Narratives of Free Trade

The Commercial Cultures of Early US–China Relations

Kendall Johnson

• Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
• Year: 2012
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9789882209152
• Subtopic: Economic History
• Index: History

This collection of essays discusses the first commercial encounters between a China on the verge of social transformation and a fledgling United States struggling to assert itself globally as a distinct nation after the Revolutionary War with Great Britain. In early accounts of these encounters, commercial activity enabled cross-cultural curiosity, communication and even mutual respect. But it also involved confrontation as ambitious American traders pursued lucrative opportunities, often embracing British-style imperialism in the name of "free trade." The book begins in the 1780s with the arrival in Canton of the very first American ship The Empress of China and moves through the nineteenth century, with Caleb Cushing negotiating the Treaty of Wangxia in Macao after the First Opium War and, at the century's close, Secretary of State John Hay forging the Open Door Policy (1899). Considering Sino-American relations in their broader context, the nine essays are attuned to the activities of competing European traders, especially the British, in Canton, Macao, and the Pearl River Delta.

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Book Synopsis
• Author Biography
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• Introduction: Revising First Impressions: American Stereotypes of China and the National Romance of Free Trade
• 1 Bookkeeping as a Window into Efficiencies of Early Modern Trade: Europeans, Americans and Others in China Compared, 1700-1842
• 2 A Question of Character: The Romance of Early Sino-American Commerce in The Journals of Major Samuel Shaw, the First American Consul at Canton (1847)
• 3 China of the American Imagination: The Influence of Trade on US Portrayals of China, 1820 to 1850
• 4 Russell and Company and the Imperialism of Anglo-American Free Trade
• 5 Chopsticks or Cutlery? How Canton Hong Merchants Entertained Foreign Guests in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
• 6 Representing Macao in 1837: The Unpublished Peripatetic Diary of Caroline Hyde Butler (Laing)
• 7 The Face of Diplomacy in Nineteenth-Century China: Qiying's Portrait Gifts
• 8 To Make a Way: Telling a Story of US-China Union through the Letters of Henry Adams and John Hay
• 9 The Flow of the Traders' Goddess: Tianhou in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century America
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index