Merchants of Canton and Macao
by Paul Van Dyke
HKU Press
Magisterial in scope and execution, tremendously erudite and packed solid with fascinating period detail, Paul Van Dyke's Merchants of Canton and Macao: Politics and Strategies in Eighteenth-Century Chinese Trade demonstrates that in a contemporary academic landscape sadly debased by postmodernism, political correctness, cultural studies and other intellectually fashionable claptrap, genuinely wide-ranging, solid historical scholarship for its own sake still takes place.
And wide-ranging this superb work most certainly is. Archives as geographically dispersed as Sweden and California have been trawled to help build up a comprehensive picture of Chinese mercantile activity in the Pearl River Delta in the 18th century. During this period, Canton and Macau were the only places in China open to maritime trade, which makes these forerunners of Hong Kong - too often dismissed these days as backwaters - into centres of global economic importance in terms of the broad-based Chinese links to the wider world they helped forge.
An academic who has lived in Macau for many years, Van Dyke has studied the early economic history of the Pearl River Delta for decades; his earlier work The Canton Trade: Life and Enterprise on the China Coast 1700-1845 remains the standard modern work on this subject. This latest addition is a worthy companion volume.
As Van Dyke notes in his introduction, much of the historiography of the Canton trade period has been drawn from British and American documentary sources, and much of the detail of how Chinese businessmen operated, and the interlocking family networks and trade patterns within which they flourished, has remained obscure until now. The author opens up the field through his familiarity with the languages of original documents (Chinese, Danish, Dutch, English, German, Portuguese, Swedish).
Primary source materials are used as illustrations; more than 100 pages of original longhand documents from archives all over the world bring these long-ago transactions to life. Many contracts are bilingual, which provides additional layers of interest.