The New Middle Kingdom

China and the Early American Romance of Free Trade

Kendall A. Johnson

• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781421422527
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Economia internazionale

Looking at the Far East and American ambition in China through the lens of literature.

In the imaginations of early Americans, the Middle Kingdom was the wealthiest empire in the world. Its geographical distance did not deter commercial aspirations—rather, it inspired them. Starting in the late eighteenth century, merchants from New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Salem, Newport, and elsewhere cast speculative lines to China. The resulting fortunes shaped the cultural foundation of the early republic and funded westward frontier expansion.

In The New Middle Kingdom, Kendall A. Johnson argues that—for the merchant princes who speculated in the global Far East, as well as the missionaries and diplomats who followed them—Manifest Destiny spurred more than the coalescence of the fractious regions into the continental Far West. It also promised a golden gateway to the Pacific Ocean through which the nation would realize its historical destiny as the world's new Middle Kingdom of commerce. Examining the influential accounts of westerners at the center of early US cultural development abroad, Johnson conceives a romance of free trade with China as a quest narrative of national accomplishment in a global marketplace.

Drawing from a richly descriptive cross-cultural archive, the book presents key moments in early relations among the twenty-first century's superpowers through memoirs, biographies, epistolary journals, magazines, book reviews, fiction and poetry by Melville, Twain, Whitman, and others, travel narratives, and treaties, as well as maps and engraved illustrations. Paying close attention to figurative language, generic forms, and the social dynamics of print cultural production and circulation, Johnson shows how authors, editors, and printers appealed to multiple overlapping audiences in China, in the United States, and throughout the world. Spanning a full century, from the post–Revolutionary War era to the Gilded Age, The New Middle Kingdom is a vivid look at the Far East through Western eyes, one that highlights the importance of China in antebellum US culture.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• PROLOGUE
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER ONE: Characterizing the American China Trader The Global Geography of Opium Traffic in Josiah Quincy’s The Journals of Major Samuel Shaw (1847)
• CHAPTER TWO: Captain Amasa Delano, China Trader Slavery, Sealskins, and Herman Melville’s Dollar Signs of the Canton Trade
• CHAPTER THREE: The Troubled Romance in Harriett Low’s Picturesque Macao Transnational Family Fortunes and the Rise of Russell & Company
• CHAPTER FOUR: The Sacred Fount of the ABCFM Free Press, Free Trade, and Extraterritorial Printing in China
• CHAPTER FIVE: Caleb Cushing’s Print Trail of Legal Extraterritoriality A Confederated Christendom of Commerce, from the Far East to the Far West
• CHAPTER SIX: Extraterritorial Burial and the Visual Aesthetics of Free-Trade Imperialism in Commodore Matthew Perry’s Narrative of the Expedition of an American Squadron to the China Seas and Japan (1856)
• CHAPTER SEVEN: Passages to India from the Newly United States Revising The Middle Kingdom (1883)
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index