When America First Met China: An Exotic History of Tea, Drugs, and Money in the Age of Sail

In 1784, the Empress of China became the first ship to set sail for Canton under the American flag. The journey was celebrated as an affirmation of the new country’s independence from Britain. Previously, all trade with the Far East had been tightly controlled by the British East India Company—it was no accident that the commodity dumped in Boston Harbor was tea. Historian Dolin (Fur, Fortune, and Empire) argues for the centrality of the China trade in the early days of the republic. Despite that, at the time of American independence, “no more than a handful of colonists… had ever set foot in China,” the first few decades saw more than 600 American trading missions and “as much as one-tenth to one-fifth of all the items in many early nineteenth-century homes in Boston and Salem came from China.” This fast-moving but superficial overview focuses on intriguing anecdotes and personal vignettes, featuring colorful subjects such as pirates, drug runners, and slave traders, as well as those engaged in more salubrious pursuits. But while entertaining, Dolin fails to deliver a deeper analysis of early relations between the two nations. 16 pages of color and 83 b&w illus.; map. Agent: Russell Galen, Scovil Galen, Ghosh Literary Agency. (Sept.).