"The US government has long sought investment opportunities for US companies in developing countries. But the results have been mixed: firms have preferred to invest in the industrial world and developing-world leaders have not always welcomed foreign investment. Violence and the presence of...

Thomas M. Larkin examines the Hong Kong-based Augustine Heard & Company, the most prominent American trading firm in treaty-port China, to explore the ways American elites at once made and were made by British colonial society