British Private Traders between India and China

Abstract

During the eighteenth century, China was by no means part of the emerging British empire, formal or informal, but it was on the borderlands of that empire. Within a rapidly changing commercial and political context, British private traders, investors in India and their agents in China created new connections between the subcontinent and the southeast coast of China. In this new commercial system, British private traders reigned supreme. But this revolution was not merely commercial. Rather, a new, predominantly British financial system linking India and China was forged, which ran parallel to other existing networks of Indian-based commission merchants such as those of the Portuguese, Muslims, Armenians, and later, Parsees. However, with these new financial connections came political entanglements. Investors in India and their British agents in China used the coercive power of the British state (without its permission or knowledge) and their own private Indian militia to enforce their contracts with Chinese merchants. Before the rise of aggressive agency houses such as Jardine, Matheson & Company, and the expansion of the nineteenth-century opium trade, eighteenth-century British private traders in search of personal gain drew China into the financial and political orbit of Britain’s burgeoning Asian empire.