A New Look at the Canton Trade, 1700–1845

It is time to take a fresh look at the trade that took place in Canton (modern Guangzhou) between 1700 and 1845. New work published during the last fifteen years makes it possible to better understand the complex system that managed the increasing volume of goods, its actors, and their business practices. In this review, we introduce this new scholarship and suggest how it might change our understanding of the city, the region, and the place of the Qing empire (1644–1911) in the world trade of that era.¹

Foundational Scholarship on the Canton Trade

Prior to 2000, scholars usually set the southern port city of Canton in the context of a global system and characterized it as the single port permitted for foreign trade, the funnel through which porcelain, silk, and especially tea flowed to the world; the site of a struggle between two state-granted trade monopolies, the British East India Company and the officially designated hong merchants; and the source of riches siphoned off for the Qing throne. Problems in the Canton trade were understood as a reflection of Chinese indifference to Western goods and examples of ineffective Manchu Qing resistance to Western pressures to open China. Its history could be simplistically portrayed as one of continuous foreign frustration leading to the breakdown of the system as restrictions gave way, monopolies failed, and a Chinese appetite for opium drained away silver and led to the Opium War of 1839–1842. These dysfunctional trading arrangements were then replaced during the nineteenth century by the opening of treaty ports and the reluctant integration of the Qing into a new system of economic and foreign relations.

The designation of 1840 as the starting point of Chinese modern history, still meaningful in scholarly institutions in China, focused attention on the Opium War, the collapse of the Canton system, and the subsequent events leading to the end of the dynasty in 1911. The study of foreign relations during the nineteenth century, influenced by the focus on treaty ports that dates back to the era of John K. Fairbank,² has concentrated especially on post-1860 Shanghai, the new center for foreign trade. As for the eighteenth century, recent scholarly attention to the Inner Asian territories of the Qing empire and a better understanding of the role of the Imperial Household Department (Neiwufu 內務府) have also drawn attention away from Canton. As a result, the pre–Opium War history of the Canton trade has been marginalized within the field of Qing history, relegated at best to premodern, preimperialist world history. This situation should now change.

Pioneering studies of the Canton trade rely primarily on the abundant records produced by those who came to that city on business in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,³ particularly the relatively accessible British East India archives and English-language documents from British and American firms. These works focus on shipping records and goods, and reflect their authors’ frustrations with Qing officialdom. An apparent lack of Chinese...