Senior scholars in the field of the maritime history of Asia have recently produced a number of multivolume studies, notably those by Roderich Ptak, Peter Borschberg, and Anthony Reid. Paul Van Dyke's Merchants of Canton and Macao is the first part of a projected two-volume work on trade between Europe and China, and it is an important contribution to this growing literature. Drawing on an unprecedentedly wide range of European sources, the author produces a rich account of international trade at Canton (Guangzhou) during the course of the eighteenth century.
At the heart of Merchants of Canton and Macao are Van Dyke's detailed accounts of several key Chinese merchants, trading families, and commercial consortia active in the Canton trade. Special attention is paid to how these merchants negotiated their transactions within the context of organic institutional structures, such as personal networks and family dynamics, and the governmental regulations and constraints placed upon them. Particular issues included the need to mitigate different opportunity costs presented by the demands and needs of different Western traders, the logistical challenges of procuring products from the Chinese hinterland for this trade within the temporal and seasonal limits imposed by annual trading cycles, and a general paucity of commercial information.
Van Dyke paints convincing vignettes of the evolving strategies, reactions, and personal agendas that these Chinese merchants manifested over several generations. Almost all the merchants were contemporaries, and their experiences seem at first to be repetitively similar. However, beneath that appearance of similitude lay critical differences in coping strategies that were made necessary by the varying resources available to different individuals and groups, including their different aggregations of human and social capital, levels of access to Chinese officialdom both in the port-cities as well as the imperial capital, and access to the business and confidence of the foreigners who represented the different European trading companies. Van Dyke also details how these Chinese merchants served as brokers between the different geographical settings of the Chinese economic landscape, including the interaction between the economic hinterland (internal economy), the coastal ports (economic interface), and the sea (external economy).
The result is a masterfully executed volume that provides the reader with a wealth of information on the nature of East-West trade prior to the better-known nineteenth-century period. In particular, Van Dyke's exploitation of hitherto relatively unused and even unfamiliar European archival sources, including Danish, Swedish, and French materials, alongside the well-used records of the Dutch and English East India Company, accords his account a level of nuance not often seen in similar studies. As a case in point, one rather suspects that the distinction between private country trade and company trade, so well differentiated in the case of the English and Dutch during the late eighteenth to nineteenth centuries, was significantly less tidy in the period addressed by this book. As Van Dyke shows, negotiations between institutionalized and state-sanctioned rules of commerce were often mitigated and sometimes even superseded by personal rapport, social capital, and trust. The author's ability to tease out the interplay between all these dynamics is one of this volume's most important contributions to the field of Asian maritime and economic history. Of equal importance are the appendices, which comprise almost a third of the book. Students and researchers of Chinese maritime trade will especially value the comprehensive tables that serve as finding guides to the commercial data in the various European archives that Van Dyke has employed.
Bearing all these important contributions in mind, there are some criticisms that may be raised. Firstly, given that the study traverses between Chinese, European, and Southeast Asian history, greater consistency of keywords from each of these subfields' conventions would be critical to conferring upon the study an overall consistency. As an example, the term “hoppo,” the pidginized term used in Van Dyke's European textual sources, could have easily have been denoted by “hubu,” used in Chinese maritime and economic history, and would have immediately been understood by any reader well-informed about late-imperial Chinese economic history without the need to ferret out its actual implications from the contents of the book itself.
Second, while the book presents admirably detailed accounts of merchant activities, one wonders whether a more explicit master narrative might be useful for drawing tighter connections between the case studies that it presents. Van Dyke's analysis uses membership in the Co-Hong as a key marker of merchant business success. However, the specific dynamics shaping the rise (or fall) of specific merchants could be more clearly documented and delineated. In particular, it would be useful to know more about the ways in which merchants' activities, roles, and status in the pre-Co-Hong era were linked to their place in the Co-Hong regime established in 1760.
Finally, it is unclear whether Chinese state involvement in maritime trade was as intimate and direct as the author suggests. Even if there were frequent memorials to and responses from the imperial capital, it should not be assumed that the Qing emperor was as personally involved in the international trade as the author concludes (p. 175). For example, the supposed discussion that the Qing emperor and chief ministers had concerning a specific merchant (p. 183) seems highly improbable, given that the merchant involved was of a low social status. It seems more plausible that the local Chinese official representing the Qing fiscal department in Guangzhou would have been the one to deal with him on the state's behalf.
These minor criticisms should not distract us from this book's significant contributions, and it is with great enthusiasm that we await the second part of this multivolume work.
