This study sets out to present a history of the British presence, at first in the Indian Ocean, pursuing the Portuguese route, and later, in the Far East, in Macau, from 1635 to 1793, as also in Japan (Hirado) from 1613 to 1623, from where the English attempted unsuccessfully to set up direct trade links with China. The British presence in Macau stemmed from Elizabethan interest in Portuguese profit-making in the East Indies, and began with the arrival in 1635 of the first English vessel, the London, in Macau. I end my study with the year 1793, the date of...

Euro-Asian relations, determined in part by the European response to societies such as the Chinese and the Japanese, developed slowly, and, as stated by Donald Lach, reflect the feeling which those cultures aroused in Western traveller-writers, as well as the latters’ preconceived ideas and tastes.¹ From the end of the sixteenth century, when Macau was enjoying its economic apogee, reports reached England about the enclave and Japan, both in the form of translated Portuguese sources and in the writings of travellers and traders such as the Dutch Dirck Gerritszoon Pomp (1544–1608) and Jan Huygen van Linschotten (1563–1611) who...

In 1602, two years before England and Spain signed their Peace Treaty, and in the wake of the Dutch,¹ the English, using their increasing naval military might and diplomatic activity, reached the Indian Ocean, gradually moving towards Macau. The English defied Portugal at the very heart of her empire, India and Persia, and took advantage of the desire of certain indigenous authorities to shake off the Portuguese yoke,² of the uprising of terrified indigenous slaves,³ of the experience of countrymen who had already lived in the East for a number of years, and of certain Portuguese who shared vital information...

The Convention of Goa signed between Goa and Surat aimed to face the growing Dutch power in the Far East, gradually opening the gateway to Macau for EIC vessels and those of private English traders. This alliance mirrored the problems with which the Estado da Índia had to concern itself in the face of its northern European rivals and the strategies Portugal adopted to deal with the situation. The English visited Macau when the Estado da Índia was beginning to contract, but, as we will see, the EIC only established itself in China in the early eighteenth century. From early...

Throughout the second half of the seventeenth century, the EIC’s initial attempts to set up direct contact with China stemmed above all from the strategy of Eastern factories, whereas the Portuguese tried to defend their privileged position in the Pearl River delta, to the detriment of English interests. Between 1690 and 1696 eight EIC vessels made their way to Chinese ports, this number rising to twenty between 1697 and 1703 and to forty-three between 1698 and 1715.¹ At the end of the seventeenth century, the success of the voyage of the Macclesfield marked the beginning of the permanent settling of...

After the trading seasons in Canton, the supercargoes made their way to Macau, where they lived during the summer in relative quietude, thus being able to prepare contracts for the following year and attend to EIC interests without having to return to Europe. These prolonged sojourns of traders in the city gave rise to the production of increasingly well-informed descriptions of it, allowing the Company to become better acquainted both with the policies of the Portuguese and Chinese authorities and with the trade and interests of the remainder of the European nations in China, and to shape its trading strategy...

In 1719, the Kangxi Emperor (1662–1722) proposed to the Portuguese that foreign trade be centralised in Macau, where Western merchants would thenceforth reside. The city, relatively impoverished since the suppression of trade with Japan, viewed the imperial edict as permission for European rivals to enter an area in which the Portuguese still held a privileged position, and the Macau Senate, despite the profits it would gain from the sojourn of foreigners, refused the proposal, as it would again in 1733. In 1720 the viceroy of India rebuked the Senate for having refused the imperial proposal for the anchorage in...

In November 1742, with merely four EIC vessels in Canton, the HM Centurion,¹ under the command of Commodore George Anson, was the first Royal Navy warship to arrive in Macau for the purpose of re-provisioning. It had sailed from Southampton in 1740, within the context of the War of Jenkin’s Ear against Spain, with the aim of upsetting Spanish interests in South America. Anson participated in what is viewed as the first war waged by Great Britain for colonial reasons, at a time when Britain was fighting to assert its naval and colonial power, an aim achieved, above all, after...

From the second half of the eighteenth century on, Lisbon tightened its control over Macau, and, in the context of the EIC’s project for expansion in the East, conflicts heightened between the supercargoes—whose economic power became ever more visible in the enclave—and the Portuguese and Chinese authorities. In 1749, in the face of the development of British interests in China, Goa banned foreign trade in Macau, an order which was never enforced by the Senate, notably with regard to the trafficking of opium; this was acknowledged in 1795 by the governor of India, Francisco António da Veiga Cabral,...

Throughout the eighteenth century, the EIC became dependent on private trade conducted between India and Southern China whereby Indian opium reached Canton, the purchase of tea requiring silver earned through the sale of that drug. Since the previous century the Portuguese had been importing opium into China, and Macau ultimately became a strategic space for British smuggling until it moved to the island of Lintin. This move affected the revenues of the enclave’s traders, who defended themselves from the competition on finding themselves deprived of one of their major sources of income and fearing that the Lintin island might be...

The permanent and growing influence of the British supercargoes and independent traders in Macau gave rise to conflict between these and the Portuguese administration in incidents which, together with the restrictions imposed by the Mandarinate and the co-hong, led the EIC to seek a territory in Southern China, for if Portugal was an old ally of Britain in Europe, in the Far East Macau’s trading interests and those of the Select Committee clashed.

At the end of each trading season, the supercargoes came down from Canton, set themselves up in Macau and continued to manage the institution’s interests, regulate the...

As shown, throughout the second half of the eighteenth century EIC officials clashed with the enclave’s authorities. The former were, however, forced to abide by the decisions issuing both from the Chinese and the Portuguese and acknowledge the fragility of their position in China. Following the clashes between the British and the governor analysed above, Fort William wrote to the Select Committee in 1783 and acknowledged the importance of that port for the EIC trade in China.¹ On the other hand, the fact that the Chinese exerted ever increasing control over Macau was stressed by several British visitors, for instance...

The ever growing importance of the China Trade for the British economy and trade, especially after the Commutation Act, incidents such as those of the Lady Hughes (1784), the tight control of the Portuguese and Chinese on the Macau-Canton axis, the high prices practised by the Chinese, and the demands of the co-hong and the hopu led the British, “the first people in the world”,¹ to attempt to set up diplomatic ties with China and obtain from the emperor a territory of their own on the Chinese coast, like Macau, where they would be governed by their own laws and...

At the end of the eighteenth century, Britain took on the role of a mighty power in the East; the British role and status in Macau at that point were very different from those of a hundred years before when the EIC set itself up in China. The foreign population and trade ultimately became essential for Macau’s economy, but the local and religious authorities accused the British of constituting—through their higher standard of living than that of the Portuguese—a trade and moral threat, of driving upward the prices of the city’s products, of keeping prostitution active and of...