From the Harvard Gazette, January 11, 2013:
Baker Library exhibit, website track early U.S. firm’s business efforts, mirroring the times
America’s insatiable desire for goods such as electronics and inexpensive clothing fuels much of its trade with China. But more than 150 years ago, when industrious U.S. merchants began to develop their own trading firms in the Far East, goods such as tea and porcelain predominated.
A research collection at Harvard Business School’s Baker Library offers visitors an in-depth look at the earliest days of the China trade, thanks in large part to a New England pioneer in the field and his company’s meticulous record keeping.
“It’s staggering. The company saved everything,” said Melissa Banta, the curator who helped to comb through the Baker Library’s Historical Collections archive on Augustine Heard & Co., one of the most respected and powerful U.S. trading houses in China in the mid-19th century. That research developed the exhibition and accompanying website titled “A Chronicle of the China Trade: The Records of Augustine Heard & Co., 1840-1877.”
The show is only open until next week, but its online counterpart will live on at the library’s historical collections website....
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From the landing page of the dedicated website:
“Business is too important and interesting not to be chronicled somehow,” Albert Heard wrote.1 He was referring to his family’s firm, Augustine Heard & Co., which reigned among the largest American trading houses in China in the mid-nineteenth century. The company was active from 1840 to 1877 under the direction of Augustine Heard and his nephews John, Augustine II, Albert, and George Heard. The family shared Albert’s sentiments, leaving behind an extensive chronicle of their experiences in China. In addition to a voluminous collection of extraordinarily descriptive letters and diaries, they took care to meticulously preserve the company’s documents and journals—from partnership agreements and export lists to custom regulations and ship designs. The Heard papers, one of the largest collections of business records relating to the nineteenth-century China trade, present a look into momentous events concerning Sino-Western relations as well as the day-to-day activities of American traders in the treaty ports. Within the 800 volumes, 272 boxes, and 103 cartons survive both the professional accounts and personal perspectives of the life and trajectory of a nineteenth—century firm—a firm that prospered at the height of the China trade and met its decline with the advent of new technologies and the emergence of the Chinese as mainstream players in international trade.
And from the fourth page of the site, Commodities, Currencies and Balancing the Trade Deficit:
"From the earliest days of trade between the United States and China, the major obstacle to this commerce had been the lack of American commodities that could be sold in China."
— Thomas Layton, The Voyage of the ’Frolic’: New England Merchants and the Opium Trade14
Augustine Heard & Co.’s formation occurred during the First Opium War (1839–1842). The conflict broke out between the United Kingdom and China in part over the transport and sale of opium by the British from India to China—a trade the Chinese Imperial government forbade. The English, who had vacated Canton, relied on American firms to oversee their transactions. Heard & Co. served in this capacity for one of the largest British firms, Jardine, Matheson & Co., and John Heard reported that the relationship brought in huge profits in annual commissions.15
Europeans had traded woolens, raw cotton, and sandalwood, while Americans exported otter skins, sandalwood, ginseng, and silver dollars (from Central and South America). But the Chinese demand for these imports did not anywhere equal the West’s desire for Chinese tea, silk, and fine porcelain. The British found they could address the growing trade deficit through opium from Bengal, India, where they owned plantations. Opium became more plentiful, and uses of the drug changed from originally medical purposes to recreational use.
The drug represented 57 percent of all imports into China and also became a major source of currency.16 Millions of dollars’ worth of opium were imported into the country, distributed into the interior, and sold at retail shops and smoking houses. “Apart from criticizing the negative economic impact of the opium trade on its economy, Chinese government officials also tried to use the moral argument in their negotiations with the British,” Geoffrey Jones, Elisabeth Köll, and Alexis Gendron write in Opium and Entrepreneurship in the Nineteenth Century.17 After losing the First Opium War, the Chinese were unable to stop the trade. Americans first acquired opium from Turkey and then from India, where it was considered superior in quality....
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