Kendall Johnson - Narratives of Free Trade

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 centurys 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.

Kendall Johnson is director of the American Studies Programme and associate professor at The University of Hong Kong.

This is an important and necessary book emphasizing the early period of Sino-American interaction. Johnson and his authors reinterpret historical events through the lenses of narrative and literature, showing how the stories people tell about one another become the first drafts of history. This book will change historians understanding of Chinese-American relations.

James Fichter, author of So Great a Proffit: How the East Indies Trade Transformed Anglo-American Capitalism

Narratives of Free Trade makes richly imaginative use of documents and images from early US-China relations. There are ledgers and logbooks from maritime trade that pilot our thinking about Company ships, trading factories and diplomacy at the port of Canton. Diaries, letters, and travel journals unveil Canton life as witnessed by Nathan Dunn, Samuel Shaw, Pwankeiqua, and Caroline Hyde Butler. Then we join chopstick dinners at the homes of Chinese Hong merchants in Canton. The collection revitalizes our understanding of everyday life in Canton and Macau, and gives us crucial clues to imagining the early stages of urban life on both sides of the Pacific Ocean at the beginning of the modern world in Asia.

Takeshi Hamashita, School of Asia-Pacific Studies, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou

Narratives of Free Trade

School of Modern Languages and Cultures
The University of Hong Kong

Series General Editor: Dixon H.W. Wong

The Global Connections series explores the movement of ideas, people, technologies, capital and good s across national and regional borders. Books in the series reveal how these interconnections have the power to produce new global forms of cultures, politics, identities and economies. Seeking to explore the dynamics of change, the series includes both historical and contemporary topics. It focuses on interactions between the worlds diverse cultures through the production of new interdisciplinary knowledge.

Forthcoming title

Europe and China: Strategic Partners or Rivals? edited by Roland Vogt

Narratives of Free Trade

The Commercial Cultures of Early USChina Relations

Edited by Kendall Johnson

Hong Kong University Press

14/F Hing Wai Centre

7 Tin Wan Praya Road

Aberdeen

Hong Kong

www.hkupress.org

Hong Kong University Press 2011

ISBN 978-988-8083-53-4 (Hardback)

ISBN 978-988-8083-54-1 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-988-220-915-2 (eBook)

All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

First printing 2012

First eBook 2012

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Acknowledgements

In June 2009, the American Studies Programme in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Hong Kong worked with the Department of History at Sun Yat-sen University, the Instituto Cultural do Governo da R.A.E. de Macau, and the Hong Kong-America Center to invite a group of scholars to participate in a colloquium on the representation of free trade in narratives of early American and Chinese relations. The participants included Dr. Paul Bov (University of Pittsburgh), Dr. Max Cavitch (University of Pennsylvania), Dr. May Bo Ching (Sun Yat-sen University), Dr. John R. Haddad (Penn State University), Dr. Vincent Ho (University of Macao), Dr. Sibing He (Independent Scholar, Guangzhou), Dr. Yinghe Jiang (Sun Yat-sen University), Dr. Yeewan Koon (University of Hong Kong), Dr. Khun Eng Kuah-Pearce (University of Hong Kong), Dr. Joseph Abraham Levi (University of Hong Kong), Dr. Aili Li (Sun Yat-sen University), Dr. Rogrio Miguel Puga (FCSH-Universidade Nova de Lisboa/FCT, Portugal), Dr. Paul A. Van Dyke (University of Macao), and Ms. Huang Yedan (University of Hong Kong). The moderators who generously contributed their time and insightful commentary were Dr. Wayne Cristaudo (Director of the European Studies Programme, University of Hong Kong), Professor Douglas Kerr (School of English, University of Hong Kong), and Dr. Pui Tak Lee (Centre for Asian Studies, University of Hong Kong).

The colloquium experience materialized through the hard work and planning of several people, including Dr. Dixon Wong (Head of the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Hong Kong), Marie Imelda Macleod (Director of the Arquivo Historico de Macau), Dr. May Bo Ching (Department of History, Sun Yat-sen University), and Dr. Glenn Shive (Director of the Hong Kong-America Center). For their intellectual energy and support of the events, deep appreciation goes to Professor Takeshi Hamashita and Professor Liu Zhiwei (the School of Asia-Pacifi c Studies, Sun Yat-sen University), Professor Wu Yixiong (Department of History, Sun Yat-sen University), Professor Kam Louie (Dean of the Faculty of the Arts, University of Hong Kong), and to Dr. Vincent Wai-kit Ho (University of Macao). Thank you to Dr. Q. S. Tong (Head of School, School of English, University of Hong Kong) for additional support. For her expert administrative coordination, Ms. Christy M. Y. Ho of the University of Hong Kong deserves special thanks. The Fulbright Scholar Program and Swarthmore College provided the opportunity and resources to enable such gratifying international scholarly exchange. The suggestions of two anonymous readers from Hong Kong University Press greatly enhanced the manuscript. Finally, thank you to Michael Duckworth and Christopher Munn for their interest in and encouragement of this book.

Contributors

Paul A. Bov teaches English at the University of Pittsburgh where he is Distinguished Professor. Editor of boundary 2, an international journal of literature and culture, he is the author of the prize-winning 1986 study, Intellectuals in Power as well as several other major books in critical theory, American literature, modern literature, and poetics. His most recent book, Poetry Against Torture, is the result of a lecture series at the University of Hong Kong where Bov has regularly visited as a professor. The author of nearly 100 refereed articles, his most recent essay is Misprisions of Utopia: Messianism, Apocalypse, and Allegory in the Field Day Anthology. He is currently completing two books,