Linguists, state, and commerce in the Pearl River Delta, 1500–1700

Thesis

This thesis examines the rise and beginning of the decline of the Portuguese-speaking linguists of the sixteenth and seventeenth century Sino-European trade in the Pearl River Delta. As interpreters and translators but also negotiators, brokers, and mediators, these linguists were at the centre of the Pearl River Delta frontier zone, where multiple states mingled and mixed with powerful mercantile families, commercial houses, joint-stock companies, and individuals for whom it was source of profit and opportunity. But the burden of nineteenth and twentieth century scholarship, as well the modern ideal of the neutral and disinterested translator, have meant that they have often been understood as corrupt and self-serving, symptomatic of an official unwillingness to engage deeply with foreigners and foreign languages. This thesis uses Portuguese, Chinese, and English sources to rethink these assumptions. It argues that the linguists arose in the Portuguese private trade between Melaka and South China, and were then co-opted into the governance of the Pearl River Delta, without losing their original status as commercial brokers. This created a tension between state and commerce that has often been read as evidence of corruption, but was in fact precisely how the Chinese state expanded its reach in the Delta, integrating the linguists into a form of frontier management reliant on the motivation of private commercial interest rather than modern ideals of public office as a trust. Over the seventeenth century, officials increasingly asserted the boundaries of acceptable conduct for the linguists using threatened and actual violence, allowing them to manage foreigners at arm’s length by restricting their linguists’ freedom of action. But the effectiveness of this system was its undoing, and the end of the century saw a new concern for ‘freedom’ in the trade, as English merchants sought alternative bilingual contacts. Here, the story comes full circle: this marked the beginning of the decline of the linguists as the primary mediators of the trade, and this decline was also the source of the image of them as mere customs clerks that was projected backwards to the seventeenth century by twentieth-century scholarship to create the inaccurate picture that the preceding chapters have argued against.

Authors: Fordham, J

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-j1p11dopq
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English