No one economic and political entanglement was more fateful for modern China than that created by the opium trade between Calcutta and Canton. And no firm was perhaps more central to the trade's contours and dynamics than Jardine, Matheson & Co. In this new biography of the firm's founding merchants, William Jardine (1784–1843) and James Matheson (1796–1878), Richard Grace sets out to give a balanced account of the private and public lives of two men who have been equally denigrated as war-mongering drug dealers and celebrated as steadfast pioneers of free trade. Grace's text is the first to provide full-length biographies of either man, and it adds to a field that includes several company histories, published letter collections, and many studies of the opium trade and the Qing-British Opium War (1839–1842). Grace compliments this literature by adding flesh to the bones of earlier biographies and by weaving a rich tapestry of historical detail to contextualize his subjects’ ambitions and actions. Grace does not offer a business or economic history, though one catches glimpses of both.
As a biographer Grace is both comprehensive and meticulous. He follows his subjects from birth to the grave, and he has an eye for the picturesque that injects both verisimilitude and verve into his story. Using key scholarship from multiple fields, the author conjures late eighteenth century Scotland with its Enlightenment learning and limited social mobility as well as the rambunctious, enterprising, multi-ethnic mercantile world that spanned the Indian Ocean and China seas. Grace's ability to deftly weave these studies into a rich historical tapestry is one of the text's strengths. The tapestry allows him to fill archival gaps in his subject's early lives and demonstrate how Jardine and Matheson were men of the moment nonetheless distinguished by their unique influence. After three chapters on their early lives and first steps into the China trade, four core chapters detail the partnership's beginnings, business operations, and most interestingly, the critical innovations the partners introduced to the opium trade. Subsequent chapters assess the extent to which these men helped instigate the Opium War, and two final chapters follow the merchant princes back to London where their success in China produced political careers and, in the case of Matheson, large landholdings.
In Grace's hands, Jardine and Matheson offer a window onto a wider world of declining monopoly capitalism, rising free trade, global commodity circulation, nascent international finance, and the geopolitics they shaped. Yet, amidst the text's charming richness the reader also begins to feel doubts. Many story lines are familiar. Grace draws liberally from existing scholarship to give his narrative momentum and substance. His archival contributions—letters, school records, wills, newspapers, and site visits—nicely compliment earlier studies, but Grace ultimately echoes these older narratives. Chief amongst them is the narrative of hardworking, scrupulous British merchants who resisted unwarranted regulation, oppressive fees, and abusive treatment by Qing government officials. For the most part, the Qing government and Chinese merchants remain offstage, allowing standard caricatures of their actions, intents, and ideas to provide the requisite foils. This seems a rather unfortunate choice by the author given the available scholarship that has complicated such narratives of Qing-European engagements. What might Jardine and Matheson look like should we think more critically and more historically about the kinds of frictions produced in Canton by differing notions of commerce and regulation?
A second doubt concerns the text's framing. What the empire is in Opium and Empire is less than clear. Grace does not elaborate on passing references to its Victorian and free trade character, so it is hard to tell in what way Jardine and Matheson offer “microcosms of the imperial experience.” Moreover, his gesture towards the gentlemanly capitalist thesis offered by P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins (British Imperialism. London: Longman, 1993) does less to evaluate the thesis's capacity to capture the British commercial project in China than to argue for his subjects’ inclusion in the ranks.
Rather than microcosms of an imperial experience, what Grace in fact shows is a microcosm of global capitalist commerce during an extraordinary period of expansion. Though it is hard to see any empire other than the firm's own, the reader has a front row seat to the rocky seas of capitalist accumulation, the growth of the opium trade, and Jardine's and Matheson's own addict-like thirst to dominate the trade. Jardine Matheson & Co did much more than trade in opium, and perhaps—as the author claims—opium does not tell the full story of the founder's lives, but Grace shows how as the era's most efficient and illicit vehicle for capitalist profit-making, opium certainly held sway over the rhythms and preoccupations the two experienced while living on the China coast.
These critiques aside, Opium and Empire is a thoroughly enjoyable page turner. It provides an engaging overview to the “China trade” during the first decades of the nineteenth century. While the stories will be quite familiar to specialists, for general audiences and those new to the field, the text offers a colorful introduction.
