James Maury's Britain

This map represents some of the correspondents of James Maury, first American consul in Liverpool (1790–1830). The yellow marker is Liverpool, where consul James Maury lived and worked for over forty years. The blue markers are business associates. Red markers are family members, Maury's in-laws after his marriage to Margaret Rutson in 1796.


I am curious how far Maury's business network correlates to other American merchants operating in Britain, particular those not based in London. Most of his business correspondence thus far (1784-1797) seems to be centered in Liverpool and London. Are letters written from places like Ripon and Epsom simply London men enjoying a holiday? Once I have more data, I'll have a better sense of who these geographical outliers were and just how important they were to Maury.

Eventually I expect to have enough data about the Maurys' lives in Liverpool to do a street-level map of where they lived, worked, and played. I know that consul Maury was a member of the Liverpool Athenaeum and the family lived for years at 4 Rodney Street. I do not where the children went to grammar school or the headquarters (if there were any) of the American Chamber of Commerce in Liverpool, which Mr. Maury helped establish in 1801. I would, of course, want to find high-quality historic maps of Liverpool to better understand the town as the Maurys saw it.

The historic map image is Britain drawn by Herman Moll (d. 1732), from the Lawrence H. Slaughter Collection of English maps, charts, globes, books and atlases at the New York Public Library. Warped using NYPL's MapWarper. The layering of maps and points made possible by a tutorial by Laura O'Hara. See Google Maps JavaScript API v3 for additional documentation.