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Chinese Business History Webinar
Networks and the Management of Risk in the China Trade during the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries
Professor Robin Pearson and Dr. Kaori Abe
(University of Hull)
Date/Time: November 11, 2022, 4:30 – 5:30 pm HKT (8:30 – 9:30 am GMT)
Language: English
Venue: Conducted via Zoom
Enquiry: (Email) ihss@hku.hk
Chinese Business History Webinar
Networks and the Management of Risk in the China Trade during the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries
Professor Robin Pearson and Dr. Kaori Abe
(University of Hull)
Date/Time: November 11, 2022, 4:30 – 5:30 pm HKT (8:30 – 9:30 am GMT)
Language: English
Venue: Conducted via Zoom
Enquiry: (Email) ihss@hku.hk
Title:
Networks and the Management of Risk in the China Trade during the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries
Speaker:
Professor Robin Pearson and Dr. Kaori Abe (University of Hull)
Date/Time:
November 11, 2022, 4:30 – 5:30 pm HKT (November 11, 2022 | 8:30 – 9:30 am GMT)
Language:
English
Enquiry:
Title:
Networks and the Management of Risk in the China Trade during the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries
Speaker:
Professor Robin Pearson and Dr. Kaori Abe (University of Hull)
Date/Time:
November 11, 2022, 4:30 – 5:30 pm HKT (November 11, 2022 | 8:30 – 9:30 am GMT)
Language:
English
Enquiry:
The trading voyages to the Pearl River delta made by British, American and European ships in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were the longest and most hazardous in the world. Some were circumnavigations of the globe in an era when large areas of the globe were still unknown to western explorers. This paper makes two arguments: first, that the international and multi-ethnic personal and business networks formed by merchants were a means of mitigating the many risks of these long-distance ventures, and that non-western actors played a central role in this; second, that maritime insurance became a key risk-reducing device developed by these networks to help grow this commerce in a period before the Opium Wars, when foreign trade with China remained restricted to Canton. This is the first work to examine how trading networks and their insurance practices in Asia enabled the riskiest of trades to be managed successfully.
Robin Pearson is Professor of Economic History at the University of Hull, UK. He has published widely on British and international economic and business history, with one focus on insurance. Books include Insuring the Industrial Revolution (2004), which won the Wadsworth Prize for Business History; and Shareholder Democracies? Corporate Governance in Britain and Ireland before 1850 (2012), co-authored with Mark Freeman and James Taylor, which was awarded the Ralph Gomory Prize for Business History. Current projects include “Global Cultures of Risk: Insurance in Non-Western Contexts 1870 – 1980”, with Martin Lengwiler (Basel), funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.
Kaori Abe is a Postdoctoral Research Assistant at Business School, Faculty of Business Law and Politics, the University of Hull. She completed her doctoral course at the University of Bristol and obtained a master's degree at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Her monograph, Chinese Middlemen in Hong Kong’s Colonial Economy, 1830 – 1890, was published by Routledge in September 2017.
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