, but ships provided the means. London merchants invested in shipping, much of which was built in Thames shipyards. Commerce stimulated merchant banking, and the acceptance of bills of exchange and other credit instruments as a way of doing business. A coffeehouse where those with interests in trade gathered to network gave its name to Lloyd's, a society of underwriters insuring ships and cargoes which became the world's largest insurance market; to Lloyd's Register (1784), which classified vessels; and to a newspaper, Lloyd's List (1692), which provided marine intelligence. Another coffeehouse produced the Baltic Exchange (1744) shipping market. Such institutions, together with a number of formal and informal commercial associations, gave to London's business community–the City–a central presence in the nation's financial and political life. Its influence was to persist into the twenty-first century.

In the eighteenth century London remained a river port close to the commercial heart of the capital, but as trade grew it became congested and inadequate. In the early 1800s several privately owned docks catering for foreign trades were opened, followed later in the century by more docks in response to the needs of steam shipping for larger and deeper berths. Along with extra water space came the lining of the docks and river with warehouses and transit sheds housing every conceivable article of world trade, but particularly the products of the British Empire. All these facilities remained in the hands of competing private businesses until financial problems transferred ownership to a public body, the Port of London Authority (1908).

These developments physically extended operations beyond the ancient port site close to the center of London. Serving the needs of the world's largest consumer market, food-processing industries such as sugar refining and flour milling took root along the Thames waterfront. These, together with the many thousands of casually employed manual laborers needed to handle cargoes, ensured that trade continued to shape London's development. Nevertheless, London's diverse, multifaceted economy and its role as the center of government meant that it had ceased to be a port city. Rather, it was a metropolis with a port.

Overseas trade continued to shape the fortunes of the City of London, but by the late nineteenth century the nature of the connection was altering. Its cluster of firms providing maritime services benefited directly from the trading links with the empire and from the growth of the international economy. The City became the world's leading financial center. What had begun as a sector primarily servicing the trade and shipping of London, and then of the country as a whole, now provided banking, brokerage, insurance, and legal services to the rest of the world. The independent strength of London's maritime service sector was demonstrated in the late twentieth century, when it survived both the demise of the port of London and the decline of the United Kingdom's merchant fleet.

London's established pattern of overseas trade endured until the late twentieth century, and it continued to be the greatest warehousing center in the world, despite some loss of transhipment business to Continental ports. Having made a remarkable recovery from the damage of World War II, London's postwar prospects seemed assured, but in the 1970s the effects of decolonization, Britain's entry to the European Economic Community, and containerization of cargoes led to loss of business and closure of London's docks. Many miles inland and hemmed in by a great metropolis, they were no match for less unionized British ports, or for container facilities downriver at Tilbury, which took over as the new, privatized port for London. London's derelict former docklands were redeveloped into office space and quality housing, but, although London itself was no longer a center for overseas trade, its continued role as the leading supplier of services to world shipping ensured that the historic link with trade was not entirely lost.

SEE ALSO Agriculture; Banking; Bristol; Cargoes, Freight; Cargoes, Passenger; Chambers of Commerce; Containerization; Empire, British; Ethnic Groups, Huguenots; Ethnic Groups, Jews; Finance, Credit and Money Lending; Finance, Insurance; Free Ports; Glasgow; Harbors;Liverpool;Lloyd's of London;Markets, Stock;Petroleum;Port Cities;Slavery and the African Slave Trade;United Kingdom.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Beier, A. L., and Finlay, Roger. London 1500–1700: The Making of the Metropolis. London: Longman, 1986.

Bird, J. H. The Geography of the Port of London. London: Hutchinson, 1957.

Corporation of the City of London. Financial Services Clustering and Its Significance for London. London: Corporation of the City of London, 2003.

Kynaston, David. The City of London, Vol. 1: A World of Its Own, 1815–1890. London: Chatto and Windus, 1994.

McCusker, John J. "The Early History of Lloyd's List." Historical Research: The Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 64 (October 1991): 427–431.

Porter, Roy. London: A Social History. London: Penguin Books, 1994.

Sarah Palmer