Ambiguous Faces of the Canton Trade

Because most historians of the Canton Trade have focused on Europeans and Americans, private Asian traders, as well as Armenians, Turks, and Jews, have been marginalized and left out of the conversation. As a result, the picture that has been presented, of Europeans and Americans dominating the private trade, is much distorted. It is very likely that a good percentage of the private ships were financed by persons from India, Southeast Asia and/or overseas Chinese. Given that the Chinese authorities opened the trade to non-Chinese regardless of nationality (except Japanese and Russians), and guaranteed them access to the market in Canton, this should not be surprising.In fact, many of the ships that called at Canton were actually commissioned by Muslims, Hindus, Parsees, Greeks, Jews, Armenians, and Southeast Asians under cover of a European flag. A Jewish trader living in Baghdad might travel on a ship captained by an Englishman. A ship and her cargo might both be owned by Parsees or Armenians but fly a British flag. A Portuguese vessel based in Macau or a Chinese junk based in Guangzhou might actually be commissioned by the Dutch. But because of the scarcity of surviving records from these individuals and the tendency to identify vessels by their flags, the British and Americans have appeared as the dominant private traders at Canton in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Further studies will undoubtedly provide a fuller picture of their importance to the Canton Trade.