Henry Smithers

Henry Smithers (Bapt. 7 August 1762 - 8 April 1828, Edge Hill, Lancashire) was an English shipowner based in Southwark, London. He was an active radical and abolitionist. He wrote poetry and a number of books on commerce and economics.

Number of slavers sailing from Liverpool 1709-1804

Henry was the son of Joseph Smithers and Martha (née Keene).[1] With Henry Keene he ran a coal merchants business in Clink Street.[1]

He was proposed for membership of the Society for Constitutional Information by Joseph Towers.[1] He was also active in the Revolution Society, serving as both steward (1788) and secretary (1789). He was a founding member of the Society of Ship-Owners of Great Britain in 1802.[2]:250 He went into business with his son, John Hampden Smithers, but they were declared bankrupt in 1815.[1]

Smithers was an abolitionist and expressed these sentiments in his account of Liverpool, providing statistics on the increase in the slave trade during the eighteenth century.[3]

Works
  • (1819) Observations Made During a Residence in Brussels Brussels: Self published
  • (1825) Liverpool, its commerce, statistics, and institutions; with a history of the cotton trade, Liverpool: Thomas Kaye

References
  1. Pope, Ed. "Smithers". Ed Pope History. Ed Pope. Retrieved 25 January 2020.
  2. Clarke, James Stanier; McArthur, John, eds. (2010). The Naval Chronicle: Volume 8, July-December 1802: Containing a General and Biographical History of the Royal Navy of the United Kingdom with a Variety of Original Papers on Nautical Subjects. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-108-01847-0.
  3. "Account of the Liverpool slave trade". The British Library. British Library. Retrieved 25 January 2020.
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