Connecting French Indochina with Hong Kong: the Shipping Company Marty et d'Abbadie, 1886-1920s

Abstract

The French merchant Auguste Raphael Marty (1841–1914) established his own trading house, A. R. Marty et Cie, in Hong Kong in 1874. Following the acquisition of northern Indochina by France, he and his business partner, Jules d’Abbadie (1853–1904), in September 1886, founded the shipping company Marty et d’Abbadie in the port of Haiphong. As one of the pioneers their firm soon became one of the most important French businesses in the Far East, operating the Subsidised River Shipping Service along the Tonkin coast and on the Red River, in addition to a regular oceangoing shipping service between Haiphong and Hong Kong with occasional stopovers at Pakhoi, Hoihow, and Kwang-chow-wan. Chinese merchants regularly chartered Marty’s steamers for shipping goods and passengers. Competition with other Western shipping companies, especially in the lucrative rice trade, was intensive but Marty managed to maintain his business until his death and his company winded up soon after World War One. The paper attempts to analyse connections between the French and British Asian empires by presenting the economic and business history of Marty et d’Abbadie (whose company records have been entirely lost) based on documents from various European and East Asian archives.