The Port of Liverpool handles more container trade with the United States than any other port in the UK and now also serves more than 100 other non-EU destinations, from China to Africa and the Middle East, and from Australia to South America. Liverpool has been an important port since the seventeenth century, when the city began to import West Indian sugar and Virginian tobacco, exporting Lancashire textiles in return.In Liverpool Docks Through Time, a wide collection of photographs guides the reader from the early years through the massive expansion of the nineteenth century and the reconstruction that followed the Second World War to the new patterns of trade that emerged later in the twentieth century and up to the present day. It covers everything from White Star ocean liners to the tugs of the modern docks and from hard-working freighters to restored sailing ships.