Review | The story of Swire, British ‘hong’ in Hong Kong: a tale of empire, enterprise and family feuds
- Robert Bickers’ history of the global company built by John Swire is not your average corporate compendium
- The book, China Bound: John Swire & Sons and Its World, 1816-1980, offers tantalising vignettes of time and place
China Bound: John Swire & Sons and Its World, 1816-1980 by Robert Bickers, 5/5 stars
Swire is ubiquitous in Hong Kong and mainland China, where the conglomerate is involved in a wide range of businesses, from property and retail mall developments to hotels, Coca-Cola bottling, Taikoo Sugar, container terminals and Cathay Pacific.
Elsewhere in the world, it has business interests in several countries, from Scotland (biodiesel) to Papua New Guinea (ferry services). China Bound, a new book by prolific historian Robert Bickers, traces this global empire back to the Liverpool waterfront of 1816.
The rise of John Swire and his family business from humble Liverpool merchants to global corporation is one that encompasses the start of what we would now recognise as globalisation. It is also a story of empire, new technologies (from steamships to refrigeration; containerisation to freight aircraft) and not a little adventuring and luck.
Swire took advantage of wars, uprisings and revolutions to move into new markets. His firm often advanced on the coattails of the Union flag and profited from some of the unsavoury businesses of the 19th century. Bickers concludes that Swire businesses never sold opium, but that its ocean-going ships, as well as the paddle steamers of the Swire-owned China Navigation Company that plied the Yangtze, opening up its upper reaches to trade, certainly carried it.