The arrival of Samuel Shaw aboard the American ship the Empress of China in Canton in 1784 marked the beginning of relations between the newly established United States of America and the venerable, though increasingly decrepit, Qing Empire. Freed by the American Revolution from the restrictions on international commerce imposed by the chartered monopoly of the British East India Company, US merchants wasted little time establishing their own presence within the “Canton system” of trade by which they too could profit by acquiring the tea, silks, ceramics, and other highly desirable goods produced by the Chinese. While Shaw had ventured to China primarily as an entrepreneur, he had also been designated by the American Congress as the first Consul of the United States in Canton, thus initiating the first major period in Sino-American relations that constitutes the subject of this book by John Haddad, Associate Professor of American Studies and Popular Culture at Penn State Harrisburg.
The vicissitudes and exploits of America's early China traders is the first subject that Haddad explores in his comprehensive overview of the first half century of the American presence in China. Drawing upon the abundant information available in the business records and personal memoirs of those who participated in the trade, along with articles covering this exotic aspect of American commerce in that era's newspapers and magazines, Haddad recreates the peculiar circumstances and challenges that confronted those who did business in the restrictive confines of the foreign factories of Canton. Forced to deal exclusively with the dozen hong merchants overseen by the powerful hoppo appointed by the Imperial Household, Western merchants were obliged to adapt to various procedures and ordinances that frequently led to costly fiscal dilemmas and bitter cultural confrontations. Haddad provides an interestingly anecdotal account of the unique system of trade that grew out of these circumstances as enterprises such as Perkins and Company drew upon their “Yankee ethos” to fashion a sustainable means for conducting profitable exchanges with their Chinese counterparts.
Among the more difficult dilemmas facing the American merchants was finding a product or commodity that was sufficiently marketable in China to offset their large purchases of tea and other goods. Haddad devotes an entire chapter to the various stratagems American merchants employed to acquire from around the world the unusual items desired by the Chinese and the success and failure of these efforts in the context of China's ever-changing markets. Describing the distinctive historical circumstances behind these various schemes, Haddad explains how American merchants were compelled to seek an ever-varying array of goods—from ginseng to sandalwood to furs—to avoid the necessity of using specie, in the form of Spanish silver dollars, to pay for their Chinese goods. In time, however, some American trading houses followed the British example by unscrupulously feeding the market for illegal opium that expanded dramatically in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Haddad describes in frank detail the involvement of Americans in the opium trade, from their acquisition of the drug in Turkey to their sophisticated smuggling operations in China, while at the same time explaining how ardent opposition to the trade of other Americans in China was reflected in a few notable attempts to bring an end to the practice around the time of the Opium War (1839–1842).
Merchants were not, however, the only Americans that first contributed to shaping their country's first adventure in China. Haddad also explains how, in the aftermath of the Second Great Awakening, Protestant missionaries from the U.S. began to focus on China as a key field of missionary endeavor. Inspired by the evangelical/millennialist convictions that constituted the central theme of the American missionary movement, individuals such as E. C. Bridgman, S. Wells Williams, and Dr. Peter Parker exercised an enormous influence over Sino-American relations. Haddad describes how these individuals served as pioneering scholars and cultural intermediaries, acquiring a knowledge of the Chinese language and culture and conveying that knowledge to the West through their numerous articles and publications, while at the same time informing the Chinese of Western civilization through publications in Chinese. Parker's famous hospital in Canton also contributed greatly to facilitating intercultural knowledge and understanding, along with generating a measure of good will, between China and the West. While their success in winning converts was very limited, these early missionaries and others that followed played a significant role in setting the tone for Sino-American relations. Not all American missionaries, however, enjoyed such an admirable reputation or record of positive achievement, and Haddad also devotes considerable attention in his study to figures such as the Baptist missionary Issachar Roberts, whose aberrant personality created serious tensions in the missionary community and whose unorthodox strategy linked him in peculiar fashion to the disastrous Taiping Rebellion of the mid-nineteenth century.
The distinctive role of missionaries was perhaps most evident in American policies surrounding the Opium War and the subsequent formulation of the first formal treaty between China and the United States undertaken during the Caleb Cushing mission to China in 1844. The Treaty of Wanghia that Cushing negotiated with his Chinese counterparts reflected the aspirations of his missionary assistants, Bridgman and Parker, and had the effect of opening the country far more effectively than the earlier Treaty of Nanjing drafted by the British at the conclusion of the Opium War. The treaty was also somewhat more conciliatory in tone and respectful of Chinese national integrity than the British treaty, although it also initiated the system of extraterritoriality that the Chinese would come to consider one of the most despised elements of their relations with the West. In various respects, though, the generally positive influence of American missionaries and the somewhat more equitable policies of the American government toward China would set the stage for the latest episode in this era of Sino-American relations that Haddad describes as a period of relative cooperation and good will.
Anson Burlingame's benevolent stewardship of American policy toward China was, from an internationalist perspective, the highpoint in nineteenth-century Sino-American relations. Burlingame was appointed by President Lincoln as minister to the Qing Empire in 1861, and by 1867 had so won the respect and admiration of his Chinese hosts that they appointed him minister plenipotentiary assigned to head a historic Chinese diplomatic mission to Europe and the United States. In Haddad's account, Burlingame epitomized the more progressive aspects of American relations with the Chinese, rejecting the imperialistic, gunboat diplomacy that had been characteristic of the era of the Opium Wars. Burlingame's eloquent advocacy on behalf of the Chinese led to the formulation of several important treaties in America and Europe and set the stage for improved relations between China and the West. His sudden death in Saint Petersburg in 1870, unfortunately, marked the end of this promising era, after which relations between the United States and China would decline steadily as increasing Chinese immigration began to stoke the fears and prejudices of the American public.
Haddad has produced a remarkably comprehensive and informed study of various aspects of early American relations with China, successfully demonstrating his contention that, owing to the lack of official structure during this era, Americans were compelled to adopt a distinctive style of pragmatism in their dealings with the Chinese that intensified their already pronounced individualistic tendencies. While a fair number of scholars have in recent decades examined the various dimensions of early Sino-American relations, very few have attempted to produce the sort of broadly synthesized overview that Haddad presents here. Citing knowledgeably from the considerable body of secondary literature on the topic, while also mining interesting gems from the rich trove of primary source materials still awaiting scholarly evaluation, Haddad has contributed significantly to our understanding of this particularly momentous and colorful period in the early American experience in East Asia. Written in a style easily accessible to the general public, this book provides an excellent introduction to the stimulating range of subjects that constitute the history of America's first adventure in China.
