This study gives an account of the activities of the British merchants in China in the crucial years before the Treaty of Nanking (1842), which transformed the relations between the Celestial Empire and the Western ‘barbarians’ and placed them upon a footing that was to last for a hundred years. An historical epoch which is only now drawing to its end was inaugurated by the decisive pressures of an expanding British economy in the early 19th century.

A century ago, the West invaded China with commodities, guns, ideas. The economic conquest of China by the European invaders passed through three broad stages. First, the balance of trade changed in favour of the foreigners, the flow of silver reversing its direction from about 1826. In the second phase, British manufactures began to pour into China, so that the country which had for centuries been famous for its textiles was by the 1870s taking in Lancashire cotton goods to the extent of one-third of its entire imports. Thirdly, the inflow of foreign manufactures was followed by that of foreign capital, bringing with it railways, cotton mills and similar undertakings requiring a capital accumulation which China lacked. It is mainly with the first period of this development that we are concerned in this volume.

This period has been studied, hitherto, almost wholly from the standpoint of the diplomatic historian; which is here especially inadequate, both because—apart from three abortive embassies— there were then no direct governmental relations, and because what in fact brought British subjects into daily contact with Chinese was avowedly commerce.