Ten Cities That Made an Empire by Tristram Hunt

Author:Tristram Hunt
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141957531
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2014-04-22T04:00:00+00:00

THE GREAT BABYLON

Even if over-optimistic aspirations for Hong Kong as an eastern Carthage were not immediately realized, the colony did nonetheless grow as a busy trading hub. Initially this was down to foreign merchants involved in the China trade in opium, silk and tea, a growing ship-building and -refitting industry and financial and legal services in banking and insurance. Despite the naysayers, Hong Kong offered a secure, accessible and competitive staging post, tax-free and under British rule of law, on the India–China trade route. For all their shroud-waving and demands for government support, once Jardine, Matheson & Co. and Dent & Co. decided to station their headquarters on the island, its importance as a hub of Asian trade and finance expanded exponentially. Soon enough, French, Dutch, German, Parsi and Sephardic Jewish businesses (led by the entrepreneurial Sassoon family) were stationing themselves in the colony in a mutually reinforcing process of commercial growth. Together with Calcutta, Bombay and Canton, Hong Kong was where global trading information came to be exchanged, capital raised, prices fixed and international trading networks forged. For all Montgomery Martin’s prophecies of collapse, commerce picked up as traders deposited their goods in ‘insurable’ godowns, waiting for the right moment to bring their wares to market. Between 1844 and 1861, the number of ship arrivals rose almost fivefold from 538 to 2,545, and total tonnage climbed almost sevenfold from 189,257 to 1,310,388 tons.58 In 1847, for example, the chief countries from which they came were Great Britain, with 53 ships carrying 21,173 tons; India, with 114 ships, of 66,259 tons; Australia, with 33 ships, of 10,364 tons; and North America, with 16, of 8,175 tons.59 The Fragrant Harbour became one of the busiest shipping stations in the world as Chinese ocean-going junks bobbed up against heavy Indian merchantmen, American whalers, tea clippers, gigs, paddle-steamers and gunboats. By the end of the nineteenth century, when over 11,000 ships entered and cleared every year, carrying over 13 million tons of cargo, Hong Kong would proudly claim the title of the Empire’s third port after London and Liverpool.60

In the early years, it was above all else the opium business which kept Hong Kong going. ‘The principal mercantile firms are engaged in the opium trade, who have removed hither from Macao as a safer position for an opium depot and which they frankly admit is the only trade Hong Kong will ever possess,’ was Montgomery Martin’s acid verdict in 1844.61 He was wrong, but not yet. In the 1840s, the colony became known as ‘the central warehouse’ for ‘British Indian produce’ as it handled some 75 per cent of the entire Indian opium crop. ‘Between 1845–9 some three-fourths of the opium crops were deposited in and reshipped from this harbour, which thus protected an immense amount of British property,’ boasted one British diplomatic memo. In 1844, the second British governor of Hong Kong, Sir John Davis, thought that ‘any scruples on our part’ about Hong Kong becoming a transshipment centre for drug running

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