The China Firm by Thomas Larkin

Author:Thomas Larkin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

FIGURE 5.11.    Heard network: Kinship networks. Image by author.

Through the course of business in China the Heard brothers formed a broad social, political, and commercial network. Associations occurred within a limited set of parameters and while varied individuals filled the network, the bulk of the Heards’ social and commercial worlds tended toward homogeneity. Defined subcommunity clusters within this network demonstrate that, while time and space separated the various groups, the insularity of foreign life in China made such boundaries porous as pervasive ties formed between the members of each cluster. The overall network encompassed two dominant groups: an American commercial sphere and a British social sphere. As significant outliers, the Portuguese represented a central and stable fixture in Augustine Heard & Company. Regardless of nationality or relationship type, merchants monopolized the network, suggesting the mercantile class’s primacy both within Hong Kong society and to other merchants. Other significant firms—Russell’s, Jardine’s, Gibb Livingston’s—were accordingly intertwined with Augustine Heard & Co., the first laying the conditions for Heard’s foundation, the second overseeing Heard’s demise, and all three comprising pockets of their social world. Yet the presence of significant family clusters suggests that despite the expansiveness of the Heard network and the variegated contacts therein, New Englanders relied upon kinship to reproduce metropolitan sociocommercial worlds in distant Hong Kong.

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