Colin Campbell and the 1730S

Colin Campbell and the 1730s

On the evening of 8 September 1732, the first Swedish East India Company ship arrived in Canton. The journey had taken about six months, and on board was first supercargo Colin Campbell. When the Swedish company ship reached the Chinese shore, Campbell led the way. He and the other supercargoes left the large company ship, and went ahead in a small boat. They arrived in the anchorage of Whampoa late at night, ‘very tir’d & wet to the skin. As we wanted very much a little refreshment & much more a nights lodging we went along the side of the Banksaals […] to see if we could light on any of the English of our Acquaintance’.1 Not only did they meet some acquaintances, they also exchanged news of mutual friends – at ten at night their very first night in the Chinese harbour.

Everyday life in Canton of 1730 was quite different from that of 1830. Parts of how daily life was experienced are best understood thematically, others are better approached through snapshots of the lives of company employees. The first of these sketches the life of Colin Campbell (1686–1757).2 Campbell was born in Scotland in 1686, embarked on a career in foreign trade and became involved in the South Sea Company between 1720 and 1723. When the South Sea Bubble burst, he was left with substantial debt and left Britain (probably to avoid debtors’ prison). He went to work for the recently formed Ostend Company, which led both him and his brother to Canton in 1726. Consequently, he had been to China before the Swedish company even existed. Just as the Ostend Company was being disestablished in 1728, Camp- bell made contact with some Swedes interested in foreign trade, and in 1730 he moved to Sweden to continue his career. Campbell was quickly naturalised as a Swedish citizen, and ennobled on the day that the first company charter was established – 14 June 1731. The following year, Campbell moved to Gothenburg and the Sävesnäs estate, where he lived for the rest of his life. He became one of the Swedish company’s first directors, but he was far from the only Scot in the company: he joined the Swedish company together with many men from Britain as part of the Scottish trade diaspora. Some of these men had been his friends for years, and they

1 Campbell, A Passage to China, 88–89. 2 This biography over Campbell is based on Colin Campbell, Colin Campbell, 1686–1757, Mer- chant, Gothenburg, Sweden: His Will, ed. Alexander Allan Cormack (Peterculter: Aberdeen Journals Limited, 1960) and Campbell, A Passage to China.

76 Colin Campbell And The 1730s included Charles Irvine. Irvine had worked in the French company but was lured to Sweden by his friend Campbell in 1733. He worked alongside Campbell for the rest of his life, and embarked on many journeys as supercargo for the Swedish company between 1736 and 1745.3 There were strong connections between the new Swedish and the old Ostend Company, in terms of who worked there, who funded it and their busi- ness model. On the first expedition, Campbell took it upon himself to be first supercargo. The captain of the first expedition, Herman Trolle, was born in Sweden, but the supercargoes and their assistants were all of British origin and had connections to the Ostend Company.4 The connections between the Scots helped them find appointments in the company, and they were given a warm welcome: men with experience of the East India trade were hard to come by in Sweden. During Campbell’s time, many of the ‘Swedes’ in the foreign quarters were thus Scottish. However, they were also Swedish: when Campbell left for China, he did so as a naturalised Swede and carrying a letter from the Swedish King. Nevertheless, he spoke English and talked of himself as Scottish. These multiple identities led to conflicts on board ship. According to his diary from the first journey, Campbell had numerous arguments with the captain. Once, the captain claimed that all Scotsmen were villains, and Campbell wrote: ‘he must be a mighty Hero to quarrel with a whole nation, that he ought to know there were other Scotsmen aboard beside me’.5 This close connection between the Scots, together with Campbell’s experience from the Ostend Company, helps explain the quote that opens this section, describing how Campbell and the others easily found friends and acquaintances on their first night on the other side of the world. In South Asia, Scots who were already established nur- tured and helped new Scottish arrivals.6 While that same behaviour was pos- sible in Canton, Campbell argued that easy socialising was quite normal for all new traders from Europe: ‘The first time that we visited the Ostend Super- Cargos we were soon acquainted (as is the Custom here with Europeans who have no quarrel together)’.7 These connections are signs of the continuity that the Swedish company entered into; these first traders were not new to the Asian trade, nor did they enter an unchartered space. Historian Hongsheng Cai has claimed that ‘To the Chinese who lived in Far East Asia, the Swedes from Northern Europe were no

3 Brigitte P.F. Henau, Charles Irvine (1693–1771) and the Swedish East India Company 1732–1743 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1986), 14–17. 4 Müller, ‘Scottish and Irish Entrepreneurs in Eighteenth-Century Sweden’. 5 Campbell, A Passage to China, 222. 6 McKillop, ‘Europeans, Britons, and Scots’, 34. 7 Campbell, A Passage to China, 113.