True Yankees is a cultural history of American involvement in the Old China Trade. Through a close reading of five American travel accounts between 1784 and 1840, the author traces Americans’ shifting sense of themselves and their nation as reflected in encounters with the peoples and places of the East. While Dane A. Morrison does not “assert a direct causal connection” between the writings of his travelers and the construction of an American identity, he attempts “to show how, cumulatively, the ‘news from the East’… contributed” to it (xvi–xvii). Morrison concludes that a “tentative and tolerant” American identity, concerned about legitimacy, grew over time “more confident and less empathetic” to the peoples living east of the Cape of Good Hope (xxii).

Eschewing government officials or other dignitaries, the author follows five middle-class Americans whose accounts convey the richness of cultural encounters in the East, while also echoing the American “national mood” and “its changes” (xvi, xiv). Boston merchant Samuel Shaw sailed on America's first voyage to China, then spent a decade in Asia as a merchant. Ship captain Amasa Delano twice circumnavigated the globe in the Pacific fur trade. Plying the same trade, Edmund Fanning discovered three islands in the South Pacific before earning a small fortune at Canton. If these New Englanders embodied the Jeffersonian republican virtues of tolerance, practicality, and fair dealing, Morrison's second generation of travelers reflected the assertive individualism, prejudice, and “materialism” of the Jacksonian period (146, 194). Harriet Low spent five unhappy years in Manila, Macao, and Cape Town in the early 1830s when American attitudes toward nonwhite persons grew less generous. Merchant Robert Bennet Forbes found his “disdain” for the East and its people unchanged after a dozen voyages and “two extended stays at Canton” (196). Both generations of Morrison's travelers encountered not only a host of Asian and African peoples abroad but also many Europeans. These experiences enabled voyagers to chart a “middle course” for the American character (232). Americans, they could all agree, were neither decadent nor barbarous, but rather “among the most civilized people in the world” (xviii).

The author's five profiles are interspersed with brief, illuminating “Interludes” that flesh out the historical context of the Old China Trade and America's place in the world. These Interludes are rich with detail and skillfully written. Morrison is a master of narrative, and his ability to synthesize sprawling travel accounts into coherent chapters makes for delightful reading. A number of illustrations also enrich the text, yet maps are conspicuously absent in a book organized around voyages of great expanse. A map of the Pearl River delta (China), where much of the second half of the book takes place, would have been especially helpful.

Morrison's major challenge is to show that these accounts reflect something about American identity that was not already fixed in the minds of the travelers or their readers. Nineteenth-century Anglo-American travel writing is replete with discovery of self and other. Readers of published travel journals expected narrators to explore, learn, and make something of their travels. Discovery, that is to say, was a staple of the genre. Certainly readers of these accounts could learn a great deal about the geography and diverse societies bordering the Pacific and Indian Oceans. And each of Morrison's writers has interesting things to say about the Old China Trade and about their own world travels. Yet it is ultimately difficult to see how travel in the East served to bind Americans “closer together as one people,” or helped them to discover an “American identity” (50). It is also worth noting that none of Morrison's five travelers were imperialists. “True” Yankees, it would appear, did not foist their beliefs on others or lay claim to an archipelago while in transit. One wonders how Morrison's argument might have been affected by the inclusion of US naval commanders, filibusters, or missionaries. Still, each of Morrison's profiles makes important contributions to the scholarship on early American encounters with the East, and the overall book is greater than the sum of its parts.