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

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...