This chapter will examine the transformation of the British merchant firm Jardine Matheson from illicit opium smugglers in nineteenth century China to a modern, multi-national group of companies that is involved in a range of legal business activities. In doing so, it will examine the firm’s historical activities as a classic case study of unethical business and look at how the modern business represents this history. Even British contemporaries in the nineteenth century, who often shared similar assumptions about Western superiority and wanted to open Qing China to free trade, criticized Jardine Matheson’s opium smuggling operation and advocacy for British military action against China. But, by the 1870s, Jardine Matheson was no longer involved in the opium trade, and the firm has continued to diversify its business activities up to the present day. For the modern firm, this connection to the past raises a number of questions about the role of company history in modern day branding.

In 1832, business partners William Jardine and James Matheson rebranded the trading firm Magniac & Co. as Jardine Matheson. This new firm became notorious for smuggling opium grown in British India into China beyond the limits of the “Canton system.” The “Canton system” limited the access of Western traders to the port of Canton and ensured that they could trade only with the carefully selected and regulated Cohong merchants. This system prohibited the importation of opium into China.

Jardine Matheson re-invested capital raised through its illegal opium smuggling operations into the legal tea trade. Effectively, the firm acted as a go-between for business clients who lacked the resources to smuggle opium themselves. The firm offered 16 different “agency” services that revolved around brokering for buyers and sellers of goods to and from Asia (Connell, 2004, p. 6). The services provided included sales, arranging insurance, chartering ships, obtaining freight, and transhipping goods. Jardine Matheson traded in a range of imported or exported products, such as tea or silk, but the firm’s most important customers were figures like the Parsee merchant Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy. Based in Bombay (Mumbai), Jejeebhoy supplied the firm with Indian-grown opium for sale on the China coast, which accounted for the bulk of its business growth in the 1830s (Le Pinchon, 2006, pp. 3–5). The firm made profit through the commission charged on sales made on behalf of sellers such as Jejeebhoy.

The firm’s opium voyages served multiple purposes. They were also channels for circulating biblical literature, recruiting tea cultivators, sourcing valuable plant samples, and disseminating various forms of “useful knowledge” (Berg, 2006; Chen, 2012). Thus, beyond gaining a reputation as drug runners, the firm became a symbol of Western economic, colonial, and cultural incursions into the isolationist Qing Empire in the nineteenth century.

In Britain, firms like Jardine Matheson were “country traders” – private firms that distributed opium grown in British India into China. The East India Company used intermediate firms, such as Jardine Matheson, to avoid directly circumventing the Chinese state’s prohibition of the highly addictive drug and risking a diplomatic confrontation between Britain and China. This illegal trade ensured the profitability of the legitimate trade in Chinese tea to Britain. In turn, excise duties on tea imports into Britain accounted for 7% of Britain’s public revenue and raised £4 million per annum for the East India Company by the 1830s (Lawson, 1993, p. 157). So, whilst illegal under China law and officially disassociated from the British state, the opium trade in which Jardine Matheson were engaged was crucial to Britain’s domestic and colonial finances.

However, by 1839, the profitable system of Anglo-Chinese trade faced a crisis. For decades, the Qing state had issued increasingly hostile edicts against Western firms importing opium into China. In March 1839, Commissioner Lin Zexu famously forced the foreign merchants at Canton to destroy their opium stores. This seizure took place as William Jardine was en route to London. On his arrival, he urged the Foreign Secretary, later Prime Minister, Viscount Palmerston to take military action against China. The Royal Navy dispatched a squadron to seek redress for the perceived insult of Commissioner Lin’s activities, and the First Opium War (1839–1842) ensued. The firm was a consistent voice in favor of military action against the Qing Empire with the aim of opening China to foreign trade. By directly lobbying senior politicians and publishing the first English language China coast newspaper, the Canton Register, Jardine Matheson was moving beyond involvement in the opium trade and into making justifications for war.

Jardine Matheson also was influential in the development of the British colony of Hong Kong. During the First Opium War, the firm relocated from the China coast to Hong Kong and seized prime geographical locations as the colony developed. In 1844, Jardine Matheson relocated its main office from Macao to Hong Kong. The Treaty of Nanking (1842) granted Hong Kong to the British, opened five “treaty ports” to Western traders, made the Qing pay indemnities for costs incurred and granted legal extraterritoriality to Westerners in China. This was the beginning of “gunboat diplomacy”: a strategy by which industrialized Western nations forcibly opened closed markets to trade through the nineteenth century. The economic philosophy of Adam Smith justified this course of action. Both Jardine Matheson and commentators in Britain presented this conflict as a moral contest between modern British economic freedom and archaic Chinese despotism (Grace, 2014). The representation of China as backwards, uncivilized, and savage, in contrast to Britain and the Western, imperial powers in general served as a justification for the opium trade and the conflict it led to.

However, there were limits to Jardine Matheson’s commitment to free trade. Following the Treaty of Nanking, which neglected to mention opium explicitly, the firm was actively against the legalization of the opium trade. Along with Dent & Co., Jardine Matheson had a virtual monopoly on the importation of opium into China. Abolition of the smuggling system would lower the delivery costs of the trade and increase competition from firms with small capital (Le Fevour, 1968). Similarly, the Opium War had increased Jardine Matheson’s supply advantage as the increase in piracy along the China coast made the trade a risk for firms without armed vessels. Even after the First Opium War, the opium trade remained both profitable and risky. Continued tensions over the opium trade and the instability of the Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864) led to the Second Opium War (1856–1860), after which Britain and France forced further concessions from China, including the legalization of opium, in the Convention of Peking (Feige & Miron, 2008).

Whilst Britain used gunboat diplomacy to force China open to Western trade, and opium by extension, many British commentators criticized opium traders like Jardine Matheson. In 1840, the Tory politician William Gladstone, who would later serve as Prime Minister, criticized the First Opium War as “a war more unjust in its origin, a war calculated in its progress to cover this country with a permanent disgrace, I do not know and have not read of” (Hanes & Sanello, 2002, p. 78). Beyond the Opium War, the main criticism of the opium trade was that it operated at the expense of legitimate trade in China and consumed Chinese capital. This, in turn, reduced the potential market for legal British exports like cotton. Criticism also came from religious groups. In 1848, Donald Matheson left the firm and actively campaigned against the opium trade due to its perceived immorality (Keswick, 1982). His conversion became a publicity coup for the Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade, which led an increasingly vocal public campaign against the trade in the late nineteenth century (Gelber, 2004). This criticism of opium consumption sat within a broader Victorian concern with moral, physical, and mental purity that also was manifest in the temperance movement against alcohol consumption.

Orientalist discourse shaped the representation of the Chinese opium addict (Said, 1978). The defining image of the Chinese people in nineteenth-century Britain was that of the opium wreck. As the Opium Wars opened China, Chinese migrants moved into British settler colonies – Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Canada – and the USA from the 1850s onwards. These migrants subsequently encountered viscous anti-immigrant rhetoric from White settlers. These racially motivated exclusion movements drew heavily on the imagery of opium by equating Chinese immigrants with drug addiction, immorality, and crime. As a result, whilst public condemnation of the opium trade itself was common, Western observers did not see Chinese opium addicts as victims. Instead, British traders saw opium addiction as part of a flawed Chinese character that explained China’s civilizational decline and justified the Western opening of China.

Most importantly, the damaging effects of opium addiction were common knowledge in the nineteenth century. Criticism of Jardine Matheson’s historical activities is not the projection of modern moral standards onto a specific historical context with different norms and conventions. The contemporary criticism of the opium trade as unethical makes it more difficult for modern observers to insulate the firm from criticism. Moreover, for historians and scholars of the nineteenth century, the name Jardine Matheson is synonymous with the addiction of the opium trade, the violence of the Opium War, and the expansion of the British Empire.

In the face of resistance in China and criticism in Britain, Jardine Matheson invested heavily in publishing and managing the firm’s public image. Through these publishing networks, the firm was keen to emphasize that their interests were aligned with that of the British state and its vast Empire. They expended considerable resources on shaping public opinion and constructing a narrative of their trading operations as bringing Western civilization, modernity, and freedom to the backward, despotic and corrupt Qing Empire. In many ways, this was an attempt at branding by invoking the prevailing assumptions and ideas about the superiority of Western civilization and the British Empire to justify their unethical business practices.

The core of Jardine Matheson’s communication strategy was its newspaper: the Canton Register. The Register was the first English-language newspaper on the China coast. With an average population of around 30, the foreign merchant community in Canton was not the intended audience. The newspaper was intended to influence opinion in Britain, India and across the Empire. Articles from the Register were commonly reprinted in Britain’s provincial titles. According to Matheson, the newspaper was a “recorder of facts” and not a “vehicle for controversy” (King, 1965, p. 41). It was this aversion to controversy that led Matheson to remove the American editor William Wood in February 1828 and replace him with the British Missionary Robert Morrison. Wood had publicly criticized the East India Company’s monopoly of the China trade. In contrast, Matheson kept the Register’s editorial position on the monopoly debate neutral until 1834, when the British state removed the East India Company’s monopoly of the China trade. At this point, the paper became openly anti-regulation and pro-free trade.

The need to avoid controversy, despite its potential benefits in terms of an increased audience, was clearly demonstrated in a letter from Alexander to James Matheson: “I mean to disavow any connection with the paper … The offensive paragraph will, I have not the smallest doubt, give notoriety to the paper, and gain it many subscribers in India” (Le Pinchon, 2006, p. 68). In spite of the acrimony with Wood, the paper’s future seemed bright. Specifically, the newspaper could offer unparalleled specialist knowledge of China: “the field for a newspaper is certainly extensive, and if the Register is properly conducted it may be made the most popular journal in the East” (Le Pinchon, 2006, p. 68). Matheson had identified a gap in the provision of news and information about China. By making use of his connections to contemporary China experts, Matheson used the Register to reach an audience beyond the Western Canton community. Matheson was so successful that by 1850 Shanghai merchants published the North China Herald so they could similarly advocate their interests (Bickers, 2011, p. 108).

The need to de-legitimize the Qing Empire in order to justify the opium trade affected the Register’s editorial angle (Hillemann, 2009, pp. 83–85). Much of the Register’s content concerned the implications of Chinese law for the foreign community and the prejudice that Western merchants faced. For example, this concern was evident in an 1828 article on the linguistic debate over Chinese words for foreign residents and whether they were offensive:

everyone knows that in ordinary speech they use to each other … the most contemptuous language: such as foreign devil; red bristled devil; black devil; a devil; flower flagged devil … (to refer to) not only the poor ignorant people, but the Gentleman merchants.

(Canton Register, 24 May 1828)

The idea that the Chinese did not treat foreign, and most importantly British, merchants with adequate respect was a common accusation – the inference being that Chinese restriction of trade was not targeted on opium, but connected to a wider anti-British prejudice. The dismissive attitude of Chinese officials to the wants and desires of British firms was especially hard to accept given the contemporary attitudes of civilizational superiority and hierarchy: “the superiority of Europeans in some of the mechanical arts, and physical sciences, does not elevate them as rational beings in the estimation of the Chinese” (Canton Register, 17 July 1830).

In addition to the Canton Register, Jardine Matheson was also integrated into broader information networks. For example, the firm employed the Protestant missionaries Robert Morrison and Charles Gutzlaff, who were some of the most prolific China experts of the 1830s, as interpreters. In some cases, the firm had direct control over the activities of China experts and facilitated or funded their research and writing. A letter from Gutzlaff to James Matheson in 1834, demonstrated the role Matheson played in the book publishing process. Gutzlaff, working on an opium clipper on the China coast for the firm, gave Matheson specific instructions to publish his General Description of China through the firm’s London agent Thomas Weeding (Le Pinchon, 2006, p. 218). Through these connections, the firm was not just opening China to opium but to Christianity.

The firm also had an important involvement in Chinese language publishing. William Jardine paid for the publication of Gutzlaff’s Dong-Xi as part payment for his interpreting work on the firm’s opium vessels (Chen, 2012, p. 1711). Gutzlaff also distributed this Chinese language magazine – which brought news of Western science, geography, government, and history for a Chinese audience – during his voyages along the China coast. Perhaps most significantly, given Jardine Matheson’s economic interests, Gutzlaff published texts titled Outlines of Political Economy and Treatise on Commerce in Chinese in 1840, both of which advocated free and open markets (Trescott, 2007, p. 23). Similarly, during Robert Morrison’s editorship of the Canton Register, he saw the dissemination of information into China as important as the acquisition of knowledge: “were instructive papers and books, printed in Chinese, they would no doubt gradually find their way to every part of the Empire… and convey new ideas, calculated to benefit every country of Eastern Asia” (Canton Register, 16 August 1828). The firm’s involvement in publishing on China in the 1830s was widespread, combining direct ownership of the Register and specific firm-funded publications, as well as more surreptitious associations. As a result of these associations, the firm’s interests in uninhibited trade were heavily reflected in contemporary discourse on China.

Defense of the firm’s economic interests in the 1830s provided the rationale, particularly for James Matheson, for such an involvement in publishing. After the removal of the East India Company monopoly the firm advocated a European-style diplomatic relationship with the Chinese government, a relaxing of Chinese trading regulations and, ostensibly, the liberalization of the despotism that oppressed the Chinese populace (Keswick, 1982, p. 21). Chinese government edicts prohibiting the opium trade regularly targeted Jardine Matheson, and this fed into a sense of victimhood at the hands of Chinese authorities. On his return to Britain in 1835, Matheson lamented how foreigners had to deal with “ignominious surveillance and restrictions” (Matheson, 1836, p. 3). As the Chinese officials aimed to curtail the opium trade – which was Jardine Matheson’s main income – it was in the firm’s economic interests to present Chinese trade restrictions alongside broader critiques of the Qing tyranny. Attempts to control the opium trade were equated with resistance to Christianity, freedom of movement, the rights of women, and the expansion of legal trade. This was particularly important for the firm as it meant that the blame for poor British export sales could also be attributed to the regressive Chinese authorities. It was in the firm’s economic interest to portray the Qing Emperor’s legal edicts as despotic and against the natural laws of humanity. The firm’s connection to the publishing network of China experts was not coincidental. Jardine Matheson both offered unparalleled access to China and had a vested interest in supplementing the criticism of the Qing Empire that became a significant narrative of writing on China in the 1830s and 1840s.

In addition to Jardine Matheson’s publishing connections, its commercial and political links ensured that their narrative of Western and Chinese victimhood at the hands of the despotic Qing Empire was also visible in British political discourse in the 1830s. Due to their perceived expertise on China and the China trade, the opinion of members of the firm was sought in Britain. William Jardine and Alexander Matheson, as well as other notable Canton merchants, were called to give evidence to the 1840 Select Committee on the Trade with China, which had been appointed in a direct response to Commissioner Lin Zexu’s seizure of British-owned opium (British Parliamentary Papers, 1840). Similarly, Magniac, Smith & Co. and the veteran Whig MP John Abel Smith represented Jardine Matheson in London through the 1830s (Price, 2004). An even more direct connection to parliament came from the careers of prominent members of the firm after their time on the China coast. After returning to Britain, William Jardine was elected as Whig MP for Ashburton in 1841 (Keswick, 1982, p.24). Upon Jardine’s death in 1843, James Matheson ran for, and won, Jardine’s seat and subsequently sat on the 1847 Select Committee on Commercial Relations with China (British Parliamentary Papers, 1847). Throughout the 1830s and 1840s, the firm was well connected with the political elite in London.

The lobbying of Viscount Palmerston in favor of military action against China demonstrated the firm’s ability to influence senior British statesmen. As Foreign Secretary for most of the 1830s, Palmerston was instrumental in determining British policy toward China. John Abel Smith engineered the first meeting between the firm’s partners and Palmerston, which took place in 1835 when James Matheson returned to Britain with the widowed Lady Napier. In light of the diplomatic failure and death of the first Superintendent William Napier in 1834, Matheson urged an aggressive stance toward the Qing Empire. At this meeting, Matheson was unsuccessful in convincing Palmerston to take military action in defense of the interests of British subjects at Canton (Napier, 1995, p.214). In March 1839, Commissioner Lin seized British-owned opium in Canton. At the same time, William Jardine was travelling to London. On his arrival, Jardine had a private meeting with Palmerston. He advised Palmerston on the necessary size of naval force and the strategic advantages of seizing Hong Kong – information which would later be acknowledged as essential by Palmerston (Le Pinchon, 2006, p.43). The firm had become a vital point of information on China by both British legislators and senior statesmen.

Beyond the firm’s direct political links, Jardine Matheson were also integral to new commercial networks and organizations developing in the 1830s, which were designed to articulate the interests of China trade merchants as a collective. Over the 1830s, British merchants across Asia established Chambers of Commerce: in Canton (25 August 1834), Bombay (22 September 1836), Madras (29 September 1836), Singapore (8 February 1837), and Ceylon (25 March 1839) (Webster, 2006, p. 757; Nish, 1962, p. 75). Given the prominence of Jardine Matheson in Canton’s foreign merchant community, it is of little surprise that the firm was instrumental in the formation and coordination of these organizations. The Canton Chamber of Commerce elected James Matheson as its first president in 1834, and several heads of the firm filled this role over subsequent decades. The Chamber acted as an important lobbying device, which aimed “to protect the general interests of the foreign trade with China” (Chinese Repository, 1838, p. 44).

Using their publication networks, lobbying of senior politicians and commercial organizations, Jardine Matheson was able to maintain the support of the British state and, to some extent, public in spite of contemporary criticism of opium addiction and the opium trade.

Whilst the name Jardine Matheson became synonymous with opium, one of the firm’s strengths lay in its ability to diversify and adapt. Over the nineteenth century, many of its competitors ceased to exist, yet the Jardines Group still exists today. The diversification of business interests began early. On an individual level, one of the firm’s founders, James Matheson, became Chairman of the Peninsula and Oriental Steam Navigation Company (Grace, 2014). Similarly, Hugh Matheson, James Matheson’s nephew, was the first President of the Rio Tinto Company in 1873. Over the nineteenth century, the opium trade became less lucrative, and Jardine Matheson scaled back its opium smuggling operations through the 1860s. After opium imports into China were legalized in 1860, the firm faced much more competition. Importantly, competitors like Sassoon & Co. controlled their own opium supplies in India and were able to match Jardine Matheson’s competitive advantage. The firm had withdrawn completely from the opium trade by 1872 (Keswick, 1982). From the firm’s base in Hong Kong, it was able to transition successfully from an agency house, to an investment house, to a multinational corporation.

As one of the first merchant houses to move to Hong Kong, Jardine Matheson was instrumental in the colony’s development. By 1881, the firm was described as ‘controlling the Hong Kong dockyards,’ and in 1889, it founded the Hong Kong Land Company, which exists as Hongkong Land in the present day. From Hong Kong, Jardine Matheson also increased its involvement and investment in mainland China. For example, in 1867, the firm gave a loan of £400,000 to the Chinese government (Keswick, 1982). Of course, the irony was that decades of conflict around the opium trade had caused China’s money troubles. The opening of China to Western trade also opened the Chinese economy to investment and modernization. In 1898, Jardine Matheson and the Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corporation formed the British and Chinese Corporation for the financial exploitation of Chinese railways. This contracting firm was equipped to build railways, and supply engines and rolling stock, and staff to work the train lines. As with the Opium Wars, this Western involvement led to resistance and political turmoil in China. By the end of the nineteenth century, the proto-nationalist, anti-colonial Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901) swept China before the military intervention of a coalition of Western powers.

Overtime, Jardine Matheson also expanded its operations geographically. In 1859 – following Commodore Perry’s opening of Japan to American trade in an infamous episode of US “gunboat diplomacy” – the firm opened an office in Yokohama. As the firm’s representative, William Keswick arrived in Yokohama with “cotton goods, sugar candy, elastic bands and 40,000 Mexican dollars” (Keswick, 1982, p. 154). The firm’s success in late-nineteenth-century Japan again represented its ability to adapt. For example, in 1863, Jardine Matheson exploited the global cotton shortages during the US Civil War by engaging in the export of Japanese cotton (Keswick, 1982, p.159). Similarly, the firm became involved in banking when high prices damaged the profitability of the silk trade. Rather than specialize in one particular business area, Jardine Matheson were able to adapt to specific geo-political and market conditions.

By 1930, Jardine Matheson had offices across China, Japan, London, and New York, with staff numbering 113,000 (Keswick, 1982). The spread of operations also allowed the firm to adapt to geo-political challenges. For example, after the fall of Hong Kong in 1941, operations continued to be supervised from Calcutta and later Bombay, and the head office moved to Shanghai in 1950. In the present day, Jardines comprises a group of companies with extensive operations across Asia and the world, including engineering and construction, transport services, motor trading, property, retailing, restaurants, hotels, and insurance broking.

The comprehensive archive of commercial, and personal, letters and records at Cambridge University has made Jardine Matheson an attractive topic of study for historians. Access to the Jardine Matheson Archive requires approval from the Jardines Group’s London agents Matheson & Co. After using the archive, scholars also require the firm’s consent to publish material arising from their research. That the modern-day Jardines Group maintains editorial control over the historical archive demonstrates an awareness of the significance of Jardine Matheson’s history.

The centrality of Jardine Matheson to historical themes of war, colonialism, trade, opium, and migration also makes the firm an important topic of study. For example, Alain Le Pinchon’s China Trade and Empire provides a selection of letters from the archive that traces the evolution of the firm in the nineteenth century. But, this text also offers an insight into Anglo-Chinese exchange, colonial life, business culture, and global economic changes. There are also more problematic histories. Maggie Keswick’s The Thistle and Jade is more a celebration of the firm than an analytical history, though it is laden with fascinating images and items of material culture. But whilst Keswick takes a positive tone and Le Pinchon provides primary sources, the specter of opium smuggling, inevitably, looms large in these and other histories of the firm.

Typically, the firm’s founders are either characterized as drug-dealing agent provocateurs or celebrated as enterprising pioneers of free trade. Richard Grace’s recent biography of William Jardine and James Matheson Opium and Empire, which seeks to look beyond the firm’s infamous reputation, summarizes this historical problem. Grace describes how, as individuals, William Jardine and James Matheson have been:

Caricatured by writers who mention them briefly, depicting them as one-dimensional villains whose opium commerce was ‘ruthless’ and whose imperial drive was ‘war-mongering’. Such cardboard figures fail to represent with any adequacy the complex, multifaceted personal and business histories of Jardine and Matheson.

(Grace, 2014, p. viii)

Scholars have often portrayed this firm, which has left such a visible and searchable wealth of sources, on a variety of historical topics, as an evil corporation. This is clearly an issue for historians, but why is access to the firm’s archive such a concern for the Jardines Group?

In Chinese history, Jardine Matheson represents the West’s forcible domination of China through drug addiction, military power, and colonial control. Historically, the Treaty of Nanking is the start of a “century of humiliation” in which foreign powers dominated and exploited China until the creation of the People’s Republic in 1949 (Lovell, 2011, p. 9). The colonial history, to which the “Jardine Matheson” name is so closely connected, is of deep, national significance. The diplomatic discomfort between Britain and China over Beijing’s interference in Hong Kong’s affairs since the handover of sovereignty in 1997 is a good example of how the colonial past can cause controversy in the present. In 2017, Chinese President Xi Jinping suggested that Britain and China should “shelve differences” over Hong Kong in order to maintain a strong trading relationship post-Brexit (Reuters, 2017). In this context, multi-nationals like Jardine Matheson must navigate a precarious relationship with the colonial past.

Today, the Jardines Group website consciously alludes to a broader history. It refers to an “unsurpassed experience in the region, having been founded in China in 1832” (Jardine Matheson, 2017). This reference to the past skillfully acknowledges the firm’s history whilst neglecting to mention opium, conflict, or even the cession of Hong Kong. Similarly, the firm’s history is a potential selling point: “affiliates benefit from the support of Jardine Matheson’s extensive knowledge of the region and its long-standing relationships” (Jardine Matheson, 2017). This attempt to construct a positive narrative around the firm’s history mirrors the way that the original firm used its publishing networks to justify the opium trade as part of a wider philosophical conflict. In a competitive global marketplace, Jardines attempts to promote longevity and stability, whilst disassociating the modern company name from the controversial activities of its nineteenth-century founders. Operating in post-colonial Asia, the Jardines Group is anxious to preserve its history selectively.

• 1    To what extent can companies distinguish between their modern business operations and their historical activities?

• 2    What is the role of company history in a brand?

• 3    What is the relationship between businesses, academics, and consumers?

• 4    To what extent have companies always managed and manipulated their public image?

• 5    What ethical issues do war and colonization raise?

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