Decline or Prosperity? Guild Merchants Trading Across the Taiwan Straits, 1820s–1895

During the seventeenth century there was intensive rivalry among merchants from Holland, Spain, Japan, and China for the trade across the Taiwan Straits, but in the following eighteenth century the cross-straits trade came to be monopolized to a considerable extent by Chinese guild merchants. Yet, according to the earlier studies, the guild merchants then lost their dominance in the nineteenth century. One of the chief factors mentioned for this decline was Western competition; others include internal corruption among the merchants and silting of harbors. Some scholars, including Christian Daniels, have focused on the guild merchants’ subordination to the British-led world financial market. ¹