TRADING FOR TEA: A STUDY OF THE ENGLISH EAST INDIA COMPANY'S TEA TRADE WITH CHINA AND THE

The East India Company played a vital role in British commercial expansion and European-Asian economic links in the early modem period, and its business activities covered many regions of the East, including China, the most populous nation on earth. The general structure and development of EIC's Chinese trade had been studied, but, details of the Company's tea trade with China, the most important and profitable branch of the Company's commercial affairs after the late eighteenth century, remain to be explored. In particular, the issue of its management of tea procurement from China remains largely unstudied. This thesis thus examines the EIC's tea trade with China and the related financial issues in 1760-1833, the heyday of the Company's Chinese tea trade. Because Canton was the only Chinese port open for the international maritime trade after 1760, the Company's trade in China was in effect a trade with Canton. The Canton Commercial System which shaped the Ch'ing Empire's foreign trade policy had another major feature, that is, only a handful of merchants, the Hong merchants, could deal with foreigners. Accordingly, transactions with the Hong merchants in order to procure tea fo