Mr Smith Goes to China

Not sure how I missed this excellent monograph – Mr Smith Goes to China: Three Scots in the Making of Britain’s Global Empire from Jessica Hanser and published by Yale University Press…. Definitely worth noting for anyone interested in the early days of the Canton trade.

This book delves into the lives of three Scottish private traders—George Smith of Bombay, George Smith of Canton, and George Smith of Madras—and uses them as lenses through which to explore the inner workings of Britain’s imperial expansion and global network of trade, revealing how an unstable credit system and a financial crisis ultimately led to greater British intervention in India and China.