Book Review:
H-Diplo Review Essay 622
Thomas M. Larkin. The China Firm: American Elites and the Making of British Colonial Society. Columbia University Press, 2024. ISBN: 9780231210676 (paperback).
25 March 2025 | PDF: https://hdiplo.org/to/E622 | X: @HDiplo | BlueSky: @h-diplo.bsky.social
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Review by Richard J. Grace, Providence College
At the conclusion the First Opium War, in 1842, the Celestial Empire ceded the island of Hong Kong to Great Britain. Prior to the war, British merchants at Canton (Guangzhou) had complained vociferously to their home government that the Chinese authorities had declined diplomatic relations with Britain but imposed regulations that affected the business of foreign merchants. To escape from that uncomfortable situation, British merchants sought an entrepot of their own, separate from Chinese interdictions as in the case of the opium trade. When Commissioner Lin Zexu seized the foreign opium stocks in 1839, the Scottish merchant William Jardine sent a “paper of hints” to Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston, suggesting that the British naval squadron then in Chinese waters seize a suitable island and initiate a negotiation on such terms as: “You take my opium—I take your islands in return—we are therefore Quits, — & thenceforth if you please let us live in friendly Communion and good fellowship.”[1]
When the Treaty of Nanking was agreed to in 1842, Hong Kong was the island that was ceded to Britain; by that time, it was already in British possession, as British naval forces had taken control of the island in 1841. Almost immediately, British firms had begun setting up their operations there and much of the foreign trade of Canton relocated to the new British colony. The Hong merchants, who had been the required conduit of foreign trade at Canton, quickly recognized that “the island-entrepot meant the end of Canton as they knew it.”[2] American firms followed the initial British establishments at Hong Kong, and they became participants in an evolving China trade that took shape differently from the pre-war commerce. The most prominent American firms in the China trade at Canton prior to the Opium War were Russell & Co., Wetmore & Co., Olyphant & Co., and Augustine Heard & Co.
Thomas Larkin’s monograph is the story of Augustine Heard & Co., which was established by Massachusetts people in 1840 and which was declared bankrupt by 1878. The book concentrates much of its attention on four nephews of Augustine Heard, Sr., the founding father of the company. John Heard, Augustine Heard, Jr., Albert Farley Heard, and George Farley Heard were the directors of the Heard business in its heyday.
For most of its life, Augustine Heard & Co. was at home in Hong Kong, though it had offices in some of the treaty ports, most prominently Shanghai. Accordingly, Larkin’s book devotes much of its attention to the way in which the American firm adapted to the circumstances of commerce and society as established by British firms on the island. The book takes in business history, cultural history, personal biographies, and transnational commercial developments. It is a valuable addition to the growing stock of studies of the mercantile history of East Asia during a period when China was in decline. It is written more for scholars than for general readership, in part because of its style of composition, with a vocabulary that employs terms which are more commonly used in other disciplines. In short, the text is sometimes thick, requiring multiple readings for some sentences. However, that does not subvert the value of the author’s research and organization.
The chapters deal with many interesting facets of the firm’s headquarters in Hong Kong, including, for example, the racial dimension of the relationship between these American businessmen and their Chinese personnel who had a great deal to do with the smooth operations of the business and the domicile (under one roof). As the household served commercial affairs and personal accommodation, the operation of the company headquarters had to satisfy a great number of functions, including transactions and entertaining.
One of the most important elements of the book, one which Larkin handles deftly, is the rapport (or lack thereof) between American merchants in China and their English counterparts. The business practices and social practices were established by the British firms there, and the Americans largely conformed and took advantage of the British model. There was some tension or jealousy evident in the way that Americans regarded the more firmly established British firms and the “elite society” that Larkin describes in his presentation of the merchants from different homelands and their ways of life.
The book gives some attention to women on the scene in China and in Boston, but mostly the four Heard brothers are the primary figures in this history (with the exception of Mary Livingston, wife of Albert Heard). The social code of the China trade opposed marriages between American or British businessmen and Chinese women, but there were many instances where Western traders held long-lasting relationships with “protected women” and, upon leaving China, set up funds to provide for these women and their Eurasian children, as in the case of John Heard’s son, Richard Howard Heard (178-85).
Although the title of the book refers to the Heard “firm,” the text is as much about the lives of the company’s administrators as it is about business operations. Close observation of company management (cargoes, bills of trade, banking transactions, taxes, bankruptcy settlements, consignment sources, pay for employees, etc.) would have been welcome, at the risk of nitty-gritty, but important, detail.
The man who gave his name to the firm, Augustine Heard, Sr., a sea captain from Ipswich, Massachusetts, does not occupy a prominent role in Larkin’s account of the firm. The founders who were active in China were Joseph Coolidge (formerly of Russell & Co.) and George Dixwell. They assisted British firms in carrying on a clandestine trade during the period of the Opium War. After the Thirteen Factories (where foreign trade was conducted at Canton) were razed to the ground during the British and French assault on the city at the start of the Second Opium War in December 1856, the operations of Heard & Co. were re-established at Hong Kong, which became the headquarters of the firm for the remainder of its existence. The four brothers (John, Augustine Jr., Albert, and George) ran the firm by turns, but not with even management strategies. Accordingly, Augustine Heard & Co. was not a model of business stability. Larkin’s primary documentary collection is the Heard Family Business Records at the Baker Library, Harvard Business School.
One theme that runs through the book examines the relationship between American merchants in China and the British firms which were on home ground in the new colony. The business practices and social practices were established by British firms there, and the Americans largely conformed and took advantage of the British dominance. To some degree, the neutral status of American trade during the Opium War allowed British firms to keep their businesses alive by trans-shipping their cargoes into China on American ships. But there was a quiet tension between the two national groups after the war that was intensified by the sympathies of some British citizens (in China and in England) for the Confederate side in the American Civil War. Larkin handles this tension smoothly, acknowledging it, but not exaggerating it. Sometimes the fusion of local Chinese ways and British practices, as in the emergence of the “tiffin” as a substitute for the English afternoon tea, reduced such tensions between the English and the Americans. Moreover, the author describes a “sense of white cohesion” by which “the Americans and British found unity by identifying that which they both were not: Chinese” (75).
Larkin’s chapters have varying weight. For example, chapter 2, which deals with the properties that served as domicile and business headquarters, offers a great deal of insight into the somewhat confusing social circumstances of the American merchants. Chapter 3, which describes the roles of women in the colony, and the situations in which American and British merchants and families got together in social rounds, at clubs, and at the horse races, explains the odd functioning of social occasions and practices. Larkin’s work is very good in this field of social history. In contrast, the chapter which describes the Heard brothers’ fortunes after China is somewhat less effective because of the awkwardness of the text bouncing from one brother to another repeatedly.
Jacques Downs’s The Golden Ghetto is a good starting point for readers interested in American commerce in China in the first half of the nineteenth century.[3] The field of the old China trade and the post-1842 burgeoning of Western firms is a hot market these days, and those scholars who are interested in this province of East Asian History would do well to keep attention on the work of Paul van Dyke, John Carroll, Alain LePichon, Elizabeth Sinn, Phyllis Forbes Kerr, and Stacilee Ford.[4]
In his introduction, Larkin states that he has used this case study of Augustine Heard & Co. “to establish a more complete understanding of how Americans abroad interacted with nineteenth-century British colonialism and shaped Sino-foreign contact” (9). In that endeavor, he has been successful.
Richard J. Grace is an emeritus Professor of History at Providence College in Rhode Island. He holds a PhD in History from Fordham University and has twice been a visiting fellow at St. Edmund’s College, University of Cambridge. His fields of special interest are British and American history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His study of nineteenth-century China traders, Opium and Empire: The Lives and Careers of William Jardine and James Matheson, was published in 2014 by McGill-Queens University Press. He is currently completing an analysis of the various types of costs of World War II for Great Britain. He is the author of articles and reviews in numerous academic journals.
[1] Memorandum from William Jardine to Lord Palmerston, 5 December 1839, Palmerston Papers, University of Southampton, MS 62 PP/ MM/ CH /5.
[2] Jacques Downs, The Golden Ghetto: The American Commercial Community at Canton and the Shaping of American China Policy, 1784–1844 (Lehigh University Press, 1997), 325.
[3] Downs, The Golden Ghetto.
[4] Regarding Chinese migration via Hong Kong, see Elizabeth Sinn, “In-between Place: A New Paradigm for Hong Kong Studies,” in Elizabeth Sinn, Siulun Wong, and Wing-hoi Chan, eds.,Rethinking Hong Kong: New Paradigms, New Perspectives (University of Hong Kong Centre of Asian Studies, 2009). Regarding the field, see Paul Van Dyke, Americans and Macao: Trade, Smuggling, and Diplomacy on the South China Coast (Hong Kong University Press, 2012); John Carroll, Canton Days: British Life and Death in China (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020); Alain Le Pichon, Aux origins de Hong Kong: Aspects de la civilisation commerciale a Canton – Le fonds de commerce de Jardine, Matheson & Co., 1827–1839 (L’Harmattan, 1998); Elizabeth Sinn and Christopher Muss, eds., Meeting Place: Encounters across Cultures in Hong Kong, 1841–1984 (Hong Kong University Press, 2017).
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