The China Firm: American Elites and the Making of British Colonial Society. <i>By</i> Thomas M. Larkin. New York: Columbia University Press, 2024. pp. 336. Paperback, $35.00. ISBN: 978-0-231-21067-6.

In 1882, the China trader Albert Heard returned to Boston, forlorn and mostly penniless.It had been seven years since his bankruptcy and the failure of Augustine Heard and Company.For the rest of his life, Heard would try, with occasional success, to maintain his Brahmin lifestyle-spending leisurely mornings at the Atheneum, obliging callers to his Beacon Hill house, and playing cards at the Somerset Club.He found a job as a commission agent for the Lowell Gun Company, hawking their guns in Russia.But his finances never rose to the level of his professional and social ambitions.In 1890, depressed "as if broken in two" and with his health failing, Heard died.The sense of anticlimax that marked Albert Heard's final years epitomized the China trade and its decline in the US political economy.In the early years of the American republic, the China trader was a proverbial figure in New England culture.Stories circulated of men such as Elias Hasket Derby, Thomas Handasyd Perkins, and John Jacob Astor, who ventured to the East Indies and obtained unimaginable wealth in a short span of time.And yet, by the second half of the nineteenth century, the China trader was a specimen of a bygone era.What happened?In The China Firm, the historian Thomas Larkin provides a compelling set of explanations.He follows the rise and decline of Augustine Heard, one of the leading American trading houses in China, through the firm's resurgence during the First Opium War and its attempted reinvention in the treaty port era, running steamships on the Yangzi.The result is a sophisticated and nuanced work that reinserts, as Larkin puts it, "Americans into the history of British empire in China."The China Firm begins in the cauldron of the Opium War.As the British were evacuated from Canton, a number of Americans remained behind to exploit the swell of opportunities resulting from their exodus.Among them were Joseph Coolidge Jr. and George Basil Dixwell, partners in Augustine Heard and Company, who took on consignments for the British firm Jardine Matheson.In what became typical of US-British commercial relations in China, the two firms alternated between collaboration and rivalry once normalcy was restored.In succeeding chapters, Larkin shifts perspectives between the intimate and the imperial.He recounts drawn-out dinners, horseback rides, regattas, social clubs, and the various trappings the Heards endured to maintain their status as members of Hong Kong's colonial elite.There are frustrated wives and secret families, including John Heard's relationship with the Macanese woman Lam Kew-fong, with whom he had a son.In one innovative chapter, Larkin employs social network analysis to show, in stunning detail, how the firm's social, diplomatic, and kinship networks were at