Conclusion

Abstract

When we look at each of the individual chapters in this volume, it is often difficult to envision the importance of these private traders to the commerce as a whole. For the most part, their operations were miniscule compared to the large volumes of goods that each of the European East India companies purchased in China annually. The importance of the companies to the trade is much easier to qualify and quantify owing to the massive volumes of records that they left behind for us to examine. It is thus understandable that those enterprises have commanded most of the attention of scholars in the past; their work now constitutes many dozens of publications. It was, in fact, necessary for those studies to be done first, before we could begin to understand the roles that private investors played in the trade....