Overview

This set looks at Trade Relations with China from 1635-1842. Volumes 1-5 The classic work on the period 1635-1834 is Hosea Ballou Morse's Chronicles of the East India Company Trading with China, 1635-1834 (5 vols, Clarendon Press 1926). Morse attempted to cover the whole of the East India Company's monopolisation of Britain's trade with China from 1634 onwards through the medium of primary documentation, and his is still the largest collection of printed source materials available on the subject. However, his coverage of the subject is uneven and, for a fuller view, his treatment of the more complex period of later eighteenth and early nineteenth century dealings between the East India Company and China are usefully complemented in this series by two other major research studies, and by a number of printed original documents. These are: Volume 6 E.H. Pritchard, The Crucial Years of Early Anglo-Chinese Relations, 1750-1800 (1936), makes use of a wealth of documentation not available to Morse, particularly concerning the Macartney embassy. Pritchard, a former student of Morse, took as his major theme the whole range of problems and frictions that arose between the British and the Chinese after the Chinese constructed the 'Co-Hong' or 'Canton' system by which officially licensed Chinese guilds, based on Canton, were created to manage and monopolize all trade with the West. Morse touches on all of this, but Pritchard analyses it in much greater depth. Volumes 7 & 8 J.L.Cranmer-Byng, An Embassy to China: being the journal kept by Lord Macartney during his embassy to the Emperor Chien-lung, 1793-1794 (1962), gives the first hand account of Lord Macartney's impressions of China, and covers his dealings with Chinese mandarins, and his meeting with the emperor. The journal is supplemented by a Chinese view of the embassy originally published as Lord Macartney's embassy to Peking in 1793 from Official Chinese Documents (J.L Cranmer-Byng, ed.), Journal of Oriental Studies, 1957-8 [Hong Kong 1961], and by two official British documents concerning the embassy, his instructions from the Board of Control, and his own final report to the Board, both edited by E.H. Pritchard and published in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1938. Volume 9 Michael Greenberg, British Trade and the Opening of China, 1800-1842 (Cambridge, 1951) is also a classic work. Published in 1951, it is a more up to date study of the economics (and especially of the structure) and the business history of the China trade, and it also draws attention to the economics of the Opium Question, up to, and including, the Opium War of 1839-42. It is supplemented by an essay by Jonothan Spence on the Chinese: 'Opium Smoking in Ch'ing China', taken from Frederick Wakeman Jr. and C. Grant, Conflict and Control in Late Imperial China (University of California Press). Volume 10 Notes of Proceedings and Occurrences during the British Embassy to Peking in 1816 by George Staunton (reprinted for the first time since 1824).

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'With this ten volume set on British-Chinese economic and political history between 1635 and 1842 the editor presents a luxurious reprint of the basic primary sources as well as the literature which is mainly founded on primary sources, to an academic readership' -- Michael Mann

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