Introduction

In the era of the Canton Trade (c. 1700–1842), China was the source of products and commodities that were avidly sought after by international traders and consumers alike. France, which was home to one of the three major East India companies, was a key participant in this trade, as well as one of the the eighteenth century’s two most important Western powers. Yet the French remain surprisingly underrepresented in Canton Trade scholarship. To ignore the French, or to dismiss them as simply “also-rans,” results in a skewed perception of the Canton System, a full and accurate understanding of which requires that all participating nations and ethnicities be included. Drawing on sources from other East India companies and archives as well as from those of France, Sino-French Trade at Canton, 1698–1842 rescues the French from the shadows, presents considerable new findings and corrects a number of misconceptions, and also makes available in English a wealth of information that was previously accessible only in French.

Conclusion

France was a key participant in the Canton Trade, although she has not received sufficient attention in its scholarship. Early to enter the trade, she continued, with occasional interruptions, to the end of the Canton System in 1842, and her vessels made over 265 voyages to China. The French model of Sino-European trade was distinctive, both in the structure and governance of the French East India Company and in the role of the private sector, and the nation’s contributions to, and influences on, the trade were both significant and diverse, not limited to the strictly commercial. A knowledge of the French experience is essential to a thorough understanding of the Canton Trade, as well as to an appreciation of the cultural, political, economic, and other factors that shaped each nation’s response.

Introduction

This chapter expounds on how the making of war and British knowledge about China were intertwined, and proves a brief review on Opium War literature. What previous historiography saw as the reasons for starting the war were, in actuality, new knowledge about China to the British, which was made in Canton by the Warlike party as both a discourse for mobilising the British state to wage the war and as a moral justification afterwards. The following five chapters explain this new knowledge and its relationship to the Canton system and the war argument.

Conclusions: Profit Orders of Canton

The concluding chapter theorizes, in the context of historical capitalism, how the Canton system and the First Opium War created different kind of ‘profit orders’ for the Chinese and the British respectively and how the war represents a clash of the two orders.

A War of Words over ‘Barbarian’

This chapter assesses a decade-long debate that occurred within the British community in Canton over how best to translate the word ‘yi夷‎’—as either ‘barbarian’ or ‘strangers’. The dispute first raged in the Canton Register for more than two years beginning in 1828, and played a key role in igniting the war argument in 1830. The community agreed that it meant ‘barbarian’, representing a Chinese conception of foreigners as uncivilised savages. The translation was in wide circulation after the 1835 war lobbying campaign in London and formed an integral part of the pro-war argument. However, by 1837 the Canton community belatedly retracted their earlier translation, believing that yi should be rendered into English as ‘strangers’. However, in the early Qing, the main word used to name Europeans and things European was xiyang (Western Ocean). This term was replaced by ‘yi’ after the 1750s, coinciding with the establishment of the Canton system. Yi was another part of the Chinese soft border that classified Europeans as ‘strangers’ to be kept out of the Chinese civilizational order and was also another ideological device used to shore up the port’s vested interests.

Breaking the Soft Border

A third force at play in the British maritime public sphere, an inadvertent participant neither anti-war nor pro-war, was the ‘Canton system’. More than the physical border of the Thirteen Factories (Canton’s foreign trading quarters), the Canton system was primarily a ‘soft border’ made of a series of rules and regulations that constrained British merchants’ activities in China and restricted their interaction with Qing subjects. Soft borders here were figurative borderlines on the maritime frontier that cut through transnational information and interaction networks. By preventing interactions other than those necessary for trade, the Qing believed they had successfully prevented the possibility of foreigners joining forces with Chinese rebels—the dynasty’s major threat. The security order in Canton was paramount to the Qing ruling class. However, the Warlike party believed it necessary to start a war to abolish the system that confined British trade expansion and insulted the British Empire.