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By Root 1181 0

spread by sea and largely confined to those places which could be controlled from the sea.* There were advantages for governments in leaving so much of the initiative with private enterprise. Chartered companies offered the Crown influence without the necessity of affluence. When Queen Elizabeth I sold exclusive rights to trade with ‘the Great Turk’ to a group of businessmen she received an assured payment each year. Since the contract also required the ‘Turkey Merchants’ to promote English interests, she gained a rudimentary diplomatic service on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean as well. The charter of the Muscovy Company committed it to trade in ‘Regions, Dominions, Islands and places unknown’, and in trying to find a route to ‘Cathay’ by a north-east passage above the landmass of Europe the crew of one of its first fleets, made up of three little vessels, froze to death off Lapland.† The fur trappers and traders of the Hudson’s Bay Company became the largest landowners in the world.‡ The Virginia Company ‘owned’ much of the Atlantic coast of North America and, since making a return on investment required the cultivation of cash crops, became licensed to ‘plant’ settlements there. On the other side of the ocean, the Royal African Company cultivated almost nothing, but enjoyed a monopoly on the west African slave trade for a period and for fifty years supplied the Royal Mint with gold (thereby coining ‘the guinea’).

They were not called ‘merchant venturers’ for nothing: anyone who placed their faith in these companies took a risk that they might never see their money again. The distances were so vast and communications so slow that they might have to wait a year or more before they knew whether they had made any profit at all. But a risk divided is a risk reduced and the companies minimized the danger to investors by selling shares in their ventures, and then offering the security of limited liability. In their internal organization, the companies developed the single-minded focus on profit, the effective chain of command and the incentivizing of employees that are the marks of efficient capitalism. The most famous chartered company of all, the East India Company, ended up translating a British trading and diplomatic presence into an overseas government. But it was clear from the start that what motivated ‘the grandest society of merchants in the universe’ (it never really did modesty) was money rather than conquest: if it was necessary to fight, it would do so, but colonies were merely a means to an end. The Company was obliged to raise an army to defend its interests, and created dockyards in order to build ships, but its soldiers’ job was to secure trade and the ships’ purpose was to carry cargo home to Britain. And for those with the nerve to seize opportunity, the rewards could be lavish. Robert Clive arrived in India in 1744 as a clerk. He returned from Bengal to England nine years later with the means to buy a country estate. A further five-year stint in India turned him into one of the richest men in Britain. (The influx of such East India Company ‘nabobs’ who had amassed astronomical fortunes by trade, pillage and intimidation set off a characteristically British bout of class anxiety. ‘What is England now?’ worried Horace Walpole. ‘A sink of Indian wealth, filled by nabobs … A country overrun by horse-races! A gaming, robbing, wrangling, railing nation without principle, genius, character or allies.’)

On 26 September 1792 three ships left the sheltered anchorage between the coast of Hampshire and the Isle of Wight for a very long voyage. The vessels carried 700 men, including artists, botanists, diplomats, scientists and soldiers, accompanied by a gaggle of priests. It would be a year before they achieved the object of their journey, a meeting with the emperor of China, Qianlong, who turned out to be a surprisingly sprightly eighty-three-year-old.

The mission, under the leadership of Viscount Macartney, hoped to solve an increasingly pressing problem. The British merchant-venturers had done very nicely