In the nineteenth century, Augustine Heard & Co. became the most influential among those American firms involved in trade with China.Founded in 1840 following a rift between partners of Russell & Co., Augustine Heard & Co. rapidly became the second largest American trading firm in China. The firm expanded operations throughout China’s treaty ports, its partners witnessing first-hand many of the defining moments of Sino-Western contact during the nineteenth century. But by 1876 the firm had failed, the Heard brothers retreating from China to pursue new interests in Europe in the United States. Still, in the course of their enterprise, the brothers generated a massive amount of material describing life and commerce on the China coast.
Applying an innovative global-microhistorial approach to the history of the firm’s partners, Dr. Thomas Larkin’s research uses the case study of this company to explore the ways American merchants were shaped by their experiences living and trading within both the British and Qing empires. It in turn explores the various ways these merchants were active participants in Britain’s imperial project in China.
The Speaker
Dr. Thomas M. Larkin is the Hong Kong History Centre Fellow at the University of Bristol, Department of History. His research interests include nineteenth-century Anglo-American and Sino-American social and cultural interactions in China, and the critical application of global-microhistorical, transimperial, and digital methodologies.
Dr. Larkin’s forthcoming monograph, The China Firm: American Elites and the Making of British Colonial Society, will be published by Columbia University Press in Spring 2024. The China Firm traces the rise and fall of the American firm Augustine Heard & Co. to disentangle the symbiotic relationship between American elites and the British imperial/colonial project in China. The book considers the negotiated processes whereby Americans adapted to or rejected British colonial culture as they sought to carve out a place amongst the foreign elite living and trading along the China coast. He recently completed the British-Academy funded ‘Mapping Sino-Foreign Networks and Mobility in China’ digital project, and his work has been published in Cultural and Social History, the Historical Journal, Gender and History, and the Pacific Historical Review.
PROGRAMME DETAILS
Venue: Online event by Zoom
Admission: Zoom links are free for members of RASHK and sister societies only. Non-members are welcome depending on availability.
Registration: Please email <membership@royalasiaticsociety.org.hk> and provide your membership number, if applicable, at the time of registration. Registration will be closed at 12 noon on 15 November 2023.
Zoom links will be sent before or by 15 November 2023.