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(More customer reviews)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 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.
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Jardine Matheson: Traders of the Far EastJardine Matheson & Co, founded in Canton on 1 July, 1832, has had a longer continuous existence than any other British, European or American business connected with the China trade. It is the only firm surviving from pre-Treaty days (before the Treaty of Nanking which opened China to foreign commerce in 1842) and it played a very important part in that process. The firm soon after moved to the newly ceded colony of Hong Kong, and ever since the firm has been associated with the island. 'Jardines is Hong Kong' someone once asserted to Lord Blake - an exaggeration, of course, but pardonable. And although Hong Kong has reverted to Chinese sovereignty, Jardine Matheson is likely to remain a major feature of the place and may well play a renewed role in mainland China far into the twenty-first century.Lord Blake traces the early beginnings of the firm, from William Jardine's first glimpse of Canton in 1802, through the rapid expansion and growth of the nineteenth century and into the next, leaving the story exactly half-way through the twentieth century, just as the Korean War breaks out. The early history of the firm has always been regarded as the most interesting part of the story.It, or its background, has been the subject of two fascinating historical novels: the late James Clavell's bestselling blockbuster Tia-pan (1966) and Timothy Mo's aclaimed An Insular Possession (1986). The real story is equally exciting in the hands of one of the most distinguished historians of the twentieth century.
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