Trading Freedom
How Trade with China Defined Early America
Trading Freedom
How Trade with China Defined Early America
Publication supported by the Bevington Fund
The economic and geographic development of the early United States is usually thought of in trans-Atlantic terms, defined by entanglements with Europe and Africa. In Trading Freedom, Dael A. Norwood recasts these common conceptions by looking to Asia, making clear that from its earliest days, the United States has been closely intertwined with China—monetarily, politically, and psychologically.
Norwood details US trade with China from the late eighteenth through the late nineteenth centuries—a critical period in America’s self-definition as a capitalist nation—and shows how global commerce was central to the articulation of that national identity. Trading Freedom illuminates how debates over political economy and trade policy, the building of the transcontinental railroad, and the looming sectional struggle over slavery were all influenced by Sino-American relations. Deftly weaving together interdisciplinary threads from the worlds of commerce, foreign policy, and immigration, Trading Freedom thoroughly dismantles the idea that American engagement with China is anything new.
312 pages | 21 halftones, 2 line drawings | 6 x 9 | © 2022
American Beginnings, 1500-1900
Asian Studies: General Asian Studies
Economics and Business: Economics--History
History: American History, Asian History
Political Science: Diplomacy, Foreign Policy, and International Relations
Reviews
Table of Contents
Chapter One Founding a Free, Trading Republic
Chapter Two The Paradox of a Pacific Policy
Chapter Three Troubled Waters
Chapter Four Sovereign Rights, or America’s First Opium Problem
Chapter Five The Empire’s New Roads
Chapter Six This Slave Trade of the Nineteenth Century
Chapter Seven A Propped-Open Door
Chapter Eight Death of a Trade, Birth of a Market
Acknowledgments
Appendix: Accounting for the China Trade
Notes
Index
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