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1. 1 2019-11-18T17:22:58-05:00 Kate McDonald 306bb1134bc892ab2ada669bed7aecb100ef7d5f The Jardine-Matheson Global Network Kandra Polatis 19 A path through the Jardine-Matheson global network splash 5235 2020-08-14T19:28:57-04:00 1832-1838 Peter D. Thilly Kandra Polatis 4decfc04157f6073c75cc53dcab9d25e87c02133

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• 1 2019-12-06T11:31:28-05:00 Archival Reasoning and Spatial History 57 Instructions for Reading Treacherous Waters plain 2021-03-08T10:20:06-05:00 Peter D. Thilly

  Archival Reasoning

  Using historical archives to try and understand how people made money in illegal drug trading can be a bit tricky. If we only rely on government sources about the arrest and prosecution of drug traders, we are limited by the government's limited understanding of the mechanics of the trade. Perhaps more concerning, these sources only contain stories about unsuccessful drug traders: the ones who got caught. Sources from the point of view of the drug traders, meanwhile, are exceedingly rare.

  Lucky for us, there are two uniquely good archives about the drug trade in 1830s China. The archives of the Qing government include volumes of detailed cases on the arrest and prosecution of opium traders. Meanwhile, the British firms engaged in illegally importing the drug into China kept meticulous records, in part because the owners of these firms felt that their personal views about "free trade" excused them of any guilt about breaking the laws of a government they did not consider worthy of respect. This context is extremely helpful to historians interested in triangulating between different source bases to try and better understand what happened.

  As such, the two central paths of this module are created out of these two archives of primary sources. The first path is a legal case from the Qing archives. The second is a diverse collection of materials taken from British archives. This format is specifically designed to enable visitors to actively participate in the sort of archival reasoning that historians use when they triangulate between sources.

  In the final two pages of this introductory path, I lay out my own interpretation of the two archives that make up this module. I approached these sources with an explicit desire to understand how the opium trade worked: I wanted to know who was doing what, and to understand what people did to make this illegal offshore trade so enormous. My hope is that visitors to this module might have other questions to ask of these sources, and might discover other connections, and craft different narratives.

  Spatial History

  This module also seeks to contribute to the methodological aims of the larger Bodies and Structures project, which called upon module authors "to identify, explore, and analyze the shared and distinctive dynamics of place-making within a particular historical space." Archives shape and limit how we as historians understand a process like place-making: they reveal and highlight certain dynamics, while excluding or minimizing others. As such, the existence of two such radically different archives about the same historical space is lucky indeed.

  The organizing principle of my approach is a "spatial history of profit." I wanted to understand how the people who bought and sold opium made their money, and I have approached this question by considering the testimony of opium suspects captured by the Qing state together with the sales reports of the British opium ship captains. Here the focus is on the roles of distance, space, travel, and time in the story of opium profits.

  The conclusion to the module offers a fuller explanation of the following themes:

  • The intersection of space and time. How both Chinese and British opium traders operated in a complex race against time when it came to pricing, each side seeking to use timely information to maximize profits.
  • Environment and physical geography. The physical landscape had a structural impact on the intertwined stories of profit and corruption on the maritime frontier. The Fujian coast is a place where secluded bays are set into a jagged coastline closely abutted by steep mountains: a notoriously difficult environment to surveil and police. For the British opium captains and their Chinese partners on shore, this geography was a godsend. For the Qing officials charged with rooting out the illegal trade, it was an enormous obstacle.
  • Discrete physical spaces. Here I consider the boats, buildings, beaches, bays, and villages that the people in the module occupied, and consider how these spaces were constructed and used, and what role these spaces had in the history of opium profits.
  • Space as process. The concept refers to an approach to spatial history that considers how different spatialities are constituted, transformed, broken down, and reconstituted through the movements, actions, and decisions of people. In the conclusion, I consider how different spatialities of commodity and information circulation emerged out of technological and diplomatic breakthroughs like the advent of clipper ships and the conclusion of the Opium War in 1842. I also discuss how cases like the Shi Hou one that makes up the first path of this module indicate a spatiality of treason that structured interactions between the Qing state and Fujian's coastal residents.
  • I also consider the spatiality of law enforcement and corruption on the Fujian coast at various points within the two main paths of this module. After all, an important part of the project of opium profiteering involved not getting arrested and punished by the state. The geography of Qing rule helps to explain why some people were arrested and others not, and space played an essential role in structuring how states and state actors selectively enforced or ignored laws.
• 1 2019-11-18T17:22:55-05:00 Background Information 48 What to know before exploring the "Treacherous Waters" module plain 2021-03-08T10:22:56-05:00 Peter D. Thilly

  Opium was illegal in the Qing empire during the 1830s, but British merchants brought enormous quantities of the drug from India to the southern coast of China. Over the course of the 1830s, the trade expanded in volume as it migrated northward from Lintin off the coast of Guangdong province to Fujianese ports like Xiamen and Shenhu Bay. This northward migration was partly responsible for the outbreak of the Opium War in 1839.

  Continue below for more background on these points. Or, continue to the next page.

  Opium's legality:

  The sale and consumption of opium was extraordinarily widespread in China during the 1830s, but it was entirely illegal. This meant that all of the opium sold and consumed in the Qing empire during these years had to be smuggled in and distributed illegally. As a consequence, there were infinite opportunities for corruption and government participation in the illegal trade, from the moment of import, at each node in the distribution network, down to the retail and smoking of the drug.

  Opium trading practices:

  The opium sold in China in the 1830s was grown in India and smuggled into the Pearl River Delta near Guangzhou (Canton) by primarily British merchants. Americans and various British colonial subjects (especially the Parsee community of Bombay) were also involved in the transport trade from India to China.

  Since at least the mid-1820s, the central location for opium transactions between foreign and Chinese merchants was an anchorage off the island of Lintin in the Pearl River Delta near present-day Hong Kong. At this remote offshore island, British firms permanently anchored large "receiving ships," which were stationary vessels that operated as floating warehouses. Chinese buyers would go to money-lending shops in Guangzhou (Canton) to make payment, then take a receipt out to a foreign receiving ship anchored near Lintin to receive their opium. In this way the British and Chinese merchants involved in the trade could keep their transactions out of the immediate surveillance of the high officials in Guangzhou.

  Opium's northward migration:

  The Lintin system of offshore opium transactions expanded north from Guangdong province into neighboring Fujian province around 1834, when British firms established receiving ship stations in various locations along the southern Fujian littoral. This migration of the trade from the Pearl River Delta north into Fujianese ports like Xiamen and Shenhu Bay is the primary subject of this module. The timing of the trade's migration in 1834 is due to the British East India Company relinquishing their monopoly over British trade in China that year, which opened the door for new British firms like Jardine-Matheson and their competitor Dent & Co. to expand the trade into new markets.

  The aftermath:

  The events of this module take place in the years just before the Opium War of 1839-1842. That war began in the wake of an incident wherein a Qing official named Lin Zexu determined to confiscate and destroy the opium holdings of Jardine-Matheson and a number of other firms. William Jardine spent the duration of that war in London lobbying the British Government to secure compensation for the opium that Lin destroyed.

  This module thus explains one of the central reasons for that war: the rapid expansion of the trade in the mid-1830s, and the movement of foreign opium merchants up the coast towards Fujian. Jardine-Matheson and their Chinese partners established a hugely successful opium import market in the waters off Fujian province. For anti-opium officials like Lin Zexu (himself a native of Fujian), one of the unforgivable actions of the opium traders was in moving their boats up the coast from the Pearl River Delta, which had an established system of legal trade for Europeans, and anchoring instead in Fujian, where foreigners from Europe were not allowed to travel.

• 1 2019-11-18T17:22:58-05:00 The Coastal Opium Trade in 1830s Fujian 45 Peter D. Thilly image_header 5385 2021-01-26T09:23:00-05:00 24.66755, 118.64391 1832-1838 Peter D. Thilly Opium, Opium Smuggling, Fujian, Yakou Village, Jinjiang County, Jardine-Matheson, Opium War

  This module tells the story of how a transnational coalition of maritime traders came together to operate one of the largest illicit drug markets in history. The importation of opium into China prior to 1832 occurred exclusively in the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong Province, where Fujianese and Cantonese ships would load up on the drug for delivery to other parts of the empire.

  By the late 1830s, a huge portion of the import trade had migrated north into Fujian province. Every day after 1834 or so there were around a dozen British ships permanently anchored in strategic bays along the Fujian coast, importing tens of thousands of chests of opium directly into Fujian and exporting jaw-dropping quantities of treasure.

  This module allows users to explore this dramatic explosion in the Fujianese opium trade, by focusing on the local story of Shenhu Bay in Jinjiang County, and the interactions between the Shi Lineage of Yakou Village and the Rees brothers of Jardine-Matheson and Dent & Co.

  Module Layout

  1. Navigating Sources and Mapping the Opium Trade. Introduces the goals of the module, provides necessary background information, and summarizes my interpretation of the archival sources that make up the two main body paths of the module.
  2. The Case Against Shi Hou: A Qing Document. Constructed out of a primary source from the Qing territorial administration, a criminal case against a man called Shi Hou for escorting British opium ships to his hometown of Yakou Village.
  3. The Jardine-Matheson Global Network. A re-creation of the largest and most influential British opium-trading firm, divided up conceptually and geographically, interspersed with images, videos, and primary source text from the Jardine-Matheson archive.
  4. A Spatial History of Profit. Three short essays on a spatial history of profit and corruption on the Qing maritime frontier.
  5. Conclusion: Space as Process. The concluding page to the module.

  Link: Jardine-Matheson Archives Catalog (holdings are at the Cambridge University Library)

  Link: First Historical Archives in Beijing

This page references:

• 1 2019-11-18T17:22:55-05:00 Exploring the Jardine-Matheson Network 35 Landing page for exploring the Jardine-Matheson Network plain 2021-01-28T09:27:51-05:00 Peter D. Thilly
• 1 2019-11-18T17:22:58-05:00 The Case Against Shi Hou: A Qing Document 28 Landing page for the path that takes readers through the Qing memorial describing the Shi lineage smuggling ring. splash 5244 2020-08-14T19:18:23-04:00 1838-12-15 Peter D. Thilly
• 1 2019-12-11T09:21:01-05:00 Environment and Physical Geography 27 The role of environment and physical geography in opium profits plain 2021-01-28T09:46:40-05:00 Peter D. Thilly
• 1 2019-12-09T13:14:00-05:00 Discrete Physical Spaces 26 A list of some of the discrete physical spaces important to the spatial history of profit plain 2021-01-28T10:12:39-05:00 Peter D. Thilly
• 1 2019-12-11T09:17:06-05:00 Conclusion: Space as Process 23 Breakdown, Transformation, Constitution, and Reconstitution plain 2021-01-28T10:17:13-05:00 Peter Thilly Peter D. Thilly
• 1 2019-12-11T09:17:51-05:00 Manipulating Space and Time 21 The intersection of technology, time, and profit plain 2021-01-28T10:00:56-05:00 Peter D. Thilly
• 1 2019-12-11T10:06:18-05:00 Jardine Matheson Building, The Bund, Shanghai 4 Jardine Matheson Building, The Bund, Shanghai. media/Jardine_Matheson_Building,_The_Bund,_Dec_2017.jpg plain 2020-09-12T16:19:56-04:00 31.24026, 121.49057 Jardine Matheson Building, The Bund, Shanghai Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jardine_Matheson_Building,_The_Bund,_Dec_2017.jpg. 12/24/2017 Wikimedia Commons user ScareCriterion12 20171224 102936 20171224 102936 Wikimedia Commons user ScareCriterion12 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license Peter D. Thilly PDT-0020