Aficionados of early US trade relations with Qing China can hardly do without Jacques M. Downs’s judicious and multifarious account at their elbows. Yet with the passage of time, the initial prints by Lehigh University Press soon proved to be elusive. Therefore, this fresh reprint under the Hong Kong University Press’s “Echoes: Classics of Hong Kong Culture and History” series will be warmly welcome.
The opium trade forms the major thrust of this book. Downs rightly points out its centrality in creating “competencies” for the American merchants. What remains useful, even for the general readers, is the reminder just how much effort had gone into the enforcement against opium, given the deleterious effects opium had on Chinese populace, before the arrival of Commissioner Lin Zexu. After 1821, Downs reports, “this study has turned up no evidence of Hong merchants’ participation in narcotics” (120). In a clear case of the “devil besting the priest”, official Chinese prohibitions only served to provoke a more effective “Lintin System in smuggling opium. Nonetheless, 1837 marked the year whereby official sanctions to halt opium were finally biting. Vigorous enforcements by Wang Ch’ing-lien and Teng T’ingchen were good examples. Ironically, it was only a year earlier Xu Naiji, a Qing official, has petitioned the Chinese emperor to legalize opium sales since “laws issued against opium are quite inoperative”. When Lin Zexu finally appeared on the scene, the American merchants had already come to terms with the impending demise of the opium trade. But all these proved to be moot because the subsequent Opium War devastated the Chinese, and demonstrated that “Western military and naval superiority enabled Britain to get away with it” (135).
The “ghetto” mind-set of the American emigre community is the other companion concern of this book. Downs demonstrates how isolation and arrogance worked, hand-in-glove, to produce a framework whereby Chinese lives were cheap, their culture and customs vile, so this justified the selling of opium to the Chinese. But right on the cusp of the Opium War, even the “American public opinion agreed with most missionaries and their mercantile allies who viewed the [Opium] war as a scandalous attempt to force a noxious product on an unwilling people” (271). Yet as soon as the dust settled, the immediate concern of the mercantile community was to secure as many advantages as possible. Officially, at least, the myth of special Sino-US relations began with Secretary of State Daniel Webster’s instructions to Caleb Cushing who were negotiating the Treaty of Wanghia (1844). Cushing was supposed to stress, “America had won her independence from England, had no colonies in East Asia, and had a strong navy” (285). On the ground, a mercenary outlook pervaded and American merchants were encouraged to “wrest it from China and go home to practice their ethics” (335).
Downs’s moral indignation with the opium trade is loud and clear. Peter Ward Fay in his foreword to this book questioned the necessity of having such a heavy moral message. In his defence, Downs’s answer to that charge is particularly apt: “Judgement may be the Lord’s, but avoiding judgment on an immoral act seems immoral in itself” (338). Indeed, at places, Downs’s eloquence is analogous to C.L.R. James’s celebrated The Black Jacobins (1938)—an impassioned rendition of the sufferings brought on by the Atlantic slave trade. Fortunately, Downs’s stance does not make this book a poorer account. On the contrary, this reviewer believes that Downs’s intense account allows one to understand how the opium issue readily transforms into a touchstone of current Chinese nationalism, a development so succinctly demonstrated by Wang Zheng’s Never Forget National Humiliation (2014).
As a measure of the sinews of Downs’s intellectual litheness, the monograph frequently speaks to other disciplinary concerns. Andrew Abbott (2004), in his discussion of research methodologies, observed admiringly that historians generally employ “many methods” and “hide their arduous research process”. The same can be said of Downs’s account. For example, Downs utilizes his awareness of Max Weber’s “Protestant Ethic” thesis in providing a very useful prism to underscore the sociology of returning China traders. First, the nabobs were not some Ishmael-like deckhands who by chance happened to be in the China trade. Most of the merchants received a good education and belonged to the poorer branches of prominent merchants. Many used their wealth and managerial experience to reinvest in America, contributing to the transformation of its industrial infrastructure. One shining example of “the union of both traditions—the secularized Protestant” was Caleb Cushing (275).
Elsewhere, Downs deploys other insights from the classics of social sciences. The rarefied environs enjoyed by the nabobs in Canton are recognized by Downs as pure Marxist exploitation of the poorer classes. Likewise, imperialistic attitudes reared its ugly head in the contemptible “violence and disregard of Chinese life and property” amongst American merchants in China (333). Readers are informed that Adam Smith (335) had long ago made similar observations about the outcome of the East India Company’s bloodstained monopoly. Fundamentally, historical continuity illustrates the key to wealth creation; those successful in the old Canton system continue to succeed in the post-Nanking treaty environment, whereby their privileges were substantially enhanced. The Hong traders continued as before, and occupations traditionally held by the Cantonese such as shroffs (moneychangers), compradors, “chow chow merchants” remained in existence.
Although Downs does not directly address literary and post-colonial concepts, this reviewer finds the nature of the China Trader illuminates Mary Louise Pratt’s “contact zones” very well. Particularly in an essay, Pratt (1991) argues how Guaman Poma, an indigenous Andean, subverted the account of Spanish Conquest. By contrast, we have many examples of China Traders turning the discourses of opium trade upon its head. Customary fees were held as evidence of corruption and Chinese laws were deemed barbaric. “It became”, according to Downs (but surely written in the spirit of Frantz Fanon), “psychologically necessary for the merchant to define the Chinese as persons to whom it was appropriate to sell opium” (330). Most would put up with “oppression” as the need to return home rich was greater. These former “opium traders” would metamorphose into virtuous captains of industry in America in their second careers.
One cultural concept which stands in significant propinquity to Downs’s discussion about the Canton culture is the notion of “hybridity”. “It was, as others have noted”, Downs points out, “a hybrid, and it exhibited the vigour frequently associated with hybrids” (329). While Homi Bhabha (1994), cites hybridity in the postcolonial condition where colonial identities are highly asymmetrical and ambiguous, it is useful for examining the complexities of China traders apropos of the “third space”, which Bhabha terms as the “cutting edge of translation and negotiation”. The friendship of Howqua and his American friends was a case in point of such interstices. On the one hand, the Americans wore the prejudices of their times on their sleeves; on the other hand, Russell & Co repaid the descendants of their Chinese benefactor honourably. Self-righteous missionaries in Canton were forced to learn more about their extremely civilized “heathen”. The nabobs back in America were themselves ample examples of hybridity. No longer at ease in America after such a heady time in Canton, they were “marginal men, caught between cultures and unsure of the direction of home” (242).
Another related concept concerns “mimicry”; Bhabha posits how the colonial subjects mimic their colonial overlords culturally. To be precise, Bhabha further talks about the subversiveness of mimicry. What is interesting in Downs’s account is a sort of mimicry in reverse, or according to the then British parlance, the traders had “gone native”. To make their life easier stateside, Chinese servants were variously imported into American household of the nabobs. In addition, the nabobs carried their perspectives and memories of China via the port of Canton back to the metropoles—Boston, New York or Philadelphia. Despite looking down on the Chinese in China, displays and possessions of chinoiserie, rendered as conspicuous consumption, were all the rage back home.
The Golden Ghetto possesses a fecundity which cannot be constrained to any theoretical schools. While there are parts which might be challenging to the uninitiated (especially in chapter five), a careful reading is well worth the effort. Finally, readers will be glad to know this Hong Kong University reprint has even resolved certain editing issues pointed out by previous reviewers. For example, we are now told that “SR” represents Sicca Rupees (112) and minor spelling errors in the index are fixed.
