Docks after Dockwork
This is the Amsterdam book launch of Sam Wetherell’s award-winning book, Liverpool and the Unmaking of Britain (Bloomsbury, 2025). The book explores deindustrialization, racial divides, decolonisation, and the impact of the built environment on society, and offers new ways to think about port cities: from Rotterdam to Marseille, from Detroit to Baltimore.
Few cities in the world are as famous as Liverpool, the home of the modern world’s most celebrated rock group and of a legendary football team. The city is equally notorious for its poverty, its ethnic and racial divides and, above all, its decline. For Liverpool was once a major port, growing rich on slavery, on trade with the Americas and the British Empire’s outposts in Africa and Asia. In the 1980s, it was described as ‘obsolete’. Yet the city fights on.
Sam Wetherell’s book is an epic history of Liverpool since the Second World War. It is a story of vast docklands shrinking and eventually vanishing when corporations discovered they could 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 in 1981. It is the story of a city fighting against a descent into obsolescence.
During this presentation, the panel will reflect on the main themes of the book: racism, urbanism, and post-imperial port cities – with crucial comparisons between British and Dutch case studies.
About the speakers:
Dr. Sam Wetherell is a senior lecturer in the history of Britian and the World at the University of York. He writes about the history of cities, political economy, and culture. His first book Foundations (Princeton, 2020) is about the transformation of the British built environment in the twentieth century, focusing on housing, consumption and patterns of work. Before teaching at York, Wetherell completed his PhD at UC Berkely and worked as a visiting professor at Columbia University. Alongside his academic publications, he writes for Time Magazine, The Outline, Tribune, Renewal, Jacobin, Gawker and The Blizzard and about urban planning, politics, the economy and football.
Dr. Alex Drace-Francis is Associate Professor of Modern European Cultural History at the European Studies program of the University of Amsterdam. Drace-Francis has published widely on the modern social and cultural history of Romania and southeastern Europe, including topics such as literacy, travel, food and cultural identities in a comparative European context. He has also lived in Merseyside for over two decades and formerly taught modern history at the University of Liverpool.
Dr. Tim Verlaan is an Assistant Professor in Urban History at the History Department of the University of Amsterdam. He is currently writing a monograph about Amsterdam during the late twentieth century, examining how and why the city survived the urban crisis of the 1970s. His most recent research focuses on migration in post-war Rotterdam and the histories of gentrification, and the recent rise of solo living. Verlaan is an associate editor of Urban History, founding member of Failed Architecture, and a member of the supervisory board at the Amsterdam Museum.
Dr. Nawal Mustafa is an Assistant Professor in Black Studies, Critical Race Studies, and Indigenous Studies within the Cultural Studies department at the University of Amsterdam. She specializes in histories of slavery, race, and migration in the Dutch and British empire. Her research on Britian focused on the regulation of interracialised intimacy in the UK following World War II. Alongside her academic roles, Mustafa also serves as a strategic legal advisor at PILP, a human rights law firm and NGO based in Amsterdam.
Dr. Alma Igra is an Assistant Professor of European History at the University of Amsterdam, specializing in environmental history, the British empire, and the history of science and technology. She is completing a monograph on British global networks in nutrition studies (The Lion’s Share, U Chicago Press 2026). Alongside academic writing, she writes about food, environmental politics, literature, science, and Taylor Swift for publications including The LA Review of Books, World Literature Today, The Point, and Haz’man Haze.
