Transport Services for the China Market: European Tramp Shipping Companies in East Asia, 1870s-1914

Abstract

From the beginning of the treaty port system along the China coast, both foreign and Chinese trading houses came to depend on reliable connections to the outside world. These were maintained almost exclusively by ships of different sorts, among them increasingly medium-sized steam tramps capable of picking up freight and passengers at widely scattered ports and transporting them all around East Asia. Steam tramps from various European countries, and later also from Japan, provided important transport services for closely interwoven networks of Chinese merchants, chartering them on a regular basis and shipping all kinds of cargoes around the region. In this market, the transportation of Chinese labourers (“coolies”) was among the most profitable businesses. To minimize operational costs, steam tramps generally employed Chinese or other Asian crews. Such varied business operations of foreign tramp shipping companies have received little scholarly attention probably due to the difficulty in accessing high-quality primary sources. Making use of historical documents from European public and private archives, and focusing on a German and a French-Indochinese tramp shipping company, the paper will present the ship owners’ motives, strategies, and patterns of operation in China’s shipping market, and focus on the ways in which the managing owners responded to external and internal factors influencing their affairs. It will also consider the firms’ professional relations to several groups of Chinese. Such interactions between foreign tramp shipping companies and their Chinese customers and Chinese maritime staff was a remarkable feature of close collaboration and mutual adaptation in a period of intense globalisation and high imperialism. The intention is to draw a more complex picture of China’s maritime business environment than hitherto known.