Trading Freedom: How Trade with China Defined Early America by Dael A. Norwood (review)

IF 0.4 3区 社会学 0 HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES Pub Date : 2023-09-01 DOI:10.1353/ecs.2023.a909461
{"title":"Trading Freedom: How Trade with China Defined Early America by Dael A. Norwood (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/ecs.2023.a909461","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Trading Freedom: How Trade with China Defined Early America by Dael A. Norwood Meng Zhang Dael A. Norwood, Trading Freedom: How Trade with China Defined Early America ( Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2022). Pp. 270; 21 halftones, 2 line drawings. $45.00 cloth. America's earnest engagement with the Asia Pacific region is commonly perceived to have begun in the late nineteenth century in the context of expansionist competition with other imperial powers and global industrial capitalism. Challenging this traditional narrative, recent scholarship is drawing attention to the early interest and activities of the United States in the Pacific World. Norwood's new book is an outstanding example of this new direction and offers the revisionist argument that commerce with China had profoundly shaped Americans' perceptions of themselves and their place in the world in the long nineteenth century. Such influences were not restricted to the realm of foreign relations but indeed informed a series of domestic debates that defined American politics in those eras—on sovereignty, slavery, free labor, immigration, and imperial expansion. The book covers the period from the first American trading voyage to Qing China in 1784 to the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. For this century-long period, Norwood traces a transition in Americans' approach to their relations with China, which he terms a conceptual shift from the \"China trade\" to the \"China market.\" Whereas in the early republic, trade with China was seen as a strategic means to access a wider network of global commerce, by the late nineteenth century, Gilded-Age Americans came to see China primarily as an outlet for the overabundance of mass-produced goods at home and an arena for competition with other imperial powers. In the first decades of the American republic, commercial voyages to China were promoted as an important strategy to escape from British hegemony. China's ports functioned as gateways to a complex network of exchanges spanning the Americas, Africa, Europe, and the Pacific Islands. The priority of protecting Americans' China trade helped push for a more centralized national government that was able to implement protectionist tariffs and mobilize naval forces (chapter 1). However, other measures that aimed to support American traders in the East Indies, such as the Jeffersonian embargo, achieved the opposite result and enraged the traders they intended to protect (chapter 2). In the protectionist political environment after the French wars, the China trade came under hostile scrutiny for its role in driving the outflow of silver specie. Policies that were meant to stop the silver outflow and reduce the reliance on overseas commerce, such as the promotion of the use of bills of exchange, inadvertently ended up drawing Americans closer to a London-centered financial network of global capitalism (chapter 3). By the mid-1830s, American China traders had become close collaborators with the British in Chinese ports, including in the business of opium smuggling and more aggressive incursions into China. When the Opium War broke out, it [End Page 125] became an object of intense interest and debate in the United States—not because American merchants' deep involvement in the opium trade was widely recognized, but because of American concerns about how British power might touch on their own national sovereignty for the cause of abolition in the same way it violated China's sovereignty in the name of free trade. In chapter 4—which I consider the most interesting chapter of this book—Norwood delineates how Britain's war in China alarmed American slaveholders and emboldened abolitionists. American politicians and commentators \"consistently mapped the war's belligerents onto their own political divides, centered on the legitimacy of slavery and the enforcement of the law of nations\" (74). Norwood also maintains that it was to defend US sovereignty and slavery against a global British threat that American officials sought to deepen their commercial connections with China by sending the first diplomatic embassy there (74). I find the argument for this particular causal link less persuasive than other points made in this excellent chapter. In this regard, the traditional wisdom, that the United States was eager to ensure its access to the same privileges that Britain had obtained...","PeriodicalId":45802,"journal":{"name":"EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4000,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ecs.2023.a909461","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY","Score":null,"Total":0}
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Abstract

Reviewed by: Trading Freedom: How Trade with China Defined Early America by Dael A. Norwood Meng Zhang Dael A. Norwood, Trading Freedom: How Trade with China Defined Early America ( Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2022). Pp. 270; 21 halftones, 2 line drawings. $45.00 cloth. America's earnest engagement with the Asia Pacific region is commonly perceived to have begun in the late nineteenth century in the context of expansionist competition with other imperial powers and global industrial capitalism. Challenging this traditional narrative, recent scholarship is drawing attention to the early interest and activities of the United States in the Pacific World. Norwood's new book is an outstanding example of this new direction and offers the revisionist argument that commerce with China had profoundly shaped Americans' perceptions of themselves and their place in the world in the long nineteenth century. Such influences were not restricted to the realm of foreign relations but indeed informed a series of domestic debates that defined American politics in those eras—on sovereignty, slavery, free labor, immigration, and imperial expansion. The book covers the period from the first American trading voyage to Qing China in 1784 to the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. For this century-long period, Norwood traces a transition in Americans' approach to their relations with China, which he terms a conceptual shift from the "China trade" to the "China market." Whereas in the early republic, trade with China was seen as a strategic means to access a wider network of global commerce, by the late nineteenth century, Gilded-Age Americans came to see China primarily as an outlet for the overabundance of mass-produced goods at home and an arena for competition with other imperial powers. In the first decades of the American republic, commercial voyages to China were promoted as an important strategy to escape from British hegemony. China's ports functioned as gateways to a complex network of exchanges spanning the Americas, Africa, Europe, and the Pacific Islands. The priority of protecting Americans' China trade helped push for a more centralized national government that was able to implement protectionist tariffs and mobilize naval forces (chapter 1). However, other measures that aimed to support American traders in the East Indies, such as the Jeffersonian embargo, achieved the opposite result and enraged the traders they intended to protect (chapter 2). In the protectionist political environment after the French wars, the China trade came under hostile scrutiny for its role in driving the outflow of silver specie. Policies that were meant to stop the silver outflow and reduce the reliance on overseas commerce, such as the promotion of the use of bills of exchange, inadvertently ended up drawing Americans closer to a London-centered financial network of global capitalism (chapter 3). By the mid-1830s, American China traders had become close collaborators with the British in Chinese ports, including in the business of opium smuggling and more aggressive incursions into China. When the Opium War broke out, it [End Page 125] became an object of intense interest and debate in the United States—not because American merchants' deep involvement in the opium trade was widely recognized, but because of American concerns about how British power might touch on their own national sovereignty for the cause of abolition in the same way it violated China's sovereignty in the name of free trade. In chapter 4—which I consider the most interesting chapter of this book—Norwood delineates how Britain's war in China alarmed American slaveholders and emboldened abolitionists. American politicians and commentators "consistently mapped the war's belligerents onto their own political divides, centered on the legitimacy of slavery and the enforcement of the law of nations" (74). Norwood also maintains that it was to defend US sovereignty and slavery against a global British threat that American officials sought to deepen their commercial connections with China by sending the first diplomatic embassy there (74). I find the argument for this particular causal link less persuasive than other points made in this excellent chapter. In this regard, the traditional wisdom, that the United States was eager to ensure its access to the same privileges that Britain had obtained...
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贸易自由:与中国的贸易如何定义早期美国作者:戴尔·a·诺伍德
Dael A. Norwood著,《贸易自由:对华贸易如何定义早期美国》(芝加哥:芝加哥大学出版社,2022)。页。270;21个半色调,2个线条图。布45.00美元。人们普遍认为,美国与亚太地区的认真接触始于19世纪末,当时美国与其他帝国主义列强和全球工业资本主义展开了扩张主义竞争。最近的学术研究挑战了这种传统叙事,将人们的注意力吸引到美国早期在太平洋世界的兴趣和活动上。诺伍德的新书是这种新方向的一个杰出例子,并提出了修正主义的论点,即在漫长的19世纪,与中国的贸易深刻地塑造了美国人对自己及其在世界上地位的看法。这种影响并不局限于外交关系领域,而且确实影响了一系列关于主权、奴隶制、自由劳工、移民和帝国扩张的国内辩论,这些辩论定义了那个时代的美国政治。这本书涵盖了从1784年美国第一次到清朝的贸易航行到1882年排华法案通过的这段时间。在长达一个世纪的时间里,诺伍德追溯了美国人处理对华关系的转变,他称之为从“中国贸易”到“中国市场”的概念转变。在共和初期,与中国的贸易被视为进入更广泛的全球商业网络的战略手段,而到了19世纪末,镀金时代的美国人开始将中国主要视为国内大量生产商品过剩的出口,以及与其他帝国主义列强竞争的舞台。在美国建国的头几十年,到中国的商业航行被视为摆脱英国霸权的重要战略。中国的港口是连接美洲、非洲、欧洲和太平洋岛屿的复杂交流网络的门户。保护美国对华贸易的优先事项有助于推动一个更加集中的国家政府,能够实施保护主义关税并动员海军力量(第1章)。然而,旨在支持东印度群岛美国商人的其他措施,如杰斐逊禁运,取得了相反的结果,激怒了他们打算保护的贸易商(第2章)。与中国的贸易因在推动白银外流中所起的作用而受到敌意的审视。旨在阻止白银外流和减少对海外贸易依赖的政策,如促进使用汇票,无意中最终使美国人更接近以伦敦为中心的全球资本主义金融网络(第3章)。到19世纪30年代中期,美国的中国商人已经成为英国人在中国港口的密切合作者,包括鸦片走私业务和更积极地入侵中国。当鸦片战争爆发时,它在美国成为了一个强烈的兴趣和争论的对象——不是因为美国商人对鸦片贸易的深度参与得到了广泛的承认,而是因为美国担心英国权力可能会像以自由贸易的名义侵犯中国主权一样,为了废除鸦片而触及自己的国家主权。在第四章——我认为是本书中最有趣的一章——诺伍德描述了英国在中国的战争是如何惊动了美国奴隶主,并使废奴主义者更加大胆。美国的政治家和评论家们“一贯地把战争的交战各方划分到他们自己的政治分歧上,以奴隶制的合法性和国际法的执行为中心”(74)。诺伍德还坚持认为,正是为了捍卫美国的主权和奴隶制,抵御英国在全球的威胁,美国官员才寻求通过向中国派遣第一个外交大使馆来加深与中国的商业联系(74)。我发现这一特定因果关系的论证不如这一优秀章节中提出的其他观点有说服力。在这方面,传统观点认为,美国急于确保自己能获得与英国同样的特权……
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来源期刊
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY-
CiteScore
0.30
自引率
0.00%
发文量
74
期刊介绍: As the official publication of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS), Eighteenth-Century Studies is committed to publishing the best of current writing on all aspects of eighteenth-century culture. The journal selects essays that employ different modes of analysis and disciplinary discourses to explore how recent historiographical, critical, and theoretical ideas have engaged scholars concerned with the eighteenth century.
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