In 1882, the China trader Albert Heard returned to Boston, forlorn and mostly penniless. It had been seven years since his bankruptcy and the failure of Augustine Heard and Company. For the rest of his life, Heard would try, with occasional success, to maintain his Brahmin lifestyle—spending leisurely mornings at the Atheneum, obliging callers to his Beacon Hill house, and playing cards at the Somerset Club. He found a job as a commission agent for the Lowell Gun Company, hawking their guns in Russia. But his finances never rose to the level of his professional and social ambitions. In 1890, depressed “as if broken in two” and with his health failing, Heard died.

The sense of anticlimax that marked Albert Heard’s final years epitomized the China trade and its decline in the US political economy. In the early years of the American republic, the China trader was a proverbial figure in New England culture. Stories circulated of men such as Elias Hasket Derby, Thomas Handasyd Perkins, and John Jacob Astor, who ventured to the East Indies and obtained unimaginable wealth in a short span of time. And yet, by the second half of the nineteenth century, the China trader was a specimen of a bygone era. What happened?

In The China Firm, the historian Thomas Larkin provides a compelling set of explanations. He follows the rise and decline of Augustine Heard, one of the leading American trading houses in China, through the firm’s resurgence during the First Opium War and its attempted reinvention in the treaty port era, running steamships on the Yangzi. The result is a sophisticated and nuanced work that reinserts, as Larkin puts it, “Americans into the history of British empire in China.”

The China Firm begins in the cauldron of the Opium War. As the British were evacuated from Canton, a number of Americans remained behind to exploit the swell of opportunities resulting from their exodus. Among them were Joseph Coolidge Jr. and George Basil Dixwell, partners in Augustine Heard and Company, who took on consignments for the British firm Jardine Matheson. In what became typical of US–British commercial relations in China, the two firms alternated between collaboration and rivalry once normalcy was restored.

In succeeding chapters, Larkin shifts perspectives between the intimate and the imperial. He recounts drawn-out dinners, horseback rides, regattas, social clubs, and the various trappings the Heards endured to maintain their status as members of Hong Kong’s colonial elite. There are frustrated wives and secret families, including John Heard’s relationship with the Macanese woman Lam Kew-fong, with whom he had a son. In one innovative chapter, Larkin employs social network analysis to show, in stunning detail, how the firm’s social, diplomatic, and kinship networks were at once cosmopolitan and insular, with the Heards exhibiting a “homophilic tendency” toward the British and other Americans.

Larkin is a sensitive writer; he is at his best when explicating the fluid and often contradictory nature of American expatriate identity in what he calls the “transimperial dimension of white colonial spaces” (p. 11). In public, the Heards shed their American national identities and embraced a shared Anglo-Saxon identity to harness Britain’s imperial influence for their own ends. In private, however, they chafed against these pretensions and struggled with the quiet sectarian tension between their Unitarian beliefs and the Anglican faith. Larkin’s book sparkles most when he delves into the inner lives of his subjects, dredging their desires and disappointments to the surface.

Another great virtue of The China Firm is the time frame it covers. Whereas studies of the “old” China trade with the USA tend to conclude with the Opium War, Larkin begins with the war’s aftermath and carries the narrative through its twilight years. By taking this chronological approach, the book presents fresh and original material—such as Americans engaging in a short-lived trade with the Taiping rebels and diplomatic tensions from the American Civil War impinging on their relations with the British.

At the same time, The China Firm is not without blemishes. Similar to the transnational actors it so gracefully portrays, the book suffers from a kind of identity crisis. Is it, ultimately, a history of American diplomacy in East Asia? Is it about the making of Hong Kong and the broader history of empire? Or, as its subtitle suggests, is it not so much about Americans at all, but about the “making of British colonial society”? Across six chapters, Larkin touches variously on all these themes, but in a way that might have benefited from a more crisply defined and sustained thesis. Without one to bring the book’s insights into sharper focus, the reader is left to wonder: why do the Heards and their ilk deserve our attention anyway?

Another shortcoming is that despite the word “firm” in its title, the book gives sparing attention to the actual operations of business. In Chapter 4, for example, Larkin examines the Heards’ ambitious but ultimately faltering attempt to build a foothold in the Yangzi steamship business. In accounting for why the venture eventually failed, Larkin blames a “complex convergence of political and commercial developments,” pointing to exogenous factors, such as interference from the Taipings, over endogenous reasons such as mismanagement. Yet despite his impressive use of archival sources elsewhere, Larkin appears to have passed over financial journals, account books, and other sources that might have better explained the reasons for Augustine Heard’s demise. As such, the reader is left to puzzle why, if foreign firms, such as Jardine Matheson and David Sassoon and Company, were able to capitalize on the opportunities of China’s treaty port era, Americans struggled to do the same.

In spite of these flaws, Larkin’s The China Firm makes an excellent addition to the literature on the China trade. It is intelligently written and richly textured, recreating a vanished and fascinating world.