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Warren Delano Jr. was an American merchant who made a large fortune smuggling illegal opium into China. He was the maternal grandfather of U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
By the 1800s, European demand for Chinese luxury products such as silk, tea, porcelain ("china"), and furniture was immense, but Chinese demand for European products was relatively weak. As a result, many European nations ran large trade deficits with China.
Foreign traders such as the Scottish merchant William Jardine of Jardine Matheson introduced large-scale opium smuggling into China in order to reduce this trade imbalance and to gain further access to coveted Chinese products.
The vast increase in opium smuggling into China resulted in millions of people becoming newly addicted to opium in China, and in an unprecedented Chinese trade imbalance with foreign powers, which in turn resulted in the First Opium War of
By early 1843, Delano had prospered greatly in the Chinese opium trade, rising to become the head partner of the biggest American firm trading with China. He had witnessed the destruction of the Canton system, the humiliation of the Chinese government, and the creation of New China.[12][page needed]
Delano lost much of his fortune in the Panic of 1857. In 1860, he returned to China, except this time he went to Hong Kong where he rebuilt his fortune. During the U.S. Civil War, Delano shipped opium to the Medical Bureau of the U.S. War Department.[
David_Sassoon
In 1844, he set up a branch in Hong Kong, and a ye ar later, he set up his Shanghai branch on The Bund to cash in on the opium trade.
It was not until the 1860s that the Sassoons were able to lead the Baghdadi Jewish community in overtaking Parsi dominance.[citation needed] A particular opportunity was given by the American Civil War, during which turmoil American cotton exports from the South declined. Lancashire factories replaced American cotton imports with Sassoon's Indian cotton.
