Although the coolie agency in this case was said by Her Majesty’s government to have “brought disgrace on the British name,” it was not easy to bring them to book because the coolie trade was of immense economic value to British colonial interests. As for the coolie trade on the China coast, British colonial interests were too powerful to permit strict regulation of unscrupulous brokers like Syme or their Chinese collaborators. Like opium, coolies were too profitable a commodity to be regulated effectively by well-intentioned laws.