Meike Fellinger
Thesis statement
“Beyond company control: merchants, mariners and the British
private trade in Chinese export wares, c.1720-1763.”
Meike Fellinger
This PhD thesis examines the private networks and multifaceted trading activities of a group
of notorious border-crossers: the maritime personnel of the East India Companies. My
research lies at the intersection of British overseas trade, social network analysis, business
history and the history of consumption in Europe; it is not, therefore, a traditional history of
the East India Companies. Instead, my study places the private trade of Company servants in
its wider European context – by exploring the ties of China traders to wholesalers, smugglers,
and brokers in Britain and on the continent. Through the analysis of hitherto largely neglected
business papers (and private mercantile correspondence), along with Company documents
from various European and American archives, this thesis provides a new understanding of
the ways in which mariners acted as merchants in Europe.
The steady growth of the China trade after the Peace of Utrecht in 1713 has been attributed to
the rising competition that the smaller Companies (which focused on trade rather than
territorial gain, such as the Ostend, Danish, and Swedish East India Company) brought about.
The first half of the eighteenth century was also a period in which the EIC outcompeted its
greatest rival in Asia, the Dutch VOC. Between 1720 and 1740 the French Company
experienced its ‘Golden Years’, and so did many British private traders who populated the
high ranks of several of the new ‘monopoly Companies’. Especially in the first decades of
their existence, the smaller Companies relied heavily on the practical experience, business
acumen and navigational knowledge of British (and, to a lesser extent, French and Dutch)
China traders.
The transfer of knowledge and capital through the migration of British (predominantly
Scottish) commanders and supercargoes to the European mainland was accompanied by a
greater integration of markets for Chinese export wares. Britons who worked for the smaller
Companies established close contacts with dealers and consumers in port cities across northwestern Europe, while maintaining their ties of friendship and business with colleagues and
distributors at home. The informal networks thus created criss-crossed the boundaries of the
different Companies and impacted on the flow of information on price developments,
incoming goods from China, and changes in taste in Europe and the North-American
colonies, thus providing also a crucial communication network for the prediction of markets
in Europe.
At the core of the project lies the attempt to deepen our understanding of the pan-European
ordering and distribution networks for Chinese export wares (such as tea, porcelain, silk and
other decorative wares), and the role of private traders within these processes. Historians of
retail and consumption have studied the role of mercers, upholsterers and minor shopkeepers
in marketing East India goods through print advertisement and display alongside Western
decorative art. Carolyn Sargentson in particular has shown how mercers (in her case Parisian
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Meike Fellinger
Thesis statement
marchants merciers) sat at a strategic position between large suppliers of goods and the local
finishing trades. 1 What we cannot grasp from her and other works, however, is how the
wholesale trade in Chinese consumer goods was actually organized, and how the
communication between consumers and overseas traders (who procured most novelties and
fine luxury wares from China) was mediated.
The re-distribution of Chinese export wares following the regular Company sales is equally
neglected by Company historians, whose interest in the objects of the Indies trade often
ceases with the arrival of the cargo in the Company warehouses. 2 My thesis seeks to fill that
void by emphasising the active participation of China traders in the wholesale, retail and
special commission trade in Europe. By analysing the collaboration (and collusion) of
Company supercargoes and wholesale dealers in important nodes such as Amsterdam,
London, Cadiz, Gothenburg, Ostend and Hamburg, I seek to develop a more systematic
account of the functioning of the commission trade while mapping the geographies of British
private trade in a pan-European trading arena.
The dramatis personae of this study are those maritime traders who possessed a unique set of
skills, commercial experience and navigational knowledge, as they were ‘brought up’ in the
merchant fleet of the East India Companies – or who joint the China trade at a later stage of
their career, having worked their way up to the position of captains and supercargoes in the
Atlantic, Mediterranean or intra-European coastal trades. Supercargoes of the Canton trade
(who represented a curious mix between commission agent, entrepreneur and diplomat) were
substantial merchants in their own right, who took on the responsibility for managing the
Company business abroad. During the first half of the eighteenth century, supercargoes
accompanied Company ships to China and back – thus spending less than six months at a time
in Eastern ports. In recognition of their key role for the success of the Company enterprise,
they were granted a share in the profit of a voyage, as well as the privilege to conduct
substantial freight-free trade on their own account. Commanders who had an equally
influential position on board were treated with similar respect and commercial remuneration.
Given the special requirements for gaining a post in the lucrative China trade, and the direct
competition between the Companies for competent personnel, there existed from the late
seventeenth century a pan-European labour market for such maritime traders.3
China supercargoes, commanders, and officers formed a close-knit community with a strong
professional identity and extensive links to metropolitan circles of ship-owners, insurers and
bankers. 4 The amount of dining, gambling, gift-giving, and intermarrying within this
1
Carolyn Sargentson, Merchants and Luxury Markets: The Marchant Merciers of Eighteenth-Century Paris
(London, 1996).
2
The lack of research on Company auctions and the inner-European and Atlantic re-distribution has contributed
to the marginalisation of the privilege trade in the literature on the East India Companies. One exception is
certainly the literature on tea smuggling. See, for instance, Hoh-Cheong and Lorna H. Mui, ‘Smuggling and the
British Tea trade before 1784', The American Historical Review, 74:1 (1968), pp. 44-73.
3
An excellent account of the frequency by which British mariners accepted employment in other Companies is
given by Conrad Gill, Merchants and Mariners of the 18th Century (Westport: Connecticut, 1961, repr. 1978).
4
On the social ties between British East India commanders in the later part of the eighteenth century see the
important article by H.V. Bowen, ‘Privilege and Profit: Commanders of East Indiamen as Private Traders,
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Meike Fellinger
Thesis statement
community might be seen as a social component of the sophisticated commercial
collaboration that developed within these transnational collectives. Although much of the
literature on the China trade still assumes an antagonism between British commanders and
supercargoes, hitherto neglected archival materials on the personal networks and commercial
ventures of members of both groups show a rather different picture. 5 In fact, the lines of
competition and friendship were far more complex than previously thought, given the
persistent focus on the ‘national’ in studies of European Company trade with the East.
Instead, this study highlights the centrality of cross-Company networks and alternative modes
of business organization within the larger Company infrastructure. Regional bonds and family
ties were powerful among the Scottish, English and Irish China traders on the European
continent, and they also helped to integrate private trade into parallel channels of distribution
such as smuggling.6 A case study on a Scottish network of commanders, supercargoes and
Company directors is used to shed light on the ways in which informal networks undermined
the otherwise hierarchical structure of the Companies.
On a theoretical as well as practical level, the study of mariners as merchants contributes to
the discussion about the ambiguous relationship between Company and private trade in the
first half of the eighteenth century. By focusing more in-depth on the careers and activities of
individual China supercargoes and commanders (including Captain Thomas Hall, Robert
Hewer, Arthur Abercromby, Charles Irvine, Captain Francis Nelly, the brothers Alexander
and Abraham Hume and Colin and Hugh Campbell), this project seeks to reveal both the
opportunities and constraints of private trade against the background of changing Company
regulations. Despite the many restrictions on tonnage and on certain commodities that were
put in place by the Companies over the course of the eighteenth century, private traders had
considerable space for manoeuvring. 7 In fact, every alteration of private trade regulations
created a new set of opportunities, which individual Company servants were quick to discover
and use to their own advantage.
It is crucial to recognize that private traders gathered information about the particular
restrictions and commercial strategies of all Companies trading to China, and their investment
in goods was made in response to the niches that were created by the various private trade
Entrepreneurs and Smugglers, 1760-1813’, International Journal of Maritime History, XIX, No. 2 (2007), pp.
43-88.
5
The contruction of this antagonism has largely been influenced by the work of Hosea Ballou Morse, The
Chronicles of the East India Company Trading to China, 1635-1834, 4 vols (Oxford, 1926) who transcribed and
annotated much of the official correspondence between British supercargoes and commanders in China. The
regular letters addressed to the ships’ captains warning them against running goods ashore and to retain
discipline among its crew was certainly an element of this official relationship. But, it does not flesh out the
private arrangements, sociability and the formation of alliances between commanders and individual
supercargoes. Supercargoes are considered as loyal servants (with some spectacular exceptions) in his work.
Commmanders instead are depicted as rough-hewn and self-interested men whose trading needed to be regulated
and contained.
6
Smuggling ventures were widespread among British supercargoes and commanders who were working for the
English, Ostend, Swedish, Danish Companies and Prussian Companies. They heavily relied on friends and
families who received consignments of tea and silks in relatively remote parts of Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of
Man.
7
This research focuses exclusively on the regulations set in place by the EIC, Ostend and Swedish East India
Company and the reactions of British-born traders within those Companies.
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Meike Fellinger
Thesis statement
regulations of other ‘monopoly Companies’ as well. Private traders assembled goods for a
European, not only a domestic market, and their operations have therefore to be set within a
matrix of competition that included a small group of large players (the Companies) who were
relatively slow moving in their business decisions, and a larger group of small players (the
individual private traders) whose salient features were flexibility, opportunism and nonspecialization. A more comprehensive treatment of the dynamic behind private and Company
trade than it is currently offered, and of the various links that connected both branches of
commerce, is necessary in order to come to terms with the question if the East India
Companies deserve to be labelled ‘monopolists’ after all in this period.
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