Residing in “South-Eastern Asia” of the Antebellum United States

Abstract

In the decades before and after the First Opium War (1839-1842), the US missionary Reverend David Abeel laid out a sense of “South-Eastern Asian” for US readers of Journal of a Residence in China, and the Neighboring Countries, from 1829 to 1833 (1834). His phrase focuses multi-lingual print evangelicalism on an archipelago stretching across networks of opium traffic connecting India to China. His accounts also imply the layers of faiths and languages that shaped senses of geography before the existence of the United States and the convergence of mottled European imperialisms in the China trade. At the end of the war, Abeel moved to the coastal city of Amoy where he rationalized opium commerce as an evil outweighed by the potential benefits of opening treaty ports. The prominent administrator of Fujian and scholar Xú Jìyú (徐繼畬‎; 1795–1873) disagreed and adapted Abeel’s geographical tools to present a warning about the attempts to evangelize “South-East Asia.” His Yíng huàn zhì lüè (瀛擐志略‎; General Survey of the Maritime Circuit, a Universal Geography, 1849) portrays Catholic and Protestant commercial activity as a threat to indigenous jurisdiction the world over.