Mr.

Smith Goes to China: Three Scots in the Making of

Britain's Global Empire by Jessica Hanser (review)

Maxine Berg

Journal of World History, Volume 32, Number 1, March 2021, pp. 171-173
(Review)

Published by University of Hawai'i Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jwh.2021.0011

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/785907

[ Access provided at 30 Mar 2021 01:30 GMT from The University of British Columbia Library ]
Book Reviews 171

readers. As much as debates around the American origin of syphilis

might have fostered a sense of self worth in the colonies, scholars have
found emerging threads to American identity and self-determination
to be up and running well before this period. The same can be said,
of course, for Hispanic contributions to modern scientific methods.
What González Espitia does add, despite these minor misgivings, is
nevertheless important: the role of syphilis and the associated debates
around it in further fostering and, surely, accelerating these tendencies.
Sifilografía is a sophisticated and wide-ranging analysis of syphilis as
a cultural phenomenon in the eighteenth-century Hispanic world.
With an eye for detail and a penchant for methodological innovation,
González Espitia reveals fascinating interconnections across the
Atlantic divide and, thereby, offers a tantalizing view into the underside
of Hispanic societies and how syphilis, in its multiple discursive
manifestations, ultimately destabilized Enlightenment ideals of progress.
CRISTIAN BERCO
Bishop’s University

Mr. Smith Goes to China: Three Scots in the Making of Britain’s

Global Empire. By JESSICA HANSER. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2019. xiii +240 pp. ISBN 978-0300-236088.
$45.00 (hardcover).

What do the histories of three relatively unknown Scots, all with

the same name of George Smith, tell us about Britain’s part in the trade
with China in the decades leading up to the Macartney Embassy in
1792–1793? Jessica Hanser has an ingenious take on the China trade,
the East India Company and the Indian Ocean world through her
microhistories of the George Smiths of Madras, Canton and Bombay
respectively. They were not related, nor friends; their key connections
were their Scottish backgrounds, their careers as private traders between
the 1760s and 1780s against the backdrop of the East India Company, and
their engagement in the Canton trade. Two of them, the George Smiths
of Madras and Canton, went bankrupt in the early 1780s, though their
families were still left comfortable enough, and George Smith of Bombay
who never married left significant wealth to his five sisters and to the town
where he was born, Fordyce in Banff, Scotland.
The George Smiths, as little known as they are to historians, all
played pivotal parts in key events of British imperial expansion into
172 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, MARCH 2021

Asia. These included two financial crises, a military coup in Madras, an

armed conflict with the Chinese government and a hostage crisis in
Canton, official enquiries by Parliament into Indian affairs and policy
turns against the East India Company, and the planning of Britain’s first
embassy to China. Hanser seeks to provide a human face to all these
global and imperial events and wider processes. What her book conveys
above all is the key role of private European traders in India and China
in histories hitherto dominated by monopolistic East India Companies.
Her exhaustive research in European and Chinese-language archives
and sources across Europe, in Australia, Taiwan and the U.S. and
forensic detail on the careers and events in which the George Smiths
engaged also provide great insight into just how the trade between
India and China as well as wider Indian Ocean trade worked.
Trading cotton, food, spices, medicines, crafts and curiosities, and at
this stage only to a small extent, opium from India to China, private
traders brought silver into the East India Company’s tea trade with
China. This coincided with the period when tea drinking became a
widespread social practice in Britain. Hanser demonstrates through her
characters how the trade was financed, with the profits of cargoes
deposited in the Company treasury in Canton in return for bills of
exchange which traders and their clients could cash at the East India
Company’s treasury a year later. These traders also became creditors,
especially in Canton, where lending to Chinese merchants might gain
them rates of interest between 18 and 22 percent in contrast to the
gains of their more cautious colleagues who remitted their wealth back
to Britain to gain between 3 and 6 per cent. But the risks were great, and
the results were financial crises in Canton and bankruptcy for two of
the George Smiths. Mr. Smith Goes to China gives us the inside story in
our new historiographies of European trade with Asia and Africa,
histories focussed on private rather than monopoly trade. From Huw
Bowen, Emily Erikson and Will Pettigrew we have learned of
entrepreneurialism, opportunism and political disruption; of interlop-
ing, smuggling and slave trading developed to a high degree by private
traders. Jessica Hanser brings us the creditors who took great risks to oil
the wheels of the tea trade, but also escalated financial crisis.
Hanser also shows us the wide political and cultural impact of the
events the George Smiths became embroiled in. The gunboat
diplomacy did not start in 1839 with the first Opium War, but in
1779 when Rear Admiral Edward Vernon in Madras sent a warship to
Canton as a threat to Chinese merchants in debt to British lenders.
Growing distrust and disparagement of Chinese legal and financial
institutions underpinned calls for a British embassy to China with aims
Book Reviews 173

of a permanent British Consul in China and a British commercial

settlement independent of the East India Company. The George
Smiths also engaged in the tide turning against the East India Company
as they advised Henry Dundas, William Pitt the Younger and Charles
Cathcart, leader of the first Embassy to China (1786).
Jessica Hanser, in her clever and incisive disentangling of the affairs
of the three George Smiths provides a window into operations of
Britain’s trade with India and China and some of its great events. Not
just the George Smiths, but characters from David Scott, the nawab of
Arcot, Henry Dundas, Governor Li Zhiying, Cathcart and Macartney,
William Pitt the younger and Adam Smith feature in this drama of
commerce, finance and political crisis, their own backgrounds,
contexts and the parts they played clearly outlined.
Through the George Smiths and their families, Jessica Hanser’s
beautifully-written book brings us into the precarious lives of European
merchants on ship, in expatriate communities in Canton, Macau,
Madras and Bombay, and in their family networks back in the UK.
Scattered and meticulously stitched together records unlock much
business, family and political history of her characters, but less of their
personalities, their private passions, anxieties and disappointments. Her
book opens many future directions for research. What part did other
European traders play in the affairs of the George Smiths, for example, the
Scots, Irish and Germans who passed in an out of private trade and
participation in the Danish, Swedish and Dutch East India Companies?
And what of the borrowers, the Hong merchants, such as Geowqua,
Yngshaw and Pinqua? They remain shadowy figures, their personal and
family experiences of debt and financial crisis unexplored. Jessica Hanser
concludes welcoming the prospect from more historians of the many “as-
yet-untold stories” of merchants and traders at the edges of empire.
MAXINE BERG
University of Warwick

German Science in the Age of Empire: Enterprise, Opportunity

and the Schlagintweit Brothers. By MORITZ VON BRESCIUS.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. xiv + 414 pp.
ISBN 978-1-108-42732-6. $120.00 (hardcover).

There is something romantic about the distinctly nineteenth-

century phrase “itinerant naturalist.” That romanticisation, however,