The Canton Trade: Life and Enterprise on the China Coast, 1700-1845

Preface

 PREFACE ONE OF THE GREAT DELIGHTS of studying the ‘China Trade’ is the enormous body of literature available to the researcher. Hundreds of foreign ships sailed to China from 1690 to 1845, and most of the captains and merchants aboard those vessels kept records, journals and logs, not only of their voyages but also of their dealings with the Chinese. Many of these records have survived and are available in archives throughout Europe and the United States. The foreign companies trading in China also produced letters, reports, requests, expense and account books, sales catalogues and numerous other documents that provide much detail about the trade. Researchers are doubly fortunate that many official Chinese documents concerning the administration of Macao and the trade at Canton are now available in print. This rich collection of primary sources has attracted numerous scholars to the study of the China trade, which, in turn, has resulted in a huge body of secondary literature. In the past 150 years, many books and articles have been written on aspects of the Canton trade in many languages. These histories are diverse in their areas of concern, but they can be divided into four categories: those that focus on one company or ethnic group, such as the English, Americans, or the Chinese; those that focus on one artefact or commodity, such as tea, porcelain, lacquerware, or export paintings; those that focus on the social, literary and cultural contributions of the merchants; and those that focus on one geographical area, such as Macao or Canton. Of course, some works overlap all four categories. One of the main reasons there are numerous histories with an ethnic or artefact/commodity focus is that the enormous body of documents available requires researchers to narrow their approach. It would take decades, for example, to explore xii Preface thoroughly the records from just one of the East India companies, English, Danish or Dutch. American China trade documents are equally numerous, with the added inconvenience of being scattered in libraries, archives and museums throughout the United States. French, Belgian and Swedish records are not as extensive as the others but are nonetheless important, and they too are spread out in many cities. The enormous volume of primary sources means we in the study of the China trade are all deeply indebted to the work of scholars before us. It has taken more than 150 years for the sources to be properly researched, cited, indexed, catalogued, described, summarised, filed and compiled in libraries, museums and archives throughout the world. This enormous task was performed by an army of independent scholars, curators, archivists, librarians and amateur enthusiasts who probably had no idea they were mapping out the course so this present project could be considered. If the field had not gone through this long evolutionary process of organising the documents, this study would not have been written. Now we turn to a summary of authors and works that pointed to the need for this book. Many studies have been written on each of the East India companies and the Americans trading with China. A number of articles and books have also been written on Chinese Hong merchants and Armenians, Muslims and Parsees.1 All these secondary works focus on one group, and mention other characters only when they interact with that group. For example, in the histories of the English East India Company, the Chinese who traded with, worked for, or serviced other foreigners are mentioned only if they interacted in some way with the English. Regardless of whether the individual authors focus on the English, Dutch, Parsees, Americans or Chinese, they discuss only those people directly connected with their subject. All other individuals involved in the trade are left out of the discourse. This means we cannot classify any previous work as ‘a history of Canton’. Just because the English contracted for tea at a specific price or in a specific way does not mean the other traders did the same. The English, French and Americans, for example, used an exchange rate of 0.72 taels per Spanish dollar, while the Dutch and the Swedes used 0.74 taels. These different exchange rates obviously affected the prices they paid, which needs to be taken into consideration when making any comparison of those transactions. The prices the Dutch agreed to in the 1760s were also affected by the special arrangement they had with their Hong merchants to supply separate chop boats, while the Swedish and Danish tea contracts...