ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that maritime history focuses exclusively on merchant communities economic activities, while sidelining their role in class discipline and the formation of institutional power, as well as their function as empire builders. It argues that the prison was a central but by no means singular institution of power created by the foreign community in Chinese treaty ports. During the Canton trade, a formal prison never emerged, although it was sometimes discussed as a possible solution to some of the social problems of drunkenness among cantankerous sailors in Whampoa. The chapter describes that the formation of the major institutions of power in the treaty ports between 1842 and 1860 were created to regularize the lives of sailors in the ports. It is clear from the international capitalist class in the treaty ports did not ignore working people. The chapter reveals, international institutions of power targeted the working-class empire builders as well, even if they were just lowly sailors.
