Welcome to Port City Stories 🏛️

You've just joined a small but serious circle of students who study the trade networks that built and broke empires.

What to Expect Each Week

• New course lessons drop weekly — work through them at your own pace, but keep pace with the cohort for live discussion

• Weekly Dispatches — primary source breakdowns, supplementary readings, and field notes from my own research

• Merchant's Guild Chat — your direct line to me and fellow students. Ask questions, share insights, challenge interpretations

Where to Start

1. Head to the Course → Begin with Chapter 1: The Tenochtitlan Marketplace — An Empire of Exchange

2. Introduce yourself in Chat → Tell us what drew you to trade history

3. Check back weekly for new dispatches and lesson drops

A Note on Method

This isn't pop history. We work with primary sources. We question narratives. We trace the money. If a Pochteca merchant-spy from 1500 or a Canton hong merchant from 1820 walked into a modern trading floor, they'd recognize more than you think.

The patterns repeat. The stakes compound. Let's get to work.

— Port City Stories

The Trade War That Never Ended

In 1839, a Chinese official named Lin Zexu destroyed 20,000 chests of British opium in Canton harbor. The British responded with gunboats. History textbooks call this the First Opium War.

But here's what they don't teach you:

The real story starts 300 years earlier in a marketplace in Tenochtitlan, where Aztec merchants called Pochteca ran intelligence networks disguised as trade missions. It continues through the Manila Galleon route that first connected Asian and American economies. And it culminates in the opium triangle trade that reshaped the entire global financial system.

What You'll Learn in This Course

• 🏛️ Tenochtitlan's marketplace — how 60,000 daily traders operated a more sophisticated exchange than anything in contemporary Europe

• ⚔️ First contact economics — what actually happens to trade networks when civilizations collide

• 🚢 The Canton System — how a handful of merchants controlled access to the world's largest economy

• 💰 The Opium Trade — the merchant strategies, monopolies, and market manipulations that triggered war

• 📜 Primary source analysis — read the actual letters, ledgers, and reports that shaped these events

Why This Matters Now

Every trade war, every sanctions regime, every market disruption you see in the news follows patterns first established in these port cities. Understanding the history doesn't just make you smarter — it makes you dangerous.

$217/week with a 1-day free trial. If the first lesson doesn't change how you see global trade, this isn't for you.