Private Enterprise and the China Trade: Merchants and Markets in Europe, 1700-1750 (2022) (original) (raw)
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2016
Access to China and its wealth of manufactured goods was long sought by the European ‘monopoly Companies’, yet a direct and regular trade between Europe and the South China coast was only established around the turn of the eighteenth century. By focusing on the private trade and interloping activities of British-born China traders, this thesis shows how this branch of commerce took root and expanded within a transnational European trading arena between c.1720 to 1750. Interlopers, or free agents, I argue, played a highly integrative role for the development of European markets for Chinese goods and the networks of supply and capital that underpinned the trade. British-born Canton traders, who were operating in the smaller interloping East India Companies established close connections between Britain and the continent and between the different ‘national’ East India Companies. Private trade records, merchant letters, and East India Company materials form the large source base of this ...
Your beggarly commerce! Enlightenment European views of the China trade
This article studies the European confrontation with and conceptualization of the China trade in the early-modern world, and in particular during the Enlightenment. International trade was of central importance to Enlightenment European conceptions of wealth and European intellectuals and a broader audience of popular authors, merchants and interested parties hotly debated international trade policies. In these debates, China was largely portrayed as having a more cautious, restricted approach to foreign trade. This contrast between the optimism for trade and rejection from the Chinese led to a consistent expression of frustration in many European sources. The narrative of Chinese isolation, however, should not be removed from the wider context of eighteenth-century views on the China trade. Recent scholarship has questioned the dominance of the idea of an isolated Chinese state. Revisiting eighteenth-century sources in light of these new perspectives, it is clear that early-modern European discussion of the China trade reflected a wider variety of views than simple frustration with Chinese restrictions on trade. The paper concludes that the narrative of China’s isolation should be seen as only one part of a wider picture of the China trade and eighteenth -century observers were very much aware of the complex dynamics involved in the China trade.
Private Enterprise and the China Trade
2022
This book has developed out of a PhD thesis which I submitted to the University of Warwick, UK, in January 2016. In the process of revising and extending the thesis, I have incurred countless additional debts, the lion's share of which, however, fell onto the members of my family, whose patience, love, precious time, and support, helped to make it happen. Even though a great deal more work than planned has now gone into the process of preparing the book for publication, I believe that the intellectual settings in which I developed its core arguments, the Global History Centre at Warwick and the European University Institute in Florence, are still very much alive on these pages-as its people and past events have irrevocably shaped my outlook as a historian of global culture and commerce. Critical for this book's genesis was my privilege to participate in the ercfunded project Europe's Asian Centuries: Trading Eurasia 1600-1830 led by Maxine Berg (2010-2014), under whose supervision I conducted my research and learnt to think ambitiously and independently. Arguing the centrality of continental Europe for Britain's success in the China trade is all the more timely as present-day Britain is breaking away from the European Union in a move that is certainly sustained by a flawed understanding of its historical independence in commerce. The close exchange with Maxine, the post-docs on the erc project, Hanna Hodacs, Felicia Gottmann, Chris Nierstrasz, our museum consultant Helen Clifford (who was so much more than this for all of us), and associate Tim Davies was inspiring and reassuring. I thank each and every one of them for our discussions, their comments on early chapter drafts, and their kind support and encouragement. I also look back with fond memories to the conferences we organised or went to together, at Oxford, Leiden, Venice, and Yale, and fondly remember all the great historians we were able to meet through Maxine's support and activity. We definitely had the most wonderful and competent administrators: Anna Boneham and Sheilagh Holmes. Sheilagh in particular was of enormous help in the last stages of the PhD. Thank you all! The Warwick History Department and its associated Global History and Culture Centre offered an exciting programme of lectures and seminars that stimulated my thinking and brought me into contact with people I greatly admire, first and foremost David Arnold, Anne Gerritsen, Rebecca Earle, Giorgio Riello, and Margot Finn. The latter two acted as examiners and through their reports and our discussions played a key role in the preparation of this manuscript for publication. I am also happy to acknowledge the generous Meike von Brescius-978-90-04-50474-5
British Interlopers in the Canton Trade
BRILL eBooks, 2022
This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. chapter 1 British Interlopers in the Canton Trade A Group Portrait Biographical information on private traders operating in Canton, is more readily available for the latter part of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries.1 A vast historiography has studied the entry of the Americans and the gradual decline of the Canton system from the 1780s onwards.2 Indeed, it is the scholarly work on this later period that has overshadowed-and in some ways distorted-our understanding of an earlier time of commercial interaction. The eighteenth century was the era of the East India Companies, but it was also a time of enterprising individuals who traded from within and independently of these trading structures. The movers and shakers that feature so prominently in the history of the Atlantic economy and pre-colonial India existed for the China trade too. Yet, surprisingly, the European merchants and mariners who defined the formative period of the Canton trade have received little attention so far.3 This chapter demonstrates that while each China trader's life followed its own unique trajectory, there were important similarities, shared experiences and practices among British interlopers in the European East India Companies during the first half of the eighteenth century. Their businesses evolved individually, even if on similar lines. By tracing broader patterns and career paths, the following group portrait shows that the lives of these mobile merchants can provide a unique perspective on the opportunities and risks, as well as the conventions of a dynamic trade that captured the imagination of contemporaries like perhaps no other branch of European overseas commerce. 1 Notable exceptions include Jessica Hanser's in-depth study of three British 'country traders' active in Canton and between China and India in the second half of the eighteenth century. See Hanser, Mr. Smith Goes to China; Hellman, This House is not a Home; biographical sketches are presented in Schopp 'French Private Trade at Canton'. 2 Among recent studies, Fichter, So Great a Proffit; Van Dyke (ed.), Americans and Macao; Grace, Opium and Empire. 3 In exploring the illustrious careers and activities of various Chinese merchant dynasties active in the Canton trade, Paul A. Van Dyke has contributed a vast and growing oeuvre for understanding the key Chinese players in the early decades of the Canton system. See Van Dyke, The Canton Trade; idem, Merchants of Canton and Macao.
Selling India and China in Eighteenth-Century Paris
Goods from the East, 1600-1800, 2015
In this chapter, I endeavour to show how Parisian shopkeepers played a crucial role in the diffusion of 'oriental' goods on the domestic market. This means understanding how productive innovation, consumption and distribution were connected. One way of understanding this is to examine how shopkeepers advertised their 'new' products (which sometimes were neither new nor genuine) to a broad range of clients. Another way is to track goods in their account books. Shopkeepers, as intermediaries between producers and consumers, were perhaps centre-stage among market actors-as important as large trading companies, such as the Company of the Indies. 1 And Paris was quite a good stage. Since the Middle Ages, the French capital has been one of the major centres of economic activity in Europe. It was, in the eighteenth century, a key place in the world luxury market, producing and marketing silverware and jewellery, fine timepieces, book bindings, textiles and so on. 2 Like London, Paris was celebrated for its high concentration of artists and craftsmen. Trade in Paris consists particularly of useful, fashionable and pleasant objects, such as furniture, jewellery, timepieces, bronzes, gilding, porcelain, and a mass of other precious objects that we shall describe as accurately as possible 3 Carolyn Sargentson and Guillaume Glorieux have shown how diverse suppliers for individual consumers were, and how hundreds of objects were piled up in the most famous haberdasheries, such as Gersaint, Lazare Duvaux, Granchez, and Poirier & Daguerre. 4 Their commercial success depended on their ability to meet different customers' expectations or needs, and to react quickly and flexibly to