Professor Robin Pearson and Dr. Kaori Abe (University of Hull)

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.