"Debt between Empires: Transimperial Credit in Late-Qing China"

When a globalized banking system emerged in Qing China in the late-nineteenth century, it did so thanks to key intermediary figures who linked the Chinese and foreign halves of that system in Shanghai and Hong Kong. This paper suggests that these compradors and other intermediaries, by facilitating bank-to-bank and bank-to-state lending between Qing imperial and British imperial institutions, served a transimperial function—one largely to the mutual benefit of both sides. However, the social and legal foundations of that intermediation were fragile. And when a major financial crisis broke out in the early 1880s, triggering a wave of Sino-foreign bankruptcies, it laid bare how little foreign bankers in China knew about the fine print of the guarantor contracts that secured their local intermediaries (and thus underpinned the financial system). The 1880s crisis, this paper argues further, therefore served as a catalyst for bankers to place Sino-foreign credit relations on a sounder footing.