What was the long term consequence of the creation of the Chinese empire between 1680 and 1760?

When Vasco da Gama sailed around the Cape of Good Hope to reach India in 1497–1498, he had not only discovered a new sea route between Europe and Asia but also opened up a new world of commerce that would shape European consumption, manufacturing, and ultimately industrial production over the following centuries. While goods from the East had reached Europe much earlier via the continental ‘silk roads’, the direct maritime trade of European powers with the East Indies began at the end of the fifteenth century. At first, the Spanish and Portuguese crowns established a monopoly for the lucrative maritime spice trade with the Far East. Soon other powers, including the French, Dutch, and English, aspired to secure a share of the immense profits that the imports of eastern consumer goods promised to any trading nation in Europe.1 Several European countries organised the commercial exchange through the establishment of East India Companies, first founded by the British in 1600 and followed by the Dutch in 1602 with the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (voc).2 Private merchants were responsible for launching these enterprises, and sought royal protection and national monopolies for all direct trade between their respective states and the whole of Asia.3

In contrast to the trade that developed between the North American colonies and the old-world centres of commerce, chief among them Amsterdam and London, Europe’s maritime trade to the East was arguably more regulated, exclusive, and hierarchical.4 However, the chartered trading Companies succeeded in keeping outsiders from accessing their overseas infrastructure and home markets with only very limited success.5 Individual East India Company directors may have sought to defend their national monopolies for trade in Asian goods in public, not least by adopting a uniform mercantilist rhetoric and sometimes through robust intervention. Yet, such national monopolies always remained incomplete and, as this book demonstrates, even deliberately so. One key defect or asset, depending on the viewpoint, of the East India trading Companies, which proliferated in both the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was that they extended and partially ceded their monopoly privileges to their own employees.6 Private trade, a portmanteau term for a large, but also largely invisible commerce of Company employees and their allies in Europe and Asia, both undermined and underpinned Company fortunes.

This book offers original reflections on the phenomenon of private trade by investigating its practices, reach, and impact for the development of European consumer markets and for the overall expansion of the China trade in the first half of the eighteenth century. With a group of influential actors in view, acting as gatekeepers and mobile facilitators for the acquisition and distribution of Chinese goods, this book presents a history of economic life populated by individuals rather than by competing states or empires. The picture that emerges from the scrutiny and comparison of merchant letters, bills, packing lists, and ledgers exposes significant blind spots at the intersection of maritime and landlocked historiographies of commerce. European trade with China, traditionally characterised as the most heavily regulated trade of the Asian trading system, lends itself to a revisionary investigation of informal commerce and Company interests. Indeed, this book shows how competition and collusion within and from outside Company structures played a significant yet underestimated role for the functioning of individual Companies and for the expansion of trade in Asia by revealing the level of networked entrepreneurship in play.7

…

From the early seventeenth century, Europe’s East India Companies increasingly strove to establish direct trade with China. Seeking to replace the Portuguese, who had settled in Macao, on the fringes of the middle kingdom, the Dutch voc tried to secure access to this South Chinese port in an ultimately unsuccessful attack in 1622. The English Company, in contrast, aspired to gain a foothold on the South China coast by more peaceful means.8 However, their attempts to establish a regular trade and presence in China proved futile until the late seventeenth century, when Canton emerged as the most open and flexible port for foreigners. Initially, the representatives of each foreign ship had to negotiate their terms separately with Chinese officials and merchants. This process required tact, diplomacy, and flexibility on both sides.9 Only after 1700 did Europeans begin a more systematic, yearly trade with the Middle Kingdom via Canton, which eventually became the only trading place open to foreigners.

Yet, during the first decades of the eighteenth century, the precise mechanisms, rules, and conventions that defined the later characteristics of the famous ‘Canton system’ were still incipient.10 What thus unfolded was a period of experimentation and familiarisation with the opportunities and limits of trade with China – in both Asia and Europe. Crucially, this phase of experimentation was shaped not only by the larger Companies, such as the English East India Company (eic), although the latter certainly became the dominant player in the long run.11 On the contrary, in the first decades of the eighteenth century, a number of smaller, rival Companies founded in different European states were leaving their imprint on the landscape of Sino-European commerce.12 Some were there to stay, others disappeared under political pressure. But all of these new Companies were populated by an important if little-studied group of actors who will stand at the heart of this book: British interlopers – renegades, political refugees, speculators, and transients from all walks of life.

This book traces the commercial careers and informal activities of these British interlopers within the smaller East India Companies to explore the development and expansion of markets for Chinese export wares in Britain and continental Europe during the period from 1700 to c. 1750. While the fledgling trading conventions and encounters of European traders with Chinese officials and hong merchants in Canton have been thoroughly studied in important works,13 this book provides the first extensive study on the European context of the early China trade. So far, we lack a detailed account of the encounter between Company and private-trade mechanisms and practices, and of the multilateral networks that linked the European importers of Chinese consumer goods to individual consumers and to the world of wholesale and retail trade more broadly. Particular emphasis is given in this work to re-evaluating the crucial significance of private-trade activities in the development of Chinese markets in northwestern Europe; indeed, I provide a revisionary understanding of the complex – and by no means only antagonistic – interplay between private and Company trade with China.

The approach taken resonates with recent scholarship in Company studies, global microhistory, and the new business history as this study explores patterns and characteristics of a trading system from the perspective of the individual trader.14 By looking at a group of British-born China traders who were employed by multiple Companies over the course of their career, vital cross-Company phenomena and connections come to the fore. The reader will discover the opportunities and incongruities of an expanding trade from the perspective of those who moved back and forth between Europe and China, between Britain and the continent, and between land and the sea. By studying the ‘amphibious worlds’15 and business portfolios of British interlopers, the work details how private trade changed the European geographies of trade and pushed for the integration of markets. This, in turn, laid the foundation for the spectacular growth in trade that set in towards the middle decades of the eighteenth century. As a key contribution, the study shows how informal commerce in all shapes and sizes underpinned the building of markets and helped to test and implement key practices in the China trade – especially in the areas of finance, purchase, Company auctions, and wholesale distribution. Interlopers who formed an experienced and mobile workforce played a paramount role in this story.

To understand the particular geographical setup of this study, it is important to note that in the aftermath of the Acts of Union between England and Scotland in 1707, the epicentre of British interloping activities moved to the European continent.16 Britons who did not find favour with the eic increasingly sought other alliances across the English Channel.17 These interlopers, who included a large number of Jacobite refugees from Ireland and Scotland, as well as English Catholics and other marginalised groups, were soon collaborating with merchants and financiers in France, Spain and the Low Countries and further afield to pursue their overseas interests. To be sure, going East was then only one of many viable options for enterprising Britons to participate in overseas trade.18 However, during the period from the 1710s and early 1740s, China in particular attracted a significant number of border-crossers. These individuals moved relatively seamlessly between the worlds of interloping and high finance, shipping, and share-trading.19 This opportunity-seeking across political and geographical boundaries led to numerous transnational alliances and enterprises for Europe’s trade with China.20 During the war of the Spanish succession (1701–1714), private merchants based at St-Malo (including Irish nationals) bought licences from the official, but heavily indebted French Company in order to conduct trade in the East.21 Two other players appeared on the scene in 1730 and 1731 respectively: the Danish and Swedish East India Companies. Both were long-lived enterprises that grew out of private transnational initiatives.22 Indeed, such chartered Companies typically emerged out of private trading schemes of European and British merchants and were given royal protection only retrospectively. This was the case, for instance, with the Ostend Company, founded in 1722, whose merchants had been sending ships to China yearly since 1717.23

Each of those Companies has attracted significant scholarly and popular scrutiny in the past. Over recent years, however, there has been a remarkable growth in publications that seek to fit those Companies into new frameworks and global narratives.24 An interest in the Companies’ relationship to the central state under whose protection they were respectively formed; their own state-like quality and demeanour; and the concrete practices of empire-building at home and abroad inform this recent outburst of works on the Portuguese, Dutch, French, and English trading ventures in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.25 While not the only new line of enquiry, one of the most convincing attempts at stripping away some of the traditional attributes of chartered Companies as national players in a mercantilist system of overseas monopolies comes from authors with a background in the political economy of early modern states rather than in business history.26 William A. Pettigrew and David Veevers have recently argued that overseas trading Companies should no longer be understood in a predominantly national framework – nor, indeed, as entirely distinct and competing enterprises that followed ‘separate developmental trajectories in different cities, regions, and oceanic basins’.27 Likewise, it is that old obsession of European scholars with the overseas trading ‘corporation’s exclusive, monopolistic veneer’ that new interpretations seek to overcome, either by dismissing it as the Companies’ own ‘mercantilist posturing in print’,28 or by pointing to the talk of monopolies as merely an economic promise or ideal that remained ‘imperfect’ in reality.29

While this study, too, is critical of the national ‘container’ models in which the Companies tended to be locked and analysed, it is not concerned with patterns and practices of empire-building or indeed with the history of the trading corporation as an institutional and legal, global type. Rather, it intervenes in the discussion by analysing the informal networks and trading activities of British-born China traders who represented different and changing East India Companies during their careers. I prove not only that there were close links between the managing elites of the different East India Companies, but that these informal networks also profoundly affected the running of the China trade in the first half of the eighteenth century in general and the development of European markets for Chinese goods in particular.

This, then, is the first monograph on the European end of the China trade written from the perspective of a group of individual traders, and hence not from the vantage point of a specific company. Apart from the work of Conrad Gill in 1961 and the more recent studies of Hanna Hodacs and Leos Müller and the author’s own 2016 doctoral thesis, the literature on the different East India Companies remains largely silent about the key role that individual Company employees who moved between Asia and Europe played in the development of increasingly integrated European markets for Chinese imports such as tea, porcelain, and silks in the early 1700s.30 It offers significant new insights into the European trading conditions that Company merchants and mariners developed in order to profit from the direct trade with Canton. By dwelling on the transnational European context of the China trade as my chosen unit of analysis, I move away from the traditional Company literature with its emphasis on national interests and political concerns.

This book breaks new ground with its focus on the early and formative period of the China trade. The existing body of literature that does address private enterprise in the Canton trade has, to date, by and large focused on the latter part of the eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries: the entrance of the Americans into the China trade, the political implications of the opium trade between Bengal and China, the twilight of the eic monopoly, and the ways in which the ideology of ‘free trade’ became a matter of national importance and, ultimately, a casus belli.31 By tracing the transnational informal networks of British-born China traders in Europe, this work uncovers the many and often hidden mechanisms by means of which money, goods, and information were entering and leaving the circuit of trade with China and were transferred between the Companies. A history of British interlopers and their extended connections also sheds light on certain places on the map that have received little or no attention from Company historians so far. These, however, were of vital importance for the organisation of private trade during the first half of the eighteenth century, as is particularly demonstrated for the case of Cadiz, the silver city of Europe.

Against preconceived ideas, I portray these interloping China traders not merely as collective importers of foreign luxuries, but as independent merchants ingeniously operating within European commercial arenas. Their commitment to East India goods, I demonstrate, covered a range of activities: wholesale buying and selling, brokering, smuggling, and the fulfilment of special commissions for sedentary merchants and individual consumers alike. In the realm of finance, private traders acted as money lenders, traded in bills, and organised provisions and bullion for outward journeys to China for themselves as well as for friends and colleagues in other Companies. In other words, private trade encompassed a large range of activities that took place outside Asia, yet which were linked to Canton, as Company servants enjoyed direct access to goods and commercial information in that port. This book, then, brings the figure of the interloper squarely into the story of British commercial expansion.32 Yet, it does so by revealing the unforeseen consequences that the quest for private trade had for the creation of a pan-European trading realm for Chinese goods.

Working on Sino-European private trade means working with scattered and largely unsystematic data. The art of reading and contextualising fragments is particularly well developed in the literature on overseas trading networks and merchant practices. The field is made up of a community of scholars with global interests and imaginaries who have developed a sophisticated apparatus of concepts and approaches that this study can build on and with which its findings can be compared.33 The book’s narrative and insights emerge to no small degree from the correspondence and business papers of individual Scottish-born traders and those larger networks of business partners, clients, colleagues, and kin with whom they corresponded frequently, and in many cases over decades. Through an intimate understanding of the trading activities of people such as Charles Irvine of Drum (1693–1771) and Colin Campbell of Moy (1686–1757), Scots who were key figures in the development of the Swedish East India Company (seic) and its trade in China, we get a good sense of how this particular Company was run, but also and perhaps more importantly, we can see the full spectrum of activities and motivations that governed formal and informal commercial practices across the Companies.34

In what follows, I first introduce the main commercial actors of my study, the Canton supercargoes, both in their official role as Company servants and as private entrepreneurs, by critically discussing their place in the existing body of literature. I then move on to address the areas and research questions to which this book directly contributes by discussing the concepts and historiographical developments that have informed my analysis. I then return to the figure of the supercargo and situate them in a larger setting of interloping activities by discussing the cross-company and cross-border phenomena and practices that lie at the heart of this work. Finally, my source base is presented, along with a short overview of the contents of each chapter.

1 Commercial Polymaths: Supercargoes and Interlopers in the China Trade

The success of the smaller ‘interloping’ East India Companies in the first half of the eighteenth century was to a great extent due to their ability to absorb capital and expertise from their more mature competitors.35 Investors from St-Malo, the Low Countries, the German-speaking states, Sweden, and Denmark entered the China trade at a critical moment. They formed state-protected Companies that could offer employment and unique financial prospects to a highly skilled and experienced workforce from Britain, France, and Holland, who were willing to trade under a foreign flag. The significant migration of merchants and mariners (as interlopers) between the Companies created lasting and powerful connections between those corporations, while those connections were often established at a personal, rather than an official, level.

I focus in particular on a group of maritime traders with special status and authority in the China trade. More than any other long-distance trade at the time, the China trade relied on mobile agents called ‘supercargoes’36 who accompanied the Company ships and their cargoes from Europe to China and back.37 In contrast to the Company factors appointed to the trading outposts in other parts of Asia who remained at their station often for years in a row, supercargoes, often members of the commercial elite in Europe, were committed to a particular ship or fleet: they were business travellers.

The management of Company affairs in China lay in the hands of these supercargoes. This chiefly involved the buying and selling of merchandise on behalf of the employing Company. Even though supercargoes were furnished with fairly detailed instructions about the kinds of products the Company managers hoped they would purchase in China on their behalf, the realities of trade gave them a great deal of freedom to disregard such recommendations. As long as their decisions were deemed to be in the interest of their employers in Europe, supercargoes enjoyed the greatest esteem.38 Supercargoes were also endowed with special privileges to engage in private trade.39 Pre-1750, they mostly invested in Asian goods for the European market. In the second half of the century, in contrast, when supercargoes were expected to stay on the South China coast for years and, in some instances, for decades in the employ of a Company, their entrepreneurial focus changed. As has been noted by historians of private trade, supercargoes then increasingly developed their stakes in the intra-Asian trade and left the private trade to Europe to the commanders of the Company ships.40

To be sure, not all British interlopers within the smaller East India Companies managed to be appointed to the privileged position of supercargo; some remained assistants, while others were working as navigating officers or in inferior stations within the Company hierarchy.41 Yet, a critical number of these mobile fortune-seekers sailing under foreign flag ultimately reached this key position on board, often owing to their previous commercial experience and expertise in other trading Companies. While the concept of commercial interlopers is more easily grasped, the status and duties of a supercargo in Canton require a more thorough explanation and historiographic critique.

Supercargoes, despite their power and influence, have not attracted much scholarly treatment over the last decades.42 They are often mentioned in passing in the China trade literature and in studies on Chinese export wares, but rarely form the subject of independent enquiry.43 To my knowledge, there exists only a single, short monograph about a British supercargo/captain active in the period of this study, Conrad Gill’s Merchants and Mariners. This pioneering work concentrated on Thomas Hall, a British interloper in the Ostend Company who returned to England and became one of the chief ship’s husbands for the eic. Published in 1961, it exposed the various strands of private business in which Hall was engaged at the time of his employment in the merchant fleet of the eic and Ostend Companies, acting as a ship-owner, speculator, re-exporter, and tea merchant. Gill successfully brought together the worlds of the seafaring community with those of sedentary merchants. While I agree with Gill’s argument that both worlds were intertwined, this book differs in both focus and frame of analysis. Instead of attempting to write the biography of a single merchant, I am concerned with linking the loosely connected lives of British interlopers to larger commercial developments of the time. In particular, the reappraisal and contextualisation of informal cross-company networks will take centre stage.

In terms of family background, trading activities, and privileges within the Company trading system, China supercargoes were closely connected to another group of maritime traders who were active in the Euro-Asian trade: the commanders of East India ships. These have received a great deal more attention from scholars in the past.44 As men-on-the-move, supercargoes and commanders encountered similar trading opportunities in Asia and Europe and both groups made ample use of their private-trade privileges on board Company ships. Taken together, the majority of the private-trade goods on board Company ships were transported from China to Europe and vice versa on account of these two elite groups of maritime traders, sometimes in partnership.45 A recent study of English Company commanders has shown that members of this ‘small maritime aristocracy’ acted as entrepreneurs and vital connectors in expanding markets in Britain and Asia.46 H. V. Bowen’s work was path breaking. He presented ‘the first detailed reconstruction and analysis of the extensive private activities conducted by the commanders of [English] East Indiamen’.47 Although Bowen’s study focused on a later period and was mostly concerned with eic commanders who serviced the routes between Britain and various trading posts on the Indian subcontinent, his study provides ample opportunities for comparisons with the privileged place of the supercargoes in the China trade before 1760.

This book takes up Bowen’s innovative methods – notably the matching of private and Company records to go beyond merely repeating Company regulations to discover actual trading practices. Yet it also advances his insights into a different period and geographical domain. I include commanders and supercargoes within the same framework of British private-trade activities and pay more careful attention to the links between both groups. This book also puts greater focus on the transnational geographies of trade that China traders were operating in. While Bowen brought the worlds of Company commanders into view, the objective here is to shed light on the private-trade activities of the unquestioned leaders of the early China trade: Company supercargoes.

Since little systematic research on this influential group of traders exists, it is salient to delve deeper into the tasks of supercargoes. A position exclusively restricted to male merchants, they represented a ‘curious mix between commission agent, entrepreneur and diplomat’.48 The formal role and responsibilities of a supercargo were remarkably similar in all European East India Companies active in China during the first half of the eighteenth century. In order to gain a position of such importance and authority in the first place, candidates had to demonstrate their literacy, multilingualism, and a high degree of cultural sensibility on the one hand, as well as outstanding commercial skills, organisational capabilities, and a sense of leadership on the other.49 In the period covered by this study, novices entered the trade as writers or assistants of a specific supercargo, an experience that allowed them to study commercial conventions, to prove their diligence in keeping the books (protocols, commercial diaries and ledgers), and in writing or copying letters on behalf of their superiors.50 Only after several trips to Asia could one hope to be given full responsibility as a supercargo – which also entailed receiving the considerable privileges that went with that position.51 The role’s extraordinary rights and privileges were a key reason why merchant mariners sought ever-new opportunities and appointments as supercargoes in different East India Companies – since the number of these plum positions was small in each and every corporation.

Patronage networks were key for aspiring supercargoes seeking one of the few lucrative positions on the ships bound for China. As contemporary analysts knew, there was simply no admission into the China trade without the benefaction of a powerful Company director.52 This was, of course, not only true for the China trade, but for the East Indies trade as a whole.53 Company careers were forged through the strategic use of letters of introduction, presents, bribes, marital alliances, and blood ties in addition to considerations of character, experience, and education.54 Supercargoes were no exception to the rule. Their careers were also responsive to familial responsibilities and unfolded within networks based on kinship and regional, ethnic and political ties. The former structured and sometimes set limits to their entrepreneurial activities. Although the focus of the study is on uncovering the trading patterns and practices of China supercargoes as private entrepreneurs in Europe, family and friendship ties played a hugely important role for interlopers and will figure accordingly. Indeed, their social ties profoundly shaped the outlook and commercial activities of individual merchants in the China trade.55

For the Canton trade in particular, merchants had to work as part of a team, as important decisions were taken together by all the supercargoes of the same Company who were present in China at the same time. As formal representatives of the Company directors at home, supercargoes placed orders with Chinese wholesale merchants, local craftsmen, and shopkeepers. They supervised product development and quality control and also ensured the fragile cargoes were appropriately packaged and stored to reach Europe in good condition after seven to nine months at sea – on the longest of all oceanic trade routes known at the time.

The demands placed on the supercargoes were considerable: ‘besides having [the] complete mental equipment of the banker, the supercargoes had to know the quality of goods’ deemed suitable for consumption in Europe. H. B. Morse (1855–1934), customs commissioner and eminent chronicler of China’s foreign relations, first analysed the role of supercargoes in the early China trade in detail.56 As he noted, they had to know the exact worth of various raw silks or tea types offered to them down to the shilling; ‘whether the weft of woven silks should have the same strength as the warp; whether China root was better white, or tinted pink; whether vermilion at 42 taels or quicksilver at 42 taels was the better purchase’.57 In other words, extremely detailed commodity knowledge was necessary to constantly calculate and balance Chinese offers against European demands.58 In making their decisions, supercargoes also had to reckon with the potential competition of European producers. Italian manufacturers produced, for instance, raw silks in large quantities. If offered (too) cheaply at an acceptable quality, the imported Chinese raw silks could easily become unprofitable for the Companies.59

Having an eye for the marketability and novelty of a particular design or product from the kilns of Jingdezhen or the Canton painting studios was a key advantage in the highly competitive fashion market in Europe. One important element of the China trade was indeed its focus on the decorative arts, both for sartorial use and interior decoration.60 Taste, a concept so powerfully propagated and debated by eighteenth-century writers and self-proclaimed connoisseurs, was therefore something supercargoes had to exercise by translating it into their commercial decisions. This applied, for instance, when they had to choose the colour combinations for silk bedspreads and petticoats or the type of heel for an order of embroidered shoes in Canton. Decisions about fashions of that kind were linked to product innovation, but they were also prone to high risks. Fashions were – as they are today – partly unpredictable and partly the outcome of deliberate variations on a successful design.61

Like other overseas traders in Asia, supercargoes also had to navigate the complexities of cross-cultural commerce as well as the conventions of increasingly sophisticated procedures to record and represent business transactions in early modern Europe.62 Fluctuating prices and exchange rates, the peculiar bookkeeping system of their employing Company, endless calculations, and the many different currencies that changed hands in Europe and Asia made their work laborious and prone to costly mistakes. For assistance in these matters, supercargoes made ample use of the professional literature available to them at the time, which would accompany these commercial polymaths on their voyages. In fact, quite a number of these men were avid readers who pursued pastimes that were in line with the ideal of the gentleman scholar in the eighteenth century. Supercargoes, for instance, shared a widespread interest with commanders of East Indiamen in navigation and astronomy. As educated members of the commercial elite, they displayed a host of genteel interests, including French literature, but also history, politics and the study of nature. China supercargoes, as a group, were thus as unusually educated for their time as they are invisible in the literature on early modern commerce today.63

2 Trading Conditions in Canton

An added complexity of the supercargoes’ dealings in Canton sprang from the fact that they had to operate in constantly changing trading conditions. In the period of this study, the ‘Canton system’ was far from established and monolithic. On the contrary, it was constantly altered according to the (at times conflicting) interests of Chinese officials in Canton and at the imperial court in Beijing, Chinese wholesale merchants (hong merchants), and foreign traders present in the city.64 This meant that first-time European supercargoes, and those who had left China and returned after a few years, had to face and cope with a bewildering range of ever-changing regulations. When taken together, these could produce – within the span of only a few years – in the words of the English supercargo and multiple times Canton-trader Samuel Blount, ‘such a total alteration in the transacting business at this Place [Canton], that I am almost in my present circumstances as great a stranger as if I had never been in it’.65

In their role as merchants and diplomats, newly arrived supercargoes had to quickly familiarise themselves with recent regulatory shifts and novel legal restrictions – and the ways to circumvent them.66 Usually, returning supercargoes would inform the next group of merchants expected to arrive at Canton about the state of operations and everything that was necessary for the newcomers. Sometimes, however, the routine exchange of letters and instructions failed, which caused great trouble for the newly arrived supercargoes. Yet, the latter did not simply have to accept those novel legal restrictions. They needed, rather, the diplomatic skills and contacts to collaborate with other European merchants in the city to join forces and oppose any Chinese discrimination deemed unacceptable. (Supercargoes often did not understand the background of new regulations; time and again, they simply assumed it was detrimental to their interest, even when this was not the case.)67 They thus tried to renegotiate trade restrictions as a pan-European force – and at times successfully. Indeed, the English East India Company directors repeatedly reminded their supercargoes of the importance of remaining cordial with their colleagues who were working for other Companies in the light of their own weakness in negotiating effectively with the Chinese. At one point, the directors bluntly informed a group of eic employed supercargoes that:

Though we expect you do all you can in a Mercantile way to disappoint both French, Dutch and Dane, you must always consider, we are in amity and alliance with them here (at Canton), and therefore you must act so warily as not to give public offence or occasion any embroil between you, that may bring yourselves into trouble and us into expense.68

Such words of caution were wholly unnecessary, since the general atmosphere between the supercargoes at Canton, with its foreign factories (a combination of apartments and warehouses) in close proximity to one another, was comradely.69 Due to the confinement of Europeans to a small strip of land and with little diversion from the daily business, dinners and evening entertainments among the Europeans, which occasionally included also Chinese merchants and compradors (licensed provision purveyors), formed the main source of amusement.70 Friendships and business partnerships were formed and nurtured over time and certainly did not follow the logic of competing national enterprises. Charles Irvine, one of the key protagonists of this study, had close friends among the English, Dutch, French, and Swedish Companies present in Canton.

Supercargoes also needed good commercial instincts in their dealings with Chinese merchants. For any contract and commission signed to secure Chinese goods, it was vital to ascertain the creditworthiness of one’s business partner. This was not only significant for one’s own contracts (as money lending was very much part of the commercial culture at Canton), but it potentially also determined future transactions and orders placed during the next trading season by the Company one worked for. Rumours about the financial difficulties of a particular merchant would spread quickly in Canton – a place where nothing could be kept a secret for long. The different trading Companies shared their linguists with the other Companies and there was simply no way to prevent commercial information from being passed on. The exchange of information between Europeans was equally open. In fact, the supercargoes and commanders of each nation knew exactly what the others had loaded on their ships to Europe. New products and designs were quickly copied – and the guarding of musters was exceedingly difficult.

The assessment of the reliability of Chinese merchants was, however, significantly complicated by the fact that European traders in Canton were not allowed to learn Chinese. Indeed, serious punishment awaited any Chinese individual who endeavoured to teach a foreigner Cantonese or Mandarin.71 This meant that all European traders had to rely on a handful of ‘linguists’ (translators) as go-betweens, chosen by the Chinese.72 Around 1700, the Chinese linguists were still communicating with the Europeans in Portuguese. Yet by 1730, pidgin English, in fact an ‘amalgam of many of [the] languages’ spoken at Canton, had been adopted by Chinese of high and low status and by European traders. It facilitated the conduct of business and the sharing of information.73Under these circumstances, establishing the commercial trustworthiness of Chinese business partners was a delicate matter, and yet it was crucial that the supercargoes could do so in order to avoid squandering resources or becoming a victim of fraud or bankruptcy.

Dealing with the uncertainties of trans-cultural commerce was not the only delicate balancing act that supercargoes had to perform. Their relationship with the Europe-based Company directors was also a matter of constant renegotiation. Episodes of outrage and blatant mistrust between the headquarters and specific Company servants – or even larger groups of employees – were generally much more concerned with the Companies’ permanent settlements, especially in India and Southeast Asia.74 Here, eic merchants sometimes stayed for decades in a row without ever coming to the attention of their employers. Unsurprisingly, this could create significant mistrust at European Company headquarters.75 Such rifts occurred much less with supercargoes in China, not least because until the 1750s they did not stay in Canton for long but rather shuffled back and forth and thus were more answerable to the concerns of the European-based directors.

3 Private Trade and Monopoly Structures: A Network Perspective

Occasional tensions between Company directors and their representatives overseas indicate a split between personal and corporate interests. Because supercargoes were also private traders, their trading interests were not necessarily aligned with those of their employing Company. The conflicts that emerged from this particular constellation – in which supercargoes were constantly changing hats as Company representatives and private traders – can be traced through official Company records, such as the instructions that were given to the small band of supercargoes who were appointed each year.76 Economists and organisational theorists have studied this interplay of potentially clashing interests between employers and distant employees – usually in the context of the modern (multinational) firm.77 But the availability of systematic data for the different East India Companies has also attracted the attention of sociologists and institutional economists. The latter produced a series of interventions that dealt specifically with the principal–agent problem – when one party (agent) agrees to work in favour of another party (principal) in return for a certain benefit as part of a contractual agreement.78

This book contributes to ongoing discussions about the relationship between principals and agents in early modern long-distance commerce in a specific way, in that it stresses the positive impact that private-trade activities could have for the success of an employing company. It thus makes a significant contribution to a re-evaluation of Company and private trade. The Swedish East India Company is taken as an example to show that the private trade of its employees (the dominant group consisting of British interlopers from the 1720s to the 1740s) was in fact beneficial to Company concerns in a number of key areas of its economic activity. Private trade, this work centrally argues, encouraged product innovation, the development of lucrative niche markets for Chinese export wares in Europe, and also helped to consolidate the position of the seic in relation to its European competitors, as its agents shared private information, contacts, and clients with the principal (the Swedish Company). The supercargoes’ private commercial networks that included wholesale merchants, investors, smugglers, and wealthy clients in Britain and on the European continent were, Chapter 2 argues, indeed highly advantageous for their temporary employers, too, since private-trade goods were sold at the respective East India Company auctions. This yielded considerable income for the formal Companies, without them having to bear the commercial risk of these transactions.

Stressing the symbiotic relationship between Company and employees – principal and agents – is one of the most recent and dynamic developments in the literature on the East India Companies. Emily Erikson in particular has put forward a new reading of the private enterprise of eic commanders in Asian waters. They expanded British trade, she claims, by deviating from the routine shipping paths of the Company to conduct private trade elsewhere.79 Her study explores the systemic impact of individual ‘malfeasant’ behaviour for a larger trading network: the British intra-Asian trade.80 Her important study comes to the conclusion that ‘[m]onopoly rights were not the key to Company success; it was the partial abrogation of those rights (to private traders) that became the foundation of England’s commercial success in Asia’.81 She argues furthermore that private trade changed the structure and reach of English trade in Asia, not in any straightforward way, but rather as an unintended by-product of individual opportunism.82

In important ways, Erikson’s work builds on an earlier strand of literature that detailed the relationship between private traders and the English East India Company, and their part in the transformation of the East India Company into a territorial power. The pioneering works of Holden Furber, Peter J. Marshall, and Ian Bruce Watson had already highlighted the crucial agency of British private traders in establishing first Britain’s commercial dominance in the so-called country trade (or intra-Asian trade), and second its political and military hegemony over parts of the Indian subcontinent after 1757 and the Battle of Plassey.83 What is new and exciting about Erikson’s research is that she turns the lamentable consequences of individual acquisitiveness into an interpretative framework that allows us to see the relationship between private and Company trade as a system that was efficient and expanding because it operated in concert.84

Erikson’s method draws on historical network analysis, which favours quantitative data. A body of published sources, the eic ships’ logs, enabled her to chart and visualise contractions and expansions in the eic (private) trade network in Asia between 1600 and 1757. By tracing diversions from the regular shipping routes of Company ships in Asia, she was able to show how the private-trade activities of Company commanders generated a more complex trading system over time, a network structure that interfered with and extended the regular trading routes scheduled by the eic directors in London. This shift in focus from trade routes to trading networks is important. However, as this study demonstrates, her framework has left out, or greatly simplified, crucial elements of the workings of trade, which are key to understanding British commercial expansion in the Asian trade. Given the wide reception of her valuable study, my appreciative critique requires further elaboration.

First, Erikson problematically projects national borders into a complex trading environment in which identities were in flux and multi-national associations the rule.85 This is mainly due to a misconception about how private trade operated on the ground. For instance, her work assumes that deviations from the regular shipping paths were usually the result of the single-mindedness of the commander on board a Company ship.86 Yet, study of merchant correspondence and private accounts at least casts doubt on whether commanders always or ever went to new places on account of their own recklessness alone. Commanders did not have a single principal (the Company), but had, in fact, many principals, often from different European and sometimes Asian kingdoms on whose behalf they acted, in addition to pursuing their own enterprises. While Erickson’s work opened up vital new perspectives for further research, it was this important multiplicity of agency relations that her work sacrificed to present her seemingly unambiguous dataset and story of British trade in Asian waters.

In reality, the composition of principals and thus the composition of the investments on board ‘English’ Company ships was multi-national and multi-ethnic. If this is true for the intra-Asian trade, this work demonstrates that the transnational is also the appropriate framework for understanding the direct trade between Europe and China. Erikson’s wider arguments are still important yet need to be qualified by a nuanced analysis of the comparative success of British nationals in using local resources and by cooperating effectively with other Europeans across the trading Companies. This provides a key rationale for the present book.

In order to study the workings and networked nature of the China trade, this study provides a group portrait of British interlopers, many of whom were Scots, some Irish, and fewer English-born. The emerging picture and recurrent patterns demonstrate how informal networks actually operated within a landscape of competing chartered Companies. Historical trading systems produced changing landscapes of risks, exigencies, and opportunities that individual traders struggled to navigate. If we lose sight of the individuals (including their successes, setbacks and failures), their wider kinship, and business networks, we also lose sight of key characteristics of their wider trading worlds.87Building on significant work in this vein, especially by Francesca Trivellato, Cátia Antunes, and Tijl Vanneste, I deploy a network approach that gives due weight to interpersonal relationships between individual economic actors by considering them primarily as social beings, who had family responsibilities and whose careers were moulded by kin, friends, and patrons and not simply driven by opportunism.88

Commercial relationships in the early modern period were built on the notion of reciprocity and on mutual interest. A well-functioning relationship between ‘correspondents’ within a network structure (who could live thousands of miles apart) was typically non-hierarchical, multifunctional, and often personal. Thus, members of a network ‘were not directed by or responsible to others in the way they would be to superiors in a hierarchy’.89 Instead, their business relationship was characterised (at least at the outset) by reciprocity, mutual favours, and services – even if, of course, power and influence were unequally distributed amongst traders. For the context of the East India Companies, the book shows, this principle of reciprocity continued to drive informal cooperation between traders regardless of their position in the Company hierarchy. As such, it often undermined the formal hierarchies and strict-sounding rules laid down in the Company regulations.

The merchants of this study, British interlopers active in the China trade, were clearly able and eager to act on behalf of multiple principals in their homelands and within wider Europe, in addition to pursuing their own ventures. It is this constant changing of hats by which merchants and mariners managed to be the principal in some and the agent in other commercial transactions that represents one of the building blocks of early modern long-distance commerce.90 The multiple functions that early modern merchants fulfilled for each other all contributed to their income.91 In order to serve their contacts effectively, merchants in the China trade performed different agency tasks, not limited to business matters alone. The sending of gifts, forwarding of letters, assisting with legal issues, finding placements for each other’s kin, and other services were all perfectly acceptable ways to ‘personalize the relationship … [by] eliding the distinctions between business and personal domains’.92 Favours were given and returned, following a balance-sheet approach to social relations, while these frequently cut across Company affiliations and politico-geographical borders.

One could argue that monopoly Companies with their centralised administration and vertical hierarchies were, in a sense, an oddity in the otherwise decentralised trading world navigated by most early modern entrepreneurs in Europe and Asia. Centralised warehousing, decision-making, and the selling of goods at fixed intervals were important features of all the chartered Companies engaged in the Sino-European trade.93 However, there were myriad ways in which this structure of contained competition was undercut. A highly complex yet uneven system of mobile agents, factors, and brokers underpinned the seaborne trade within Europe. It thus needs to be stressed that the agency system, with its emphasis on mutual interest and reciprocal favours, was not a marginal phenomenon: during my time frame, it was the norm and glue of commercial practices and social relations.94 Historians of private trade have perhaps overemphasised the fact that East India ‘Company positions were unusual in that they combined employment and self-employment into one position’.95 It depends on whether we look at these positions from the perspective of corporate history in the twentieth century or instead from the vantage point of the early modern period.

The China trade is exemplary for the dynamic that developed out of the coexistence of Company and private trade, leading to the establishment of a growing number of European port cities that acted as financial centres, transit points, and staple markets for Chinese export wares and supplies destined in turn for markets across Asia. Even though the Companies were keen to centralise the European end of the Asian trade and thus to limit access along the way to and from Asia, by creating ‘corridors’ and fixed gateways, they ultimately failed to control the involvement of a wide range of intermediaries who collaborated with Company employees out of smaller port cities on the continent and in Britain. This work explores in detail a range of common practices of cross-company collaboration en route from Company headquarters to China, by looking at the illegal passenger traffic, the credit mechanisms used by private traders, the lading of unregistered silver at Cadiz, and the trans-shipment of goods and provisions between the ships of formally competing Companies. It reveals the close connections between the foreign merchant communities of Cadiz (especially the British, French, and Flemish) and the mobile China traders for organising the supplies and loans necessary to expand the trade of private individuals and the smaller interloping Companies.

Building on my findings presented in Chapter 4, private-trade networks reveal a more complete map of routes and nodes that shaped the early China trade. They also bring out its social and transnational elements in ways that a traditional history of the chartered Companies as individual and largely separate entities could not reveal. A qualitative network analysis, so effectively used in the recent literature on early modern commerce in the Mediterranean or the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, is still absent from the literature on the Canton trade.96 This book tries to take a first step in that direction to highlight the important links and interdependence of British Canton traders and the wider merchant community in Europe. It elaborates how private traders could play one Company against the other – by constantly seeking the best terms of (private) trade and commissions available and by so doing turning into a flexible, pan-European workforce.

Similar to what Antunes found in cases in the Portuguese overseas establishments, British interlopers operated only partly in illegality. In fact, much of their profit came from using and maximising privileges through cooperation with state monopolies or through the appropriation of their power and infrastructure as direct representatives.97 In this context, it is crucial to acknowledge the existence of different legal privileges granted to private traders in each Company. Crucially, these legal restrictions and opportunities were not static. They changed frequently, thus opening up new legal spaces (and loopholes) for entrepreneurial individuals eager to exploit potential niches for private trade. At the same time, in contrast to received ideas, this book shows that the private trade conducted by Company representatives – and especially by supercargoes – was not grudgingly tolerated by the Company directors. On the contrary, it was at times actively encouraged, since it secured the good will of these powerful traders.

4 The Archives of Private Trade: How to Assess the (In)visible

Like their colleagues in India, China supercargoes received salaries from their respective Companies that were totally inadequate vis-à-vis their skills, duties, and overall responsibility. This obvious discrepancy was somewhat cushioned by the various rewards and privileges supercargoes were free to make use of. As the early historian of English private trade in Canton, Earl H. Pritchard, wrote, ‘supercargoes were paid in a variety of ways aimed at encouraging their efficiency and zeal for the company’s service’.98 Besides a small salary, their remunerations included, from 1731 onwards, a commission on the prime costs of the return investment from Canton, the exact percentage of which was fixed for each individual according to his rank; a so-called allowance to generate interest by investing money into the Company stock; ‘the permission to take out silver with which to buy gold’; and finally the privilege to use up some cargo space for their own goods on board Company vessels.99

The direct and indirect payment of supercargoes in the other European Companies was comparable, but not identical to the English case. The French, Danish, and Swedish Companies also allowed their supercargoes and navigating officers to conduct private trade in goods (called pacotille or petit port-permis).100 A plethora of unwritten rules and privileges opposed rather strict-sounding regulations in all Companies. In fact, despite the many restrictions and constraints that were put in place to safeguard the profitability of the chartered Companies in China, private traders had considerable space for manoeuvre.101 If we compare the situation in the different Companies, which private traders did themselves, we see that every change to the private-trade regulations created a new set of opportunities which individual Company servants were quick to discover and use. Moving from one Company to the next, a strategy repeatedly used by the actors in this book, can be understood as shopping around in order to secure the best terms for private trade. As I argue, the important role supercargoes played was mirrored in this range of rights and privileges, which these agents knew how to exploit, with significant consequences not only for their personal enrichment but also – and crucially – for the development of European demands for Chinese goods and even the portfolio of the official Company trade.

H. B. Morse published his five-volume Chronicles of the English East India Company Trading to China between 1926 and 1929.102 While attention is given to the Company supercargoes, they are, nonetheless, mainly considered in their role as Company representatives. Morse transcribed much of the eic’s official documentation on the day-to-day workings in Canton, sources that were written by the supercargoes themselves and which followed an established convention of noting down the particulars directly related to the Company commerce. Supercargoes, to be sure, did not write about their own private trade in these official diaries in great detail.103 By confining himself to the ‘official voice’ of the British supercargoes, Morse therefore explored only a limited aspect of these traders’ commercial activities. In the first volume, on the period 1637 to 1753, we learn a great deal about the relationships between the subsequent teams of supercargoes and the Chinese officials, although merely through the eyes of the European traders. Yet, we learn next to nothing about their mercantile backgrounds, their families, business partners, and transnational activities. Therefore, to go beyond the ‘official voices’ captured in Morse’s materials and to explore how the personal and commercial background and experiences of China traders and supercargoes in particular shaped the conduct, geographies, and expansion of the early Canton trade in Europe is one of this book’s main objectives.

The horizontal relationships between the Company servants of the larger and smaller East India Companies, which created the distinct dynamic of the early trade in Canton, is equally absent from Morse’s account. His Chronicles are very much written from the perspective of a nineteenth-century civil servant, who interpreted the experimental and unpredictable twists and turns of commerce in the first half of the eighteenth century as a mere phase towards a more orderly world of exchange.104 The supercargoes of the early China trade, instead, appear as imperfect civil servants, whose at times malfeasant or self-interested behaviour brought the Company repeatedly into trouble. Hence, while Morse’s account offered a wealth of insights into the Company’s dealings in China, this book can only partly rely on his ‘official story’. In contrast, it explores more thoroughly the private correspondence networks and activities of supercargoes – especially within the European theatre of trade. It thereby directly challenges the understanding of private trade that Morse established and later Company historians echoed in their work: private trade as a supposedly marginal practice, one largely detrimental to Company commerce and efficiency.105

In 1957, Earl H. Pritchard made the first and only attempt until now to reconstruct the long-term development of the private trade of exclusively English East India Company Canton traders, including minor officers, commanders, and supercargoes in the period between 1680 and 1830.106 While using the Chronicles as his principal source, Pritchard added information from the ‘manifests of private trade’ and surviving entries on the value of private trade in the Company’s Cash and Commerce Journals. The former comprised lists of articles registered by members of the Canton factory, commanders, and high-ranking officers to be sent to Europe on their account. His two-part article relied heavily on official regulations, which are mentioned in the Company by-laws, minutes, and the Canton diaries. However, for establishing what was actually traded privately, Pritchard limited his enquiry to those goods that were officially registered. He did not use a single private document to check the completeness of the ‘manifests of private trade’. Entries in private cash books and diaries consulted for the present book, in contrast, make clear that the value of official Company records for understanding private trade in goods is astonishingly limited. They must be juxtaposed with matching (often private) sources in order to assess their reliability.

The same issue arises in the work of the eminent Company and maritime historian Christian Koninckx, who has provided the most comprehensive study on the Swedish East India Company’s activities to date.107 For want of a sustained engagement with private-trade records, he concluded that the private trade of Company servants returning from China ‘did not as a rule attain any extraordinary dimensions but in many cases also did not permit of any detailed analysis, chiefly because the consignments involved were of minor importance or indeed negligible’.108 My findings challenge this claim. I use, in particular, the detailed records that were left by a long-serving supercargo of the same Company, the Scottish-born interloper Charles Irvine, who kept a great deal of material for befriended colleagues, as a counterpoint to Koninckx’s gross underestimation of the scope and scale of the private trade conducted by supercargoes in the early decades of the seic trade to China. The sums that Irvine borrowed for his subsequent voyages and the amounts of silver he handled in Cadiz for other private traders give key clues to the extent of the private trade. Personal notebooks, bills of lading, and the extensive documentation of the sale of private-trade goods at seic auctions are moreover used to assess the size and impact of his private enterprise. The key aim of this study, however, lies not so much in the quantitative assessment of private trade in general (which would require a concerted effort of experts on all Companies and a larger group of scholars), but on its impact for establishing key practices and infrastructures for the distribution of goods in Europe.

Finally, a study on supercargoes and their business practices also makes a salient contribution to the wider issues of the commission trade and consumption of Chinese export art in Europe. Art historians and curators have shown some interest in the private trade of commanders and supercargoes, as the chief importers of those goods that have survived in today’s museum and private collections.109 These are often objects of exceptional beauty or workmanship, such as wallpaper and lacquerware, armorial porcelain, customised furniture, and fashionable trinkets – from painted fans to ivory snuffboxes. While it is commonly accepted that these objects were brought into markets and households by enterprising individuals, and not Companies, it has more often than not been impossible to clearly establish when and through whose commercial activities these masterpieces reached their European proprietors. Also, the functioning of the Company auctions and the place of private trade for the exchange of such refined pieces in private ownership is little understood. Even if new scholarship is starting to more thoroughly trace the itineraries of Chinese export wares, a closer investigation of the private traders who ordered, transported, sold, or gifted them provides an extremely useful starting point to understand the wider context of those goods that have survived in museum and private collections.110 By considering in detail the process of choosing, packing, and shipping goods in private trade – the peculiar logistics that stemmed from traders’ quest to maximise the value of their cargo space on board – this book also opens up another dimension of design-related issues in long-distance commerce, specifically explored in a chapter on private commissions (Chapter 3).

In sum, working through the historiography on supercargoes and the private trade with China in the period before 1760 has clearly established the need for a scholarly reassessment of private enterprise in this particular trading context, since its overall importance within the context of Sino-European commercial encounters has so far been neglected.111 Although scholars such as Van Dyke and Pritchard have made important inroads, we are still far from fully understanding the role played by Canton traders as private entrepreneurs in general and the dynamics brought about by interlopers in particular. Indeed, a particularly large lacuna concerns the Company servants’ involvement in the intra-European trade as wholesalers, commission agents, brokers, and smugglers. We know too little about their informal networks in Britain and on the continent. These, however, were of prime importance for the operation of their business – especially when we consider the frequent travels of supercargoes and other maritime traders. This book’s focus on British traders who worked for at least some time in the service of foreign East India Companies brings out more clearly the sustained impact that migration and interloping had for the formation of informal networks, which connected the different trading entities on a personal and often subversive level.

5 Source Material

While this work draws on a significant corpus of diverse historical sources, including private correspondence, diaries, contracts, Company ledgers, annotated auction catalogues, images, and material artefacts connected to the European China trade, the analysis had to cope with peculiar archival logics and legacies. The unconventional careers of British interlopers who traded under (changing) foreign flags often brought fortunes to their families. Yet, fame and dignity were often achieved only by the next generation. Inevitably, the archival footprint of British interlopers in the China trade is often miniscule by comparison to the private and public records that were kept by their descendants, who succeeded in becoming respectable politicians, directors, governors, and military commanders of the Anglo-Indian empire by the late eighteenth century. The early interloping adventures of later classic English East India Company families – including such names as Metcalfe, Cumming, Campbell, Pike, Ouchterlony, Hume, Harrison, Forbes, and Arbuthnot – had by then been forgotten, or had become well-kept family secrets. Indicative for this archival and historiographical fall into oblivion is the fact that the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography contains not a single entry about the subjects/agents of this book – although quite a few of them laid the foundation for dynastic grandeur. The objects of their trade, by contrast, have survived in significant numbers. Canton trade heirlooms such as armorial porcelain, reverse mirror paintings, and carved ivory works were proudly kept in family homes.112 Yet the context of their acquisition and the careers connected to them remain largely unknown – for the most part because the private correspondence, commercial ledgers, and shipping records which detail their importation have largely been destroyed. It is therefore telling that the single largest collection of private papers relating to the early China trade known today belongs to a Scottish-born interloper who had no children of his own and who never married. The correspondence and business papers of Charles Irvine of Drum, a central figure in this book, were safely stored within the walls of a thirteenth-century castle, ten miles west of Aberdeen, until after the Second World War.

The extensive Charles Irvine collection that forms the backbone of this study incorporates several hundreds of documents that directly relate to the China trade between 1731 and the 1760s, and also to private trading activities connected to it. It includes business correspondence, commercial ledgers, current accounts (credit/debit accounts), invoices, receipts, bonds and insurance contracts, and shipping records of two kinsmen, both employed in the service of the seic in China as supercargo and officer respectively: Charles Irvine of Drum and his nephew James Rose of Clava. What is more, Irvine, who was a close confident of the two Scottish seic directors, Colin (1686–1757) and Hugh Campbell (16??–1754), also kept a great many documents that relate to Company commerce. This makes it possible to compare formal regulations with actual private-trade imports in the seic through the extremely rich textual fabric of the Rose/Irvine papers. They provide key evidence for reconstructing Charles Irvine’s entry into the China trade, his privileged place within the seic, and his transnational connections to banking houses, investors, wholesalers, clients, and agents involved in the finance, import, and re-export of Chinese commodities. The papers also provide a unique view on the intricate business practices, successes, and failures of a great number of other interlopers employed in the East Indies trade who belonged to Irvine’s business networks. The documents are used to shed fresh light on many more lives and careers involved in the experimental phase of the early China trade. The private trade records of Canton traders at The National Archives in Kew and the James Ford Bell Library in Minneapolis (USA) have furthermore been put into conversation with official English and Swedish East India Company sources and the material collections of public museums and country houses across Europe, the UK, and North America. Finally, insights from fieldwork in Scotland have been used to explore the practicalities of smuggling, in which a greater number of traders were engaged.113

6 Structure of the Study

This book offers a multifaceted thematic analysis of the private trade activities of British interlopers in the early China trade and of the role that informal networks played in directing the flow of capital, information, and commodities within a transnational arena. It is divided into four chapters. Chapter 1 compares and connects the lives and careers of a number of British interlopers active in the early China trade by means of a group portrait. Its key interest is to identify relevant patterns of how various European merchants, who had often previously pursued other commercial ventures and contacts, came to enter the lucrative China trade during its experimental and volatile phase. It also asks what their prior commercial enterprises meant for the geographical expansion of markets for eastern goods. It demonstrates that interlopers changed their employer at least once and up to four times during their active careers. The chapter further explores the risks and opportunities involved in operating for different Companies, and also the specific legal challenges, loopholes, and state documentation and early ‘passport’ systems that interlopers exploited.

Chapter 2 discusses the wholesale and re-export trade for Chinese goods. It does so by investigating the interdependent relationship between Canton traders and sedentary merchants in Europe. The precise interactions and relationships between Company and private trade are explored by looking at how commercial information was exchanged about suitable markets, and how the collaboration between Company servants and wholesale merchants impacted on the Company auctions.

Chapter 3 turns to one important element of the private-trade activities of Canton supercargoes: the special commission trade. Besides identifying the practices relating to the ordering of customised commodities, it also explores the double role of China traders as consumers and commercial experts. The chapter argues that special commissions encouraged product innovation, and that private trade was primarily responsible for managing the import of myriad niche and high-quality products during my chosen time frame. In a detailed analysis of the circumstances and regulations in place surrounding the actual shipping of Chinese export wares on board seic ships, the chapter shows the extent to which the choice of the private trader and the designs chosen relate to the tyranny of space (or rather the lack thereof). Past scholarship has focused primarily on aspects of decoration, colour, and lustre in Chinese as well as Japanese export art. This focus on veneers and effects has overshadowed the fact that the shape of export art was made to respond primarily to the pragmatics of shipping and handling, before even considering consumer fancies and artisanal skill.114 The right packaging was key to the trade as a whole. The design principle of the Canton trade, I contend, was the square box and rectangular chest.

Chapter 4 looks at the concrete organisation and financing of the private trade of Company supercargoes by exploring a particularly important city for cross-Company activities that has been largely overlooked by the existing scholarship on the China trade so far: Cadiz. I argue that Cadiz represented a hugely important node for cross-Company activities. Not by accident did many of the British interlopers that take centre stage in this book have connections of different kinds with this particular port city at the crossroads of multiple commercial arenas. I use the city as a place to develop a more systematic account of the functioning of the China trade while mapping the geographies of British private trade in a pan-European trading arena – thereby also connecting the eastern with the Atlantic trade.

What were the two biggest problems facing China during the Qing dynasty?

How did imperialism affect China quizlet?

Which of the following statements best describes the encounter between Hindus and Muslims in India during the Mughal Empire?

What internal problems threatened the Qing dynasty?