Colonial Merchants Research Articles

Commercial architecture of a British trading firm in the Far East, 1830s-1930s: building of Jardine Matheson & Co. offices and warehouses

ABSTRACT This paper’s exploration of the architecture of Jardine Matheson & Co. a British mercantile firm in nineteenth century China and Japan, contributes to the socio-spatial examination of western-style architecture in East Asia from the cross-national perspective. Based on an archival survey of the Jardine Matheson Archive and several contemporary sources, the architectural activities of this British colonial merchant that constructed its branches throughout nineteenth-century East Asia are examined with regard to the following points. First, making use of directories published in the nineteenth century, the opening and closure of their branches are summarized throughout East Asia. Second, the spatial composition and historical background of early buildings in Canton and Hong Kong are clarified. Third, with regard to the several branches established in the mid- to late nineteenth century, their historical backgrounds are clarified. Fourth, spatial compositions of several branch buildings are examined making use of architectural plans and pictures. Fifth, the development of modern office building in the early twentieth century is clarified. Finally, summarizing the above examination, the paper shows the changes in branch buildings related to their business model, and places their architecture in the merchant’s commercial network and the British colonial world in nineteenth century East Asia.

Bernard Bailyn on the Craft and Art of Historical Writing

Bernard Bailyn on the Craft and Art of Historical Writing

From Robert Keayne to Angola, Richard, and Grace: Bernard Bailyn and New England's Place in an Atlantic World

From Robert Keayne to Angola, Richard, and Grace: Bernard Bailyn and New England's Place in an Atlantic World

An Empire of Free Ports: British Commercial Imperialism in the 1766 Free Port Act

AbstractThe Free Port Act of 1766 was an important reform in British political economy during the so-called imperial crisis between the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) and the American Revolution (1775–1783). In an explicit break from the letter if not the spirit of the Navigation Acts, the act opened six British ports in the West Indies (two in Dominica and four in Jamaica) to foreign merchants trading in a highly regulated number of goods subject to various duties. Largely understudied, this legislation has been characterized in most previous work on the subject as a fundamental break from British mercantile policies and meant to benefit North American colonial merchants. This article proposes a different interpretation. Based on the wider context of other imperial free port models, the loss of conquests such as French Guadeloupe and Martinique and Spanish Havana in the 1763 Paris Peace Treaty, a postwar downturn in Anglo-Spanish trade, and convincing testimonies by merchants and colonial observers, policy makers in London conceived of free ports primarily as a means of extending Britain's commercial empire. The free port system was designed to ruin the rival Dutch trade economically and shackle Spanish and French colonists to Britain's mercantile, manufacturing, and slaving economies. The reform marks a key moment in the evolution of British free trade imperial designs that became prevalent in the nineteenth century and beyond.

Rice and 1866 Famine of Orissa: A case Study on Balasore District

Nineteenth century Orissa history is marked as a period of natural calamity and severe drought. The shortage of rainfall and the decline of food production created a horrific situation for the people of Orissa. From the ancient period,the people of Orissa were famous for their reach of rice cultivation,and till now,it is the primary food crop for most of the people of Orissa. During the 19th century,apart from being an important food crop, it was used as an essential item for trade and commercial activities. During the colonial period, society was feudal, and most of the benefits from trade were taken by the colonial Government, Zamindars, and merchants. Peasants came at the last of the list. This was one of the most prominent reasons behind the famine of 1866. Due to the high price of rice throughout the famine, lower-class people could not afford the high pricerice, and they didn’t have sufficient storage of food for any kind of emergency,;as a consequence, lower-class people became the primary victims of the famine. Here rice will be used as an essential source to study the famine in Balasore district of Orissa which was one of the city which was greatly affected by the famine of 1866 along with Cuttack and Puri. Here in this article, we are subjected to study on the famine of 1866 in Balasore district, its rice production, its society and how it reacted to the famine, and how it overcomes the famine of 1866 in Orissa.

Advancing trade with China: The Eastern and Australian Mail Steam Company and the 1873–1880 mail contract

The Eastern and Australian Mail Steam Company altered the dynamics of sea transport between China and Australia in the late nineteenth century. From 1873 to 1880, this shipping company initiated a new, regular, and permanent route between China and Australia that assisted in the development of stronger trade relationships. The company fulfilled this on the back of a mail contract with the Queensland government. What transpired during the mail contract, its impacts, and its legacies have left an indelible, though unrecognised, positive mark on Australia’s trade relationships with China. As such, Eastern and Australian were one of the pioneers in brokering regular international trade routes for colonial Australian merchants and governments. They also became an integral element in the eventual transition from sail to steam, not only along the China-Australia route but also for all Australian international shipping.

A Biography of a Map in Motion: Augustine Herrman's Chesapeake by Christian J. Koot

Reviewed by: A Biography of a Map in Motion: Augustine Herrman's Chesapeake by Christian J. Koot Keith D. Pluymers A Biography of a Map in Motion: Augustine Herrman's Chesapeake. By Christian J. Koot (New York: New York University Press, 2018. Pp. [xiv], 283. $35.00, ISBN 978-1-4798-3729-8.) Over the course of the 1660s, Augustine Herrman, a merchant and cartographer who navigated the borderlands of English and Dutch mid-Atlantic colonies, created a distinct, precise manuscript map of the Chesapeake region. In his wide-ranging and accessible A Biography of a Map in Motion: Augustine Herrman's Chesapeake, Christian J. Koot traces the histories of Herrman and his map as both moved in and between empires and around the Atlantic world, illuminating how these peregrinations transformed the man and the object. Koot uses Herrman's map, Virginia and Maryland as it is Planted and Inhabited (1673), to draw out two Atlantic worlds: the colonial, which had relatively porous boundaries and ample opportunities for interimperial trade, movement, and intellectual exchange; and the imperial, which emphasized metropolitan primacy, sovereignty, and clearly delineated authority. Three chapters framed around the details of Herrman's life as a colonial merchant and mapmaker, but offering extended discussions of mercantile life, material culture, and local politics, argue for the existence of a flexible, mobile colonial community. Herrman—who was born in Bohemia, lived in the Dutch Republic, worked as a merchant in New Amsterdam, developed trade networks across the Dutch and English mid-Atlantic colonies, and ultimately settled as a planter in Maryland—was, Koot argues, a truly colonial individual whose skills and networks were valued by English and Dutch colonial authorities. Herrman moved consistently and easily across the waterways of the Chesapeake and as far afield as the Caribbean. While Herrman stood out for his commercial success and his cartographic prowess, he typified, as Koot suggests, "colonists in the Mid-Atlantic [who] belonged to one larger cross-national community" (p. 51). Even open hostilities and the English seizure of New Netherland "did not reorient the mapmaker's imagining of the larger Mid-Atlantic as an interconnected unit" (p. 133). These dense and overlapping mercantile networks and relationships with Native peoples enabled Herrman to create "a unique map that captures a distinctive colonial geography" while displaying Dutch cartographic traditions [End Page 141] and ways of seeing (p. 55). In its manuscript form, the map conveyed colonial attitudes, knowledges, and uses, including ones at odds with imperial policy. Koot convincingly teases out these details about a manuscript map of which there are no surviving copies—a testament to his subtle, skillful visual analysis against the grain of the extant printed maps and to his deep engagement with technical histories of cartography. It is one of the book's great strengths that Koot provides such analysis without burdening nonspecialist readers or deadening his light, flowing prose. Koot's reconstruction of the absent manuscript informs his reading of the surviving prints. In peeling back engraver William Faithorne's transformations of Herrman's manuscript, Koot reveals how Faithorne and Lord Baltimore sought to transform a colonial manuscript into a metropolitan print that "spoke to the imperial uses to which the landscape could be put" and that cemented Baltimore's own interests in North America (p. 140). The new map also required a transformation of Herrman, from a planter, merchant, and mapmaker moving easily across physical and political geographies into "Augustine Herrman Bohemian." "Augustine Herrman Bohemian," Koot argues, was "a metropolitan figure" who evoked renowned Bohemian engraver Wenceslaus Hollar while simultaneously lending the image authority through a text that celebrated "an actual individual and his skill in capturing the colonies" (pp. 166, 170). But conflicting interpretations did not end the moment the printers put ink to engraved copper. The careful visual and textual rhetoric of the printed map enraged at least one anonymous Maryland colonist, who wrote that the presence of Lord Baltimore's coat of arms on the map was evidence of broader Catholic plots to usurp royal authority. People and objects in motion have long been one of the defining characteristics of Atlantic history. One of the chief virtues of A Biography of a Map...

John Banister of Newport: The Life and Accounts of a Colonial Merchant

John Banister of Newport: The Life and Accounts of a Colonial Merchant

Trevor Burnard. Planters, Merchants, and Slaves: Plantation Societies in British America, 1650–1820 .

Planters, Merchants, and Slaves: Plantation Societies in British America, 1650–1820 by Trevor Burnard is part synthesis of existing secondary literature and part overview of his own body of important work. Burnard, an eminent historian of slavery and its multiple effects on colonial society in North America and the Caribbean, is clearly well-positioned to write such a book. His main focus is on the rise and eventual economic domination of the “large integrated plantation” based on the forced labor of enslaved Africans in the British colonies in the Chesapeake, the Lowcountry of Carolina and Georgia, and the West Indies. Although each of these regions displayed similar characteristics, Burnard is careful to differentiate among these zones and makes clear that they were not all the same. Burnard persuasively argues that this integrated plantation system, once in place in these various locations, remained largely unchanged for the better part of the eighteenth century. It brought incredible wealth to planters, colonial societies, and the British imperial economy, and was key in the development of modern capitalism. It was maintained above all by extreme violence exercised by white people who had a stake in upholding the system, particularly slave owners, plantation overseers, slave traders, and colonial merchants.

Trans-Imperial Networks in the Crisis of the Spanish Monarchy: The Rio de Janeiro-Montevideo Connection, 1778–1805

The late eighteenth century brought deep changes to the Atlantic World. Imperial competition, warfare, revolutions and a general increase in transatlantic commerce changed the balance of power among European empires and their overseas territories. The Spanish empire in particular faced multiple challenges, especially intermittent warfare and economic crises, which many historians regard as having paved the way for the Spanish American independence movements after 1808. Warfare in Europe and in the Atlantic weakened Spain's economy and its control over trade and administration in its American territories. Military conflicts in the 1790s and 1800s disrupted the commercial routes connecting the Peninsula and the colonies, forcing the opening of the colonial economies to foreign agents. Because of the perils faced by Spanish vessels crossing the Atlantic, the Castilian crown allowed colonial merchants to trade directly with foreign neutral nations. Apart from legal commerce, contraband trade also flourished.

Simulating Littoral Trade: Modeling the Trade of Wine in the Bronze to Iron Age Transition in Southern France

The Languedoc-Roussillon region of southern France is well known today for producing full-bodied red wines. Yet wine grapes are not native to France. Additionally, wine was not developed indigenously first. In the 7th century B.C. Etruscan merchants bringing wine landed on the shores of the Languedoc and established trade relationships with the native Gauls, later creating local viticulture, and laying the foundation for a strong cultural identity of French wine production and setting in motion a multi-billion dollar industry. This paper examines the first five centuries of wine consumption (from ~600 B.C. to ~100 B.C.), analyzing how preference of one type of luxury good over another created distinctive artifact patterns in the archaeological record. I create a simple agent-based model to examine how the trade of comestibles for wine led to a growing economy and a distinctive patterning of artifacts in the archaeological record of southern France. This model helps shed light on the processes that led to centuries of peaceable relationships with colonial merchants, and interacts with scholarly debate on why Etruscan amphorae are replaced by Greek amphorae so swiftly and completely.

Colour of Paradise: The Emerald in the Age of Gunpowder Empires

Accessible, authoritative, and articulate, Colour of Paradise is a gem of a book. Using a well-known aspect of colonial Colombia’s export economy, emerald mining, Kris Lane explains the dynamics of early modern global commerce and consumer culture. He tracks the stones from their mining in New Granada to their exchange in the polyglot Atlantic economy to their acquisition by Asian nobility from Syria to India and so tells a fascinating story of an often fetishized commodity. This allows him to deftly illustrate significant continuities between the era of the gunpowder empires and the twenty-first century, including global supply-chain management, exploited and enslaved labor that facilitate evolving patterns of elite consumption, the intersection of various trading networks that simultaneously complicate and enable worldwide exchange, and the internationalization of cultural tastes and preferences.To be sure, emeralds from the famous mines of Muzo quickly came to be esteemed by sixteenth-century European political and intellectual elites. But, more to the point of the book, the larger, better Colombian stones found special favor “in South and southwestern Asia, where they were consumed, hoarded, ritually exchanged and pillaged by the rulers of the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal empires” (pp. x – xi). Despite this receptive market, however, emerald dealing remained “a highly uncertain business” (p. 124). Sometimes, it was added on to the legal export of standard goods like tobacco, cocoa, and hides. More often, though, colonial merchants and miners smuggled emeralds out of New Granada in conjunction with the transatlantic slave trade.Informed by the work of Colombia’s master historians, from Pedro de Aguado to Juan Friede, Lane’s analytical perspective is solidly based in impressive archival research in Colombia and Europe. But it is also enlivened by his passion for Colombia and its inhabitants, historical and current. His analysis of dynastic displays of wealth and prestige is firmly rooted in his appreciation for the land in and around Muzo and the miners who worked it. For example, Lane describes in detail the “folded shale beds known as capas esmeraldíferas” (p. 33) from which the emeralds came so that we understand the physical geography of the enterprise. Similarly, he reflects with insightful, even moral, sensitivity upon the mine owners and the miners, acknowledging both the violence of the business and the human reactions to working in a precarious environment. This examination of Hapsburg-era emerald mining anchors the book. In fact, the emphasis accentuates the eighteenth-century decline in the emerald trade as mine production fell, British smuggling increased, and Mughal, Safavid, and Ottoman power collapsed.Nonetheless, Lane’s intent is to follow the global trajectories of these Colombian stones. And so he introduces seventeenth-century Cartagena exporters such as the Portuguese Jew Manuel de Fonseca Enríquez, who likely shipped emeralds to Lisbon and Amsterdam. From there, the stones were “sucked into the gift economies of South and southwestern Asia” (p. 144). He and his colleagues then invested the profits in consumer goods that were traded for African slaves destined for Cartagena (p. 107). Thus Fonseca Enríquez exemplified the Caribbean facet of intersecting commercial networks and the personalities who “had become key vectors in emeralds’ steady eastern flow” (p. 142). In turn, the Mughal emperor Jahan (r. 1628 – 1658), who commissioned the Taj Mahal, typified the emerald consumer. His extravagance with gifts such as jewel-studded swords and inkpots displayed the significance of emeralds as an unmistakable symbol of the divine origin of kingship.To his credit, Lane shows admirable restraint as an author. His analysis does not overreach. He acknowledges his educated surmises, which necessarily occur in any treatment of informal economies. He understands that in the eighteenth century “emeralds were now a kind of tag-along commodity rather than a super-secret stowaway” (p. 188). All in all, Lane’s controlled, considered, and comprehensive study of early modern Colombian emeralds deserves a wide audience.

Re-framing the colonial Caribbean: Joscelyn Gardner's White Skin, Black Kin: A Creole Conversation Piece

The article discusses the role that the visual arts and museums—through the way their framing and selection choices shape viewers’ perception—play in the construction and deconstruction of post/colonial Caribbean identities. The locus of the analysis is a multimedia installation titled White Skin, Black Kin: A Creole Conversation Piece, which was mounted at the Barbados Museum by Barbadian Canadian visual artist Joscelyn Gardner in 2004. The artist's aim in the installation was to expose the telling gaps, silences, and omissions in regard to black and white kinship and inter-racial relations in artistic productions of the colonial period. One such production was the sub-genre of portraiture known as the conversation piece, which was fashionable among an emerging middle class that included colonial landowners and merchants eager to use that visual medium to simultaneously document the wealth their colonial connections brought them and disavow their use and abuse of black bodies to create that wealth. In challenging the conventions of the conversation piece, Gardner recovers unspoken and suppressed stories from the colonial Caribbean past in order to re-present black and white Creole females identities; and in her use of the installation to ‘intervene’ into items displayed in permanent exhibits, she demonstrates how the Museum can become a site of active contestation of received knowledge.

David Franks: Colonial Merchant

David Franks: Colonial Merchant

Accounting and Financial Reporting by a Late 18th Century American Charity

Empirical research to date has neglected accounting and external financial reporting among 18th century American charitable institutions. Contemporary understanding of 18th century American practices is supported by evidence relating to commercial transactions primarily among colonial merchants. Our study examines the accounting and financial reporting of the Charleston Orphan House, the first municipal orphanage in America, from its inception in 1790 through its first five years of operations. The institution was established by city ordinance in 1790 which required the institution “to keep a book of fair and regular accounts of all receipts and expenditures which will be subject at all times to the inspection of the Commissioners.” The ordinance charged the orphanage's Committee on Accounts to “audit” its accounts. The City Council required the institution's board chairman to countersign the financial statements in 1792 before subjecting them to a second “audit.” The Orphan House employed a system of account books that recorded and facilitated the reporting of expenditures and sources of funds. Accounting and external reporting may have been legitimizing factors to overcome the “liability of newness” by promoting a sense of propriety and transparency among benefactors.“I visited the Orphan House at which there were one hundred and seven boys and girls. This appears to be a charitable organization and under good management.”[President George Washington, diary entry, Saturday, May 7, 1791]

So great a proffit: how the East Indies trade transformed Anglo-American capitalism

In a work of sweep and ambition, James Fichter explores how American trade proved pivotal to the evolution of capitalism in the United States and helped to shape the course of the British Empire. Before the American Revolution, colonial merchants were part of a trading network that spanned the globe. After 1783, U.S. merchants began trading in the East Indies independently, creating a new class of investor-capitalists and the first generation of American millionaires. Such wealth was startling in a country where, a generation earlier, the most prosperous Americans had been Southern planters. This mercantile elite brought its experience and affluence to other sectors of the economy, helping to concentrate capital and create wealth, and paving the way for the modern business corporation. Conducted on free trade principles, American trade in Asia was so extensive that it undermined the monopoly of the British East India Company and forced Britain to open its own free trade to Asia. The United States and the British Empire thus converged around shared, Anglo-American free-trade ideals and financial capitalism in Asia. American traders also provided a vital link to the Atlantic world for Dutch Java and French Mauritius, and were at the vanguard of Western contact with Polynesia and the Pacific Northwest. Based on an impressive array of sources from Europe, Asia, Africa, and the United States, this pathbreaking book revolutionizes our understanding of the early American economy in a global context and the relationship between the young nation and its former colonial master.

Politics or Profit: New Yorkers Make their Wartime Choices

In Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961), Milo Minderbinder runs an international business during World War II that controls the market flow of everything from eggs to plum tomatoes to bombing runs. At various points, Minderbinder provides goods to the United States, Italians, and Germans, and negotiates the bombing and defense of an important bridge. The absurd episode reveals Minderbinder as a brilliant, resourceful businessman who brokered trade between nations at war. But he put profit ahead of personal friendships and political loyalties even while he insisted he was a friend and adamantly patriotic. Worse, he expressed outrage when others either questioned his motives or tried to stop him. The New York City merchants who traded illegally with Britain's enemies in the eighteenth century would have agreed with some of Milo Minderbinder's tactics. Like him, their drive for profit grew out of naked manifestations of a powerful commercial impulse that sometimes trumped their political allegiances and their willingness to abide by the law (p. 1). For both Minderbinder and New York merchants, profit was a powerful seduction. In Defying Empire, Thomas M. Truxes examines how New York merchants chased profit by detailing how they shipped contraband goods in and out of New York City during the Seven Years' War (1754-63). Truxes expertly details the movements of these goods as the colonial merchants conducted their illegal trade; and, while the trade was complicated, this well-written narrative clarifies the complex Atlantic market, legal and illegal, in the middle of the eighteenth century. Truxes is at his best when analyzing disputes between smugglers and the people bent on stopping them. Fortunately for the reader, those contests and the background to understand them dominate the book. Trading with the enemy was hardly new during the Seven Years' War. The wars between Britain and France that characterized the eighteenth century rarely interrupted trade. During King George's War (1744-48), for example,

Colonial merchants and the development of marine products trade in Hakodate

Colonial merchants and the development of marine products trade in Hakodate

Slave trade merchants of Spanish New Orleans, 1763–1803: Clarifying the colonial slave trade to Louisiana in Atlantic perspective

The Spanish era (1763–1803) saw the “re-Africanization” of Louisiana, and yet the colonial slave trade to Louisiana remains relatively undocumented. This essay seeks to clarify the Spanish-era trade by focusing on colonial slave-trade merchants in New Orleans in Atlantic perspective. Using the online Louisiana Slave Database, the paper identifies over two dozen principal slave-trade merchants, outlines the structure of the slaving mercantile community, and revises the scope of slave imports to the colony in the Spanish era.

La exportación minera en Chile 1800 – 1840: Un estudio de historia económica y social en la transición de la Colonia a la República

Luz María Méndez Beltrán has been studying various phases of Chile’s economic history for more than three decades. Her early work examined the Tribunal de Minería in its transition from the colonial to the national period. Next she explored international trade, with a particular interest in the exchange between Valparaíso and Philadelphia. The current study builds on past work, but with a considerably expanded scope. In La exportación minera, Méndez examines the impact on regional development of copper, silver, and gold exports from 1800 to 1840. It is an ambitious work, both in its use of sources and in its revision of early-nineteenth-century Chilean economic history.Whereas many historians have observed a sluggish Chilean economy in this period, Méndez shows that a strong mining sector indicates a flourishing northern economy. For each decade she studied, the value of mineral exports doubled or better. Since mining was such a dynamic sector, its growth had repercussions on all other sectors. In the future, it will be interesting to find how this mining growth influenced employment, agriculture, and government finances.Méndez laments that the study of early national development has overlooked the three mining ports of Coquimbo, Huasco, and Copiapó (Caldera). As she shows, these ports dominated the copper trade. They exported 98 percent of all copper, whereas Chile’s main port, Valparaíso, exported a meager 2 percent. She also shows the autonomy that numerous northern commercial houses maintained from the larger Valparaíso commercial firms. In the case of other minerals, however, Valparaíso dominated, with 44 percent of the nation’s silver and 94 percent of its gold moving through this port. Méndez does not adequately address why these minerals, also produced in the north, flowed south to Valparaíso.The most controversial interpretation in Méndez’s work is the role she attributes to gold in the early national economy. Previous scholars argued that gold mining stagnated after independence, eclipsed by booms in silver and copper. By contrast, Méndez finds that for 1800 – 40, gold represented 80 percent of the value of Chilean mineral exports, with copper accounting for 11 percent and silver a meager 8 percent. She does not identify the gold mines but conjectures that they were in Chile or neighboring countries. This interpretation is based on Valparaíso customs statistics. Since it challenges all previous studies on Chilean mineral production, it deserves further analysis.For this study, Méndez assembled a research team that examined two hundred volumes of customs records. Previous researchers had used this material in the Contaduría Mayor of Chile’s National Archive but found it so voluminous that they only sampled it. Méndez and her assistants scanned it thoroughly, assembling tables of mineral exports, shipping, and commercial firms. But as previous researchers have found when using mint and tithe records, no source is completely reliable on its own. Because some things are counted and others are not, historians face complex balancing of one source with another. In this case, gold export figures should be correlated with other data on mining activity.Méndez also concludes that, in the case of mining, the colonial economy flowed into the national one. She asserts that the early decades of the independence period built on colonial mining patterns rather than ushering in a new era. As evidence, she presents a series of short biographies describing how late colonial merchants and miners established ties with newly arrived European and North American entrepreneurs. Especially noteworthy were the marriages of British immigrants to the daughters of prominent local families.La exportación minera en Chile not only offers innovative interpretations but also handsomely presents illustrations of mines, ships, buildings, and landscapes. Particularly attractive are reproductions of John Marx’s paintings of northern Chile. The volume contains numerous data tables and graphs, and its notes and bibliography are useful. Most valuable, however, is Méndez’s challenge to traditional interpretations of Chile’s economic development.