Mr. Smith goes to China : three Scots in the making of Britain’s global empire

An illuminating account of global commerce in the eighteenth-century Indian Ocean world as seen through the lives of three Scottish traders. - This book delves into the lives of three Scottish private traders - George Smith of Bombay, George Smith of Canton, and George Smith of Madras - and uses them as lenses through which to explore the inner workings of Britain’s imperial expansion and global network of trade, revealing how an unstable credit system and a financial crisis ultimately led to greater British intervention in India and China. - Jessica Hanser is assistant professor of history at Yale-NUS College in Singapore. Hanser's doctoral dissertation, on which this book is based, won Yale University's Hans Gatzke Prize in European History