Page 52 - The colours of each piece: production and consumption of Chinese enamelled porcelain, c.1728-c.1780

CHAPTER 1 Introduction

72
who served in the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs Service from 1874 to 1908.

During his time in China, he was appointed as a trusted adviser of the Imperial

73
Maritime Customs Service, and served in various official capacities. After his

retirement, he took an active part as a member of the Council of the Royal Asiatic

74
Society in London, and was also on the committee of the China Association. Since
1908, he started to publish research on Chinese maritime relations, most prominently

The International Relations of the Chinese Empire, a three-volume chronicle of the

relations of the Qing dynasty with Western countries, and The Chronicles of the
75

76
East India Company: Trading to China 1635-1834. The five volumes of the East
India Company became Morse’s most enduring work. Taking advantage of his

knowledge of Chinese institutional practices and the British commercial methods, he

illustrated a trade history of the British East India Company at Canton by summarising

the record of the India Office Library. He shows the documents and summaries of
77
events of the British East India Company’s Canton trade, which he himself stated in

the preface: ‘from these records every fact has been extracted which could be

economic value to the student of the commercial history of the eighteenth and early

nineteenth centuries.’ These five volumes on Sino-Anglo trade form the first

72 The Chinese Maritime Customs Service was an international, although predominantly British-
staffed bureaucracy under the control of successive Chinese central governments from its founding
in 1854, until January 1950 when the last foreign Inspector-General resigned.
73 For of Morse’s service in China, see John King Fairbank, Martha Henderson Coolidge, Richard
J. Smith, H. B. Morse, Customs Commissioner and Historian of China (Kentucky: University
Press of Kentucky, 1995), pp.38-145.
74 Ibid, pp.58-59.
75 H. B. Morse, The International Relations of the Chinese Empire: the Period of Conflict, 1834-
1860, vol.1. 1910; H. B. Morse, The International Relations of the Chinese Empire, The period of
submission, 1861-1893, vol.2,1918; and H. B. Morse, The International Relations of the Chinese
Empire The period of subjection, 1894-1911, 1918.
76 Morse, The Chronicles.
77 India Office Library, are now administered as part of the Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections
of the British Library.
36