His career straddled commerce, civic leadership, and the transatlantic slave trade — a combination that was unremarkable by the standards of Liverpool's merchant class but no less significant for it. Staniforth participated in the forced transport of African people across the Atlantic alongside his father, operating within one of the most active slave-trading ports in Britain during the trade's final decades. That he also served as Mayor of Liverpool illustrates how deeply the trade was embedded in the city's institutional life.