Scandinavian Networks in Canton and Remittances in European Trade with Asia

The British victory in the Seven Years’ War in India entailed a revolution, not only for the English East India Company (EIC) but for all European trade with Asia. After the battle of Plassey 1757 the EIC had won the rights to extract revenues from Bengal. The profit generated became so great that the EIC and its employees struggled to transfer these revenues back to Britain. The ‘credit pool’ thus created came to fund much more than the EIC trade in Asia. It also became central in the remittance trade—where EIC revenues from Bengal came to fund the trade of the other competing East India companies, like for example that of the Scandinavians.

The case the Danish East India Company and its reliance on remittances in India has been studied in detail by Ole Feldbaek. The same remittances were, however, also used to finance the purchases of the Danish and Swedish companies in Canton, China. Notably, the Scandinavian trade in China was much more significant than the Scandinavian-Indian trade, both in value and compared to the trade of the other companies. Between the 1730s and 1780s the two companies accounted for at least one-fourth of all European trade in Canton. This paper will look at the role of remittances in Danish and Swedish operations in Canton from the mid-1760s to the mid-1780s. The study is based on correspondence between Scandinavian actors (supercargoes and merchants) and their foreign contacts. Among the correspondents we find EIC employees, in India and elsewhere, as well as many other actors. The qualitative analysis of the network connections is informed by an estimate of the size of the remittances used in Canton as payments by the Scandinavian companies.