Page 203 - Merchants and Mandarins China Trade Era

189.
quite aware of the profit the Company allowed them. In the

1830's, as English merchants, manufacturers and financiers

increasingly campaigned for the dissolution of the East India
67
Company, the Americans strongly supported the Company.

Paralleling the expansion of commercial ties between

English manufacturers and American merchants at Canton was the

growth of financial ties between American merchants and English

bankers or financiers. These ties resulted from a change in

the financial basis of the Canton trade. Beginning in the

late 1820's, American merchants replaced their use of specie

with bills of exchange. Because of the convergence of a grow­

ing shortage of available specie, an expanding domestic and

foreign commerce and an increasing use of credit in trade,

banking facilities became extremely important to merchants.

Within the United States, merchants utilized bills of exchange

from the Bank of the United States and other state banks. But

abroad bills drawn on banks in Boston and New York carried

relatively little value. American merchants engaged in for­

eign commerce therefore looked for banking connections in Lon­

don, which in the nineteenth century was the financial center

68
of the world.

67
Extract of Letter, W.H. Low to S. Low, summer 1830, in
The China Trade Postbag of the Seth Low Family of Salem and New
York, 1829-1873, ed. by Elma Loines (Manchester, Maine, 1955), p.
37.
68
samuel Eliot Morrison, Maritime History of Massachu­
setts (Boston and New York, 1925), pp. 168-69. Emory R. Johnson,
et. al., History of Domestic and Foreign Commerce of the United
States (2 vols.; Washington, 1945), p. 131.