Dael A. Norwood’s thought-provoking study covers the first century of trade between the United States and China, from 1784 until the passage in 1882 of the Chinese Exclusion Act. The book’s “core contention is that the conflicts that defined eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American politics and statecraft—over sovereignty and slavery, free labor and immigration, industrial development and imperial expansion—were all profoundly affected by Americans’ commerce with China” (pp. 10–11). Indeed, so intimate was the connection that “Americans’ participation in the China trade changed how US policymakers and public understood their nation in the world and saw the possibilities open to it” (p. 11).

Norwood provides insightful guidance on the interplay between the political economy and international diplomacy of the new United States and the mechanics of American trade with China. Thanks partly to differential duties on imports of tea carried in American, as opposed to foreign, vessels, in the three decades following 1784, the number of American ships trading in Asia soared, as did their cargoes of tea destined for their thirsty compatriots. Accomplishing this required some skill. In Canton, the sole Chinese port open to foreign trade, Americans were obliged to negotiate a complicated and often shifting bureaucratic system of regulations and requirements. Navigating mercantilist British restrictions excluding non-British ships from moving colonial products from one location to another within the British imperial system was another challenge, which was sometimes evaded by brief stopovers at American ports. On the diplomatic front, however, during the 1790s and 1800s US neutrality in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars gave its merchant fleet the opportunity to fill the void hostilities imposed on other trading nations.

By 1800, in both numbers and tonnage, American shipping at Canton was second only to that of Britain. Yet, as Norwood points out, even at its height from 1795 to 1820, commerce with China averaged only around 4% of annual US trade, far behind Britain’s share, and only half that conducted with France or the Netherlands. His study suggests that China nonetheless figured extensively in American political debates on the currency and the expansion of slavery. The American share of silver specie exports to China, used to pay for Chinese goods, rose exponentially: Though only 0.5% in total in 1785–1791, American silver constituted 28% in 1792–1798, 64% in 1799–1806, and 98% in 1807–1813 (p. 33). When these figures attracted domestic political criticism, American China traders turned to bills of exchange to finance their transactions, working closely with British trading houses. During the 1839–1842 Opium War, they publicly minimized their involvement in the opium trade, but under the Wangxia (Cushing) Treaty of 1844, received all the benefits for which Britain had previously fought. Thereafter, the American diplomatic and naval presence in China expanded to match the country’s commercial activities.

For Norwood, the high point of official American dealings with China was the 1860s, when Anson Burlingame, first as US Minister to China (1860–1867) and then as head of the Burlingame Mission, serving as China’s representative to the West and Russia, sought to buttress and stabilize the Qing government of China and win that country greater respect and better treatment from Western powers. Individuals and goods alike would be able to move freely in both directions between China and the United States. The Sino-American Burlingame Treaty he and Secretary of State William Seward negotiated in 1868 enshrined these principles, which Norwood—though failing to put them in the context of Seward’s 1867 purchase of Alaska for the United States—perceptively depicts as the enlightened international counterpart of domestic Republican-led efforts to implement Reconstruction and equal treatment for African-Americans in the Southern states following the American Civil War. As the 1870s progressed, both parallel ventures fell victim to conservative opposition: Republicans acquiesced as the South instituted Jim Crow policies, and in 1882 the US Congress passed legislation to exclude Chinese workers.

Simultaneously, between the 1870s and 1890s, the major US trading firms in China succumbed to bankruptcy and ceased operations, a fate some though not all of their British, German, French, and Japanese counterparts escaped. Although the amount of Chinese–American trade remained relatively steady, as a share of total American commerce it dwindled from 3.5% in 1861 to somewhere between 1% and 2% from 1865 to 1900.

The weakest section of Norwood’s argument is his effort to tie these latter developments to international globalization. He contends that, at this juncture, perceptions of the “China market” as an outlet for surplus American production replaced the earlier focus upon reciprocal trade. Yet, the evidence he deploys primarily suggests at best only limited American economic interest in China. American capital found that the domestic United States offered more lucrative opportunities and returns than China. Some were indeed effectively subsidized by the federal or state governments. Whatever rhetoric late nineteenth-century US political elites employed, in practice they largely looked inward, erecting intimidating tariff barriers to protect growing American industry. Lacking the shelter of any broader imperial project that would make its existence a national priority, by 1900 trade between the United States and China constituted a respectable but decidedly limited segment of each country’s overall ventures in international commerce.