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Opium and Empire: The Lives and Careers of William Jardine and James Matheson . By Richard J. Grace . Montreal : McGill-Queen's University Press , 2014. xviii + 453 pp. Illustrations, maps, bibliography, notes, index. Cloth, $34.95. ISBN: 978-0-7735-4452-9 .
Book Reviews
Much ink has been spilled on the firm Jardine Matheson, but few scholars have rendered such a vivid portrayal of its founders as Richard J. Grace in Opium and Empire. Instead of exploring Jardine Matheson's company history (as did the notable work of Robert Blake's Jardine Matheson: Traders of the Far East [1999] and Carol Matheson Connell's analysis of the firm's strategic organization in A Business in Risk [2004]), Opium and Empire offers the history of the early years of the firm largely as a biographical account of William Jardine and James Matheson. Shifting away from the focus of previous works, which have situated the history of Jardine Matheson in the economic development of China since the nineteenth century (Edward Le Fevour's Western Enterprise in Late Ch'ing China [1968], Maggie Keswick's edited volume The Thistle and the Jade [1982], Alain Le Pichon's Aux origines de Hong Kong [1998], Ishii Kanji's Kindai Chugoku to Igirisu shihon [1998], and Liu Shiping's Yanghang zhi wang: Yihe [2010]), Grace orients the narrative towards the British Empire as he approaches the stories...