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BOOK REVIEWS
THE SENIOR JOHN SAMUEL SWIRE 1825 - 98: MANAGEMENT IN FAR EASTERN SHIPPING TRADES, Sheila Marriner & F. E. Hyde; (Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 1967) pp. xiv, 206, appendices, illus. 42/-
This book is the latest product of the Liverpool School of Business History which, under Professor Hyde's direction, has published a number of converging and complementary studies of the Liverpool merchant and ship-owner. Although it is claimed for these studies that "they are collectively an expression of ideas and techniques in the progression towards more sophisticated types of analysis in the handling (sic) of business records", a common feature of all of them is the endorsement of Charles Wilson's credo: in the history of business, biography is a powerful element.
We come to this book, then, with the previous knowledge from these other Liverpool Studies that 'The Senior' was a tenacious, aggressive character, described by a business rival as "a person who lived by and for business alone"; with, as well, a considerable understanding of the part played by Messrs. Butterfield and Swire in the Far Eastern shipping trades and, in particular, of J. S. Swire's role as architect and protagonist of the Eastern Shipping Conferences. The commercial history of Butterfield and Swire, and to a lesser extent of Holt's Blue Funnel Line,* has already been examined from several angles which means that the reviewer of this present study has had to read three books instead of one! (The third one is K. C. Liu's study of the Anglo-American Steamship Rivalry in China (Harvard, 1962) and which drew, if indirectly, on the Butterfield and Swire records.) This effectively strikes the note of competition arising from the establishment and operation of the China Navigation Company.
What we have new in this latest piece of research, principally, is the story of the 'Great and Ancient' (Taikoo) Sugar Refinery and, later, of the Taikoo Dockyard in Hong Kong. This project stemmed, as the authors make quite clear, as much from the conflict between Swire's and Jardine's - Swire swore to oppose the Princely House at all points—as from a calculation that it might further the shipping interests of the firm. Indeed, one of the most valuable sections for the historian of the China Coast trade is the
* Blue Funnel: A History of Alfred Holt and Co. of Liverpool from 1865 to 1914, F. E. Hyde and J. R. Harris, Liverpool University Press, 1957.