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Compradors, Firm Architecture and the ‘Reinvention’ of British Trading Companies: John Swire & Sons’ Operations in Early Twentieth-Century China

This article provides a critical examination of the way in which Britain's trading firms coped with radical changes in local business conditions. Recent work by Jones has shown that a small number of such companies successfully 'reinvented' themselves in the post-war period. Using evidence drawn from the archives of one of these firms, John Swire & Sons, the article shows that this process of reinvention came about as a result of the firm's willingness to experiment with different organisational forms over an extended period of time. The Swire case suggests that certain trading companies began the process of evolution and adaptation long before 1945, reforming their internal and external architecture to deal with changing conditions in China, such as the demise of the comprador system. However, the network-based culture of these firms tended to mean that they did so in a more gradual and piecemeal way compared with those modern, managerial firms who had begun to set up operations abroad in the early twentieth century.