Author: John D. Wong
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107150663
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
An innovative new study of the Canton trade networks that helped to shape the modern world.

Author: Paul A. Van Dyke
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
ISBN: 9888390937
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
It is not often recognized that China was one of the few places in the early modern world where all merchants had equal access to the market. This study shows that private traders, regardless of the volume of their trade, were granted the same privileges in Canton as the large East India companies. All of these companies relied, to some extent, on private capital to finance their operations. Without the investments from individuals, the trade with China would have been greatly hindered. Competitors, large and small, traded alongside each other while enemies traded alongside enemies. Buddhists, Muslims, Catholics, Protestants, Parsees, Armenians, Hindus, and others lived and worked within the small area in the western suburbs of Canton designated for foreigners. Cantonese shopkeepers were not allowed to discriminate against any foreign traders. In fact, the shopkeepers were generally working in a competitive environment, providing customer-oriented service that generated goodwill, friendship, and trust. These contributed to the growth of the trade as a whole. While many private traders were involved in smuggling opium, others, such as Nathan Dunn, were much opposed to it. The case studies in this volume demonstrate that fortunes could be made in China by trading in legitimate items just as successfully as in illegitimate ones, which tellingly suggests that the rapid spread of opium smuggling in China could be a result of inadequate, rather than excessive, regulation by the Qing government. ‘For this absorbing book, Van Dyke and Schopp have convened excellent scholars, junior and senior, to throw new light on the foreign merchants outside the East India companies who shaped China’s engagement with the world at least as much as the companies’ men did, if not more. The slumbering field of foreign trade in Qing China has come back to life.’ —Timothy Brook, University of British Columbia ‘Much scholarship on the China trade has focused on the activities of the vast state-sponsored companies. This book flips the script. Now we know that, right under the noses of those economic behemoths, smaller private traders from Europe, America, and China were quietly reshaping the trade with their innovation, networking, grit, and dreams.’ —John R. Haddad, The Pennsylvania State University

Author: Jonathan Goldstein
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110395460
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
The Jewish communities of East and Southeast Asia display an impressive diversity. Jonathan Goldstein’s book covers the period from 1750 and focuses on seven of the area’s largest cities and trading emporia: Singapore, Manila, Taipei, Harbin, Shanghai, Rangoon, and Surabaya. The book isolates five factors which contributed to the formation of transnational, multiethnic, and multicultural identity: memory, colonialism, regional nationalism, socialism, and Zionism. It emphasizes those factors which preserved specifically Judaic aspects of identity. Drawing extensively on interviews conducted in all seven cities as well as governmental, institutional, commercial, and personal archives, censuses, and cemetery data, the book provides overviews of communal life and intimate portraits of leading individuals and families. Jews were engaged in everything from business and finance to revolutionary activity. Some collaborated with the Japanese while others confronted them on the battlefield. The book attempts to treat fully and fairly the wide spectrum of Jewish experience ranging from that of the ultra-Orthodox to the completely secular.

Author: Frederic Delano Grant, Jr.
Publisher: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers
ISBN: 9004276564
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
Modern bank insurance is traced to its roots in The Chinese Cornerstone of Modern Banking: The Canton Guaranty System and the Origins of Bank Deposit Insurance 1780-1933. Frederic Delano Grant, Jr. provides new understandings of the Canton System, collective responsibility for debt at Canton, and the history of deposit insurance. The Canton Guaranty System inspired radical reform in New York in 1829 – the ancestor of all modern deposit insurance. Yet it was never the success imagined, and soon failed. In the Opium War, the Chinese government as implicit guarantor was forced to pay its debts in full on 23 July 1843. The afflictions of the Chinese system, including moral hazard, too big to fail, and unenforced laws, remain familiar today.

Author: Jonathan Goldstein
Publisher: Merwinasia
ISBN: 9780983659969
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"Jonathan Goldstein is our premier historian of the trade conducted between Philadelphia and China. His carefully researched new book casts needed light on the China trade of Stephen Girard, a key Philadelphia China trader, and an important figure in early United States business history. One of our first millionaires, Girard bridged several worlds. He was a curious and adaptive American, and the product of the France of his birth, naming his trading ships for enlightenment French philosophes. Goldstein's book looks at Girard's encounter with China, tracking the full arc of his China trading from entry through withdrawal, noting Girard's careful study and trade risk assessment from start to end. This book will be welcomed by scholars in various topics in American, Asian and European history. Its treatment of current popular topics such as cultural differences and perceptions, drugs and smuggling, and issues of national sovereignty and solvency will have popular appeal as well." --Frederic Delano Grant, Jr., attorney and economic historian ". . . ably traces the motivation and preparations for Girard's China ventures, detailing his legitimate commerce as well as the infamous trade in opium, which was itself both a prominent feature and the catalyst for the destruction of the pre-1842 Canton system." --Robert Gardella, emeritus professor of history, U.S. Merchant Marine Academy "Goldstein is one of the major historians studying the Old China Trade and other aspects of the western relationship with China. An important contribution to the literature of the economic relationship between the West and China." --Murray A. Rubinstein, Baruch College, CUNY

Author: Paul A. Van Dyke
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
ISBN: 9888139320
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 533

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Book Description
Merchants were central to the huge growth in China’s foreign trade and contributed to the development of world markets and networks. Merchants of Canton and Macao: Success and Failure in Eighteenth-Century Chinese Trade brings together much new research about the inner workings of the merchants of Canton and Macao. The book studies in detail the leading Chinese merchants and merchant families as well as the porcelain and silk trades. By examining the successes and failures of dozens of Chinese merchants involved in foreign trade, it provides fresh insights into China’s unique form of capitalism and her role in the rise of global commerce. Van Dyke’s conclusions on the nature of Qing policy towards foreign trade are bold, original and supported by intensive research. In contrast to the traditional focus on British and American trade, his research draws on archives in multiple languages, spread around the world. ‘Like its predecessor, this volume offers a detailed and vivid reconstruction of business practices based on a remarkable collection of archival sources in Chinese and diverse European languages. It will be especially welcome by economic historians as well as anyone who wants to understand global history as it played out in a particular place.’ —R. Bin Wong, Distinguished Professor of History and director of the Asia Institute, UCLA ‘Once again Paul Van Dyke has plumbed the depths of the archives to provide us with an extraordinary catalogue of the activities of European and Chinese traders during the heyday of the Canton trade. In this second volume of his encyclopedic study, Van Dyke focuses in detail on the transactions that took place between foreign private and company traders and Chinese licensed merchants.’ —Madeleine Zelin, Dean Lung Professor of Chinese Studies, Columbia University ‘This is a great study which will be the ultimate work on the subject for many years to come. It is as complete as the available documentation at present makes possible; it is concise, well organized and the subject is researched with great thoroughness.’ —Christiaan Jörg, author of Porcelain and the Dutch China Trade

Author: Dael A. Norwood
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226815587
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
Introduction: America's Business with China -- Founding a Free, Trading Republic -- The Paradox of a Pacific Policy -- Troubled Waters -- Sovereign Rights, or America's First Opium Problem -- The Empire's New Roads -- This Slave Trade of the Nineteenth Century -- A Propped-Open Door -- Death of a Trade, Birth of a Market.

Author: Eric Jay Dolin
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 087140348X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 508

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Book Description
Ancient China collides with newfangled America in this epic tale of opium smugglers, sea pirates, and dueling clipper ships. Brilliantly illuminating one of the least-understood areas of American history, best-selling author Eric Jay Dolin now traces our fraught relationship with China back to its roots: the unforgiving nineteenth-century seas that separated a brash, rising naval power from a battered ancient empire. It is a prescient fable for our time, one that surprisingly continues to shed light on our modern relationship with China. Indeed, the furious trade in furs, opium, and bêche-de-mer—a rare sea cucumber delicacy—might have catalyzed America’s emerging economy, but it also sparked an ecological and human rights catastrophe of such epic proportions that the reverberations can still be felt today. Peopled with fascinating characters—from the “Financier of the Revolution” Robert Morris to the Chinese emperor Qianlong, who considered foreigners inferior beings—this page-turning saga of pirates and politicians, coolies and concubines becomes a must-read for any fan of Nathaniel Philbrick’s Mayflower or Mark Kurlansky’s Cod.

Author: Jean Gordon Lee
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description

Author: Dong Wang
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538149397
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
Now fully revised and updated, The United States and China offers a comprehensive synthesis of US-Chinese relations from initial contact to the present. Balancing the modern (1784–1949) and contemporary (1949–present) periods, Dong Wang retraces centuries of interaction between two of the world’s great powers from the perspective of both sides. She examines state-to-state diplomacy, as well as economic, social, military, religious, and cultural interplay within varying national and international contexts. As China itself continues to grow in global importance, so too does the US-Chinese relationship, and this book provides an essential grounding for understanding its past, present, and possible futures.