Word: merchant
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Getting In. China's Manchu dynasty began to fear the influence of the foreigners on the shaky empire. Citing the importation of opium as their reason, the Manchus began obstructing trade. Tough Merchant Jardine persuaded Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston to send in the British navy. The Manchus fought back, and the result was the 1839 Opium War, which the British won. They made a treaty by which five Chinese ports (Canton, Amoy, Foochow, Ningpo and Shanghai) were thrown open to world trade...
Fast clipper ships replaced the slow-moving East Indiamen, and China tea was the profitable cargo. To prevent idlers from wasting his business hours, Merchant Jardine kept no chair in his office but his own. He made huge deals with Bombay Tycoon Jamsetjee Jeejeebboy. Hundreds of young Englishmen, attracted by high wages & high life, flocked to China. Race tracks were built, blood horses imported. Gibb, Livingstone & Co. (John Gibb was a member of the Race Club Committee) never questioned the living expenses of their young employees unless the soda-water bills for their mess exceeded $500 a month...
...days later, as if to justify A.P. Herbert's words, a respectable meat merchant of Watford was haled into court for "the unlawful and malicious wounding" of a burglar whom he had shot as the man crept into his bedroom at 4:30 a.m. one morning in February. The Watford judge forgave the merchant the crime on the grounds that he had probably shot "in panic," and dismissed him with a $60 fine "for costs...
From the viewpoint of a moderately successful Jewish merchant, the future in Bobruisk, Belorussia looked very dim after the Bolshevik Revolution. In 1920 Joseph Hecht and his wife decided to send their husky young sons, Shimon and Yehyel, to Palestine. It was a lucky break for the Hecht brothers, because as time went by, the chances of getting out of the Soviet Union diminished to nil. Mr. & Mrs. Hecht were forced to stay in Bobruisk. Shimon and Yehyel became foundation members of Degania B, a communal settlement in the Jordan Valley...
...Lydda airport into the bearlike embraces of her husky sons. She wore workaday Russian clothes and new shoes and stockings, but the only article she prized among her effects (in fact, the only article of value she was allowed to take out) was the wedding ring which young Merchant Hecht had put on her finger more than 50 years before. In a few hours Mrs. Hecht was walking among the Jordan Valley banana groves, seven grandchildren beside her and three great-grandchildren tugging at her blue cotton skirt...