John Swire

John Samuel Swire (1825-1898) was a British businessman. He grew his family business, the Swire Group, and expanded the cotton and sugar trade with China. He established the Taikoo Sugar Refinery in Hong Kong and The China Navigation Company on the Yangtze river. He was the instigator and founding chairman of the China and Japan Conference (later known as the Far Eastern Freight Conference). This shipping cartel existed from 1879 to 2008 and was a major component of the shipping industry from the Far East to Europe. Early life John Samuel Swire was born on 24 December 1825 in Liverpool, England. His father, John Swire, was the founder of the Swire Group. His mother was Maria Louisa Roose. He had a younger brother, William Hudson Swire, born in 1830. They inherited the family business when their father died in 1847, when Swire was twenty-two years old. Later in his twenties, he went travelling in the United States and Australia. Career Swire established Swire Bros in Melbourne, Australia in 1855. In 1865, he negotiated with Alfred Holt to expand the cotton trade with China by using Holt's Blue Funnel Line. He entered in a partnership with Richard Shackleton Butterfield, a textile manufacturer from York, and established Butterfield and Swire in Shanghai in 1867, followed by additional offices in England and the United States. A year later, in 1868, they parted ways, as Swire kept the Shanghai office and Butterfield kept the English and American operations. Swire renamed the Shanghai company Taikoo Sugar Refinery.