Jardine Matheson: Traders of the Far East

Brilliantly written history of The Princely Hong
Written by renowned historian Robert Blake, this commissioned history of Jardine Matheson presents a sweeping history of this primus inter pares among British hongs, whose 171-year existence helped revitalize an Empire, and irrevocably changed the face of Asia.

Jardine Matheson is a British company whose prodigious trading activities were responsible for helping maintain a delicate balance of trade for Great Britain during the nineteenth century. A unique tripartite trade arrangement, bullion for tea and tea for opium, emerged, and the story of how this came about is as interesting as the story of Jardines.

During the 1830s, Chinese tea was in great demand in Britain, which consumed about 30 show more million pounds per annum. Tariffs on tea imports contributed about three million pounds annually to the British treasury; therefore, tea commerce held great political and commercial significance. However, this happy state of affairs presented a conundrum. Because the Chinese would only accept specie metals, such as silver, in payment for what an observer called 'the deleterious produce of China', the ever-increasing importation of tea from China began to considerably--and negatively--affect Britain's trade balance with that kingdom. To the Chinese kingdom's detriment and regret, the traders learned through trial and error that Indian opium was the key to maintaining the lucrative tea trade with the Middle Kingdom.

Jardine Matheson did not devise this three-sided trade, but the firm was in the right place at the right time, and was thus poised to profit immeasurably from this sort of arbitrage. The China trade made Jardines immensely powerful--so powerful, in fact, that its lobbying efforts to exact an indemnity from the Chinese government, which tried to stop the opium trade, led to the First Opium War.

This book makes an enthralling addition to business historiography, and considerably illuminates the role of private firms in economic and colonial adventurism in the Far East during the nineteenth century. For further reading, I recommend "Merchants to Multinationals: British Trading Companies in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries" if one wants to delve more into how the great British trading companies adapted to a changing economic landscape.

(Posted in Amazon.com, January 24, 2004) show less