After the Treaty of Nanking opened China's ports, foreign trading houses hired Chinese merchant-managers — compradors — to run their local buying, selling and staff, straddling two commercial worlds on commission. Some, like the reformer-merchant Zheng Guanying, became industrialists and public figures in their own right. The role, long resented as a symbol of foreign economic control, was abolished outright after the Communist victory of 1949.
Comprador no longer exists as a living trade. Here is what erased it, and which profession took on the work.
1600 – 1850
Joint stock and the industrial founder
The Dutch East India Company of 1602 proved strangers would pool capital in a permanent, share-trading company — and the South Sea Bubble of 1720 proved how badly it could go, freezing English company formation for a century under the Bubble Act. Industrial entrepreneurs — Wedgwood in pottery, Arkwright in cotton, Boulton and Watt in steam — built the factory system anyway, and Britain's Limited Liability Act of 1855 finally let ordinary investors risk only what they put in.
What else was happening then
1911
Schumpeter's innovator
In The Theory of Economic Development, Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter puts the entrepreneur at the center of capitalism as the carrier of "new combinations" — new products, methods and markets that displace old ones. His 1942 phrase for the process, "creative destruction," becomes the profession's defining idea.
1946
Venture capital is institutionalized
Harvard Business School professor Georges Doriot founds American Research and Development Corporation in Boston, the first institutional venture firm, raising money from insurers and universities to back untested companies. Its $70,000 stake in Digital Equipment Corporation in 1957 multiplies several-thousand-fold — the industry's founding proof that one hit pays for every miss.
1957
The traitorous eight found Fairchild
Eight young researchers walk out of Nobel laureate William Shockley's semiconductor lab and, with financing arranged by Arthur Rock from industrialist Sherman Fairchild, found Fairchild Semiconductor in Mountain View, California. Their later spin-offs — Intel, AMD, Kleiner Perkins among them — seed Silicon Valley's entire genealogy of defection and founding.
1983
Grameen Bank charters microcredit
Muhammad Yunus's village lending experiment, begun in 1976 with $27 from his own pocket to 42 borrowers in Jobra, Bangladesh, becomes an independent bank. Grameen's collateral-free small loans, made overwhelmingly to women, carry entrepreneurship to people conventional banks refused to see; the bank and Yunus share the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize.
Where that work lives now
The person who starts the company — spotting the gap, bearing the risk and answering for payroll, from Assyrian caravan financiers to venture-backed founders.
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