Sino-French Trade at Canton, 1698–1842 by Susan E. Schopp (review)

Susan Schopp's brief monograph is misnamed. Although its title is Sino-French Trade at Canton, 1698–1842, the volume, profits, and meaning of that trade are completely absent from this book. Nor does Schopp place her findings into any sort of historiographical context whatsoever. This short work of 130 pages of text is restricted to an exhaustive, repetitive description of a commercial exchange by France and the French involving a particular place, namely Canton.

Between 1698 and 1842, 289 French ships called at Canton bringing silver, textiles, luxuries like coral and gold thread, and metals, especially lead. They returned laden with cargoes primarily of tea with some porcelain and raw silk along with tiny quantities of other goods (pp. 38, 135–159, 161). Schopp did not delineate how these cargoes, or their profitability, may have changed over time. The number of French ships arriving in Canton peaked under the second Compagnie des Indies between 1730 and 1769 when 16–22 French ships arrived in China annually except during the frequent periods of war with Britain (p. 15). Three periods of "Company rule" (1664–1719, 1719–1769, 1785–1793) were interspersed with eras of "private trade."

Schopp devotes a chapter to "The French Company Model of Sino-European Trade" (pp. 25–40). She emphasizes: (1) the role of the French state in creating the French East India Company; (2) the dependence on the royal family for capital; the Company's "broad founding mission and geographical scope"; and the important role of private traders within the Company's monopoly (pp. 29–30). A brief description of the East India Companies chartered by other countries (pp. 25–29) stands in for any consideration of what was distinctive or important about that model. Schopp's findings beg for comparison to French trade patterns with the Levant, North America, and the Caribbean or even with other areas that had been part of the bailiwick of the East India Company like pondicherry or the Mascarenes. This type of analysis of commercial exchange is being undertaken across the field and has been a longstanding part of historical inquiry into commercial matters. Junko Takeda's new monograph, The Other Persian Letters: Iran and a French Empire of Trade, 1700–1808 (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2020) is deeply imbricated in the literature on commercial interaction and successfully demonstrates how an example can bring out the contours of the whole.

This book also stresses that the French Company's operations were located primarily in Paris, Versailles, and Lorient though Saint-Malo and Nantes are also mentioned (p. 31) which calls for comparison to the Dutch system described earlier in the chapter. She concludes that "The most striking characteristic of the French model was its relationship with the Crown and the consequent effect on the Compagnie's administration" (p. 32). She follows that observation with an exhaustive description of the French East India Company's administrative structures and then their replacement by a Consulate with a resident royal agent as France's representatives in Canton (pp. 32–36). The divorce of this information from the volume or profitability of trade, the importance of import substitution, or the shape of commercial interactions in Canton or how other models performed leaves this material unmoored from their very purpose.

In good encyclopedic fashion, Schopp delineates the various types of ship, their characteristics, and the crews used in the Sino-French trade as well as the "chop boats" that unloaded goods in Canton, Macao, or Whampoa. The various routes across the Indian Ocean and through the archipelagoes south of Canton are explored thoroughly. A brief look at the trans-Pacific route is interesting but had little commercial impact except for a short period in the early eighteenth century (pp. 60-62). She devotes chapters to the daily life and physical plant of the French hong or commercial establishment, entertainment, and lengthy biographical sketches that draw on her earlier interest...