The winds of change and the end of the Comprador System in the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation

Andrew Smith

Business History, 2016, vol. 58, issue 2, 179-206

Abstract: There was a marked shift in attitudes towards racial and ethnic discrimination in the capitalist world in the 1960s. In Britain and other Western democracies, workplace discrimination became both illegal and socially unacceptable in the years around 1965. At about the same time, decolonisation accelerated. This article will show how the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation responded to this changing environment by reforming the way it treated non-British workers in Asian markets. Prior to the 1960s, workers had been assigned to ethnic layers, with ethnic Chinese individuals occupying the lowest group and British expatriates filling all executive posts. In the 1960s, this system was scrapped in favour of a less discriminatory one. This article, which is based on research in the company's archive as well as other primary sources, will explore how the bank shed the cultural and institutional legacies of colonialism, which included the so-called comprador system.

Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00076791.2015.1041379 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:bushst:v:58:y:2016:i:2:p:179-206

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/FBSH20

DOI: 10.1080/00076791.2015.1041379

Access Statistics for this article

Business History is currently edited by Professor John Wilson and Professor Steven Toms

More articles in Business History from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().