People · businessman, Municipal Councillor
Edward Selby Little
李德立Lǐ Délì · b. 1864
British businessman on the Municipal Council 1904-1906 who urged an opium ban and Chinese directors, and joined the 1911 peace talks.
Edward Selby Little (李德立, Lǐ Délì) was a British businessman who sat on the Shanghai Municipal Council in 1904-1906 and took unusually pro-Chinese positions for a foreign resident of his time.
Educated at Cambridge and elsewhere, he came to China in 1886 and founded the Shanghai company of Brunner Mond (卜内门). Elected to the Municipal Council (工部局) in 1904, he served until 1906. At ratepayers’ meetings he repeatedly moved resolutions to ban opium in the settlement and to admit Chinese directors to the Council. The gazetteer describes him as sympathetic to China’s national revival; whether the resolutions passed it does not say.
In 1911 he joined the Shanghai peace talks between the Qing government and the revolutionaries as representative of the foreign merchants, with the British, American, French, German, Russian and Japanese consuls. From 1921 to 1923 he was Australian trade representative in China.