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Clipper ships and the Middle Kingdom
Apr. 8th, 2025 03:11 pmMy March assigned nonfiction read was Eric Jay Dolin’s When America First Met China: An Exotic History of Tea, Drugs, and Money in the Age of Sail. This is, broadly, a history of US trade with China, which started approximately five minutes after the US was established, and continues to today, although the President is doing his damndest to stop it because he doesn’t know anything about economics. The book doesn’t get to that point both because it was published in 2012 and also because, as the subtitle suggests, it only goes through the end of the Age of Sail.
Much of early America’s trade with China involved triangulating with the English, and less often the French. China’s system of foreign trade at the time was something called the Canton System, where foreign traders basically were only allowed to go to Canton, where they each had to have a little embassy-type trading house called a factory, from which they engaged in complex trade negotiations with the hong merchants who interfaced between the foreigners and the Chinese consumer base. This was all very complicated but for a while it mostly did its job of keeping the foreigners relatively quarantined so they didn’t disrupt life in China and a minimal sector of the Chinese population was exposed to their bad behavior.
The British were really the big egos here that got everyone into trouble with the Chinese. China, an empire that had been going for about two thousand years, considered itself the most advanced civilization on Earth, and basically acted like it was doing everyone else a big favor by trading with them. Mostly everyone else agreed that China was pretty ancient and advanced and cultured, and in America particularly everyone was quite mad for Chinese fashions. However, this sort of cultural admiration could only go so far, and eventually the Chinese view of imperial China as self-evidently the greatest civilization on earth would end up butting heads with the English view of the British Empire as self-evidently the greatest civilization on Earth. The Americans, in their pre-Manifest Destiny fashion, just wanted to make a buck.
Probably the most important stuff here for your average miseducated American to learn about is the Opium Wars! There were two of them, and the extremely short version is that they cracked Imperial China open like an egg to allow British (and other foreign, but mainly British) merchants to flood China with opium because if it wasn’t illegal in England, then clearly it had no business being illegal anywhere else; who did these Chinese think they were? A sovereign country?
Overall I found this a fun read despite the occasionally dark subject matter; there’s lots of cool stuff about boats and murder trials and tea, and it’s an area of world history that I didn’t know very much about, so I feel all edified and stuff. I definitely need to learn more Asian history but this was a decent start.
Much of early America’s trade with China involved triangulating with the English, and less often the French. China’s system of foreign trade at the time was something called the Canton System, where foreign traders basically were only allowed to go to Canton, where they each had to have a little embassy-type trading house called a factory, from which they engaged in complex trade negotiations with the hong merchants who interfaced between the foreigners and the Chinese consumer base. This was all very complicated but for a while it mostly did its job of keeping the foreigners relatively quarantined so they didn’t disrupt life in China and a minimal sector of the Chinese population was exposed to their bad behavior.
The British were really the big egos here that got everyone into trouble with the Chinese. China, an empire that had been going for about two thousand years, considered itself the most advanced civilization on Earth, and basically acted like it was doing everyone else a big favor by trading with them. Mostly everyone else agreed that China was pretty ancient and advanced and cultured, and in America particularly everyone was quite mad for Chinese fashions. However, this sort of cultural admiration could only go so far, and eventually the Chinese view of imperial China as self-evidently the greatest civilization on earth would end up butting heads with the English view of the British Empire as self-evidently the greatest civilization on Earth. The Americans, in their pre-Manifest Destiny fashion, just wanted to make a buck.
Probably the most important stuff here for your average miseducated American to learn about is the Opium Wars! There were two of them, and the extremely short version is that they cracked Imperial China open like an egg to allow British (and other foreign, but mainly British) merchants to flood China with opium because if it wasn’t illegal in England, then clearly it had no business being illegal anywhere else; who did these Chinese think they were? A sovereign country?
Overall I found this a fun read despite the occasionally dark subject matter; there’s lots of cool stuff about boats and murder trials and tea, and it’s an area of world history that I didn’t know very much about, so I feel all edified and stuff. I definitely need to learn more Asian history but this was a decent start.