From its origins in Liverpool in 1816, one unusual British firm has threaded a way through two centuries that have seen tumultuous events and epochal transformations in technologies and societies. John Swire & Sons, a small trading company that began by importing dyes, cotton and apples from the Americas, now directs a highly diversified group of interests operating across the globe but with a core focus on Asia. From 1866 its fate was intertwined with developments in China, with the story of steam, and later of flight, and with the movements of people and of goods that made the modern world. China Bound charts the story of the firm, its family owners and staff, its operations, its successes and its disasters, as it endured wars, uprisings and revolutions, the rise and fall of empires - China's, Britain's, Japan's – and the twists and turns of the global economy. This is the story of a business that reshaped Hong Kong, developed Cathay Pacific Airways, dominated China's pre-Second World War shipping industry, and helped pioneer containerization. Robert Bickers' remarkable new book is the history of a business, and of its worlds, of modern China, Britain, and of the globalization that entangled them, of compradors, ship-owners, and seamen, sugar travellers, tea-tasters, and stuff merchants, revolutionaries, pirates and Taipans. Essential reading for anyone with an interest in global commerce, China Bound provides an intimate history that helps explain the shape of Asia today.

The almost simultaneous abolition of the slave trade and the cessation of convict transportation to the colony of New South Walesnow eastern mainland Australiastarted a quest by the squatter pastoralists for alternative sources of cheap labor for their vast sheep runs. Over a period of five years, beginning from 1848, around three thousand Chinese men and boys from Fujian Province were recruited under conditions little different from the slave trade. In Among Australias Pioneers, author Margaret Slocomb focuses on the experiences of approximately two hundred of these Chinese laborers between 1848 and 1853. Her research examines their working conditions during the five-year indenture period and also traces the lives of several of the men who, at the end of their contract, chose to remain in those districts, which, by then, had become familiar to them. Perhaps they regarded themselves as pioneer immigrants. Slocomb recounts the experiences of these men on the dangerous northern frontier of European settlement. While some succumbed to the despair and loneliness of a shepherds life, others survived their indenture and went on to play an important role in the emerging society of the new colony of Queensland. They may certainly be counted among the nations pioneers.

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