Mr. Smith Goes to China: Three Scots in the Making of Britain's Global Empire by Jessica Hanser (review)

Mr. Smith Goes to China represents a considerable revision of Jessica Hanser's doctoral dissertation of the same name, completed at Yale in 2012. That work focused on two eighteenth-century Scotsmen, both named George Smith, who were involved in the British trade to India and China. Rather than working in official channels for the East India Company, however, both George Smiths were part of a considerable and hitherto shadowy group of individuals known as "private traders," who ventured to the East like so many others to seek their fortunes in the burgeoning trade in tea and silk. Winner in 2012 of the Hans Gatzke Prize at Yale for the best dissertation in European history, Hanser's work managed to uncover many details about the East Indian trade through a close study of these two men, whose absorbing stories could be brought to light by means of excellent and varied archival work in many parts of the world.

In revising this excellent work as a book publication, Hanser has done herself one better by managing to turn up a third George Smith, also from Scotland, who likewise operated in the shadows of the East India Company's trading monopoly during this same time. Hanser has done admirable detective work to unravel their stories, which have been understandably confused in previous studies. In fact, they were confused in her dissertation as well, where the third George Smith (whom she now dubs George Smith of Bombay) was originally conflated with the first (George Smith of Madras). George Smith of Bombay is by far the best known of the three, since he was serving as the supercargo of the English ship Lady Hughes in 1784, when a cannon salute fired by the ship to another European ship near Canton accidentally killed two Chinese sailors in a nearby customs vessel. The result was a heated altercation between the British and Chinese governments and the eventual execution of a man who may or may not have been the gunner responsible. It was one of many incidents that fueled British demands for greater autonomy from the Chinese legal system and, it was hoped, some kind of permanent settlement from which the British could manage their immensely lucrative Canton trade.

Distinguishing these three men teaches us a number of valuable lessons about the realities of that trade and the complex financial transactions which made it possible. Most important of all, Hanser confidently demonstrates both that the vagaries of the "Canton system" must be read in conjunction with the British trade in India and that most previous work has concentrated on only one or the other of these. Both locations were involved in an increasingly globalized network of trade and credit, the instability of which led to a severe financial crisis in Canton in the late 1770s, when enormous amounts of money that had been lent to Chinese merchants for decades could not be repaid. All three George Smiths were involved in these high-interest loans.

The book is at its best when explicating the minutiae of this financial debacle, and the entertaining stories of the three George Smiths, often drawn from the scraps of history, are only lenses through which this often faulty system of credit and debt can be more fully viewed. The debts incurred by the 1779 financial crisis, finally, were also an important stimulus for mounting the ill-fated Macartney embassy to China in 1793, and Hanser's final chapter speculates about how at least two of these George Smiths may have had a hand in encouraging the British government to pursue a goal that every European knew was practically a hopeless cause: how to get the Chinese to negotiate on any terms but their own. Senior officials of the East India Company, for instance, strongly discouraged another attempt at a European embassy. To my mind, this...