While the title of this book and its cover illustration of the early nineteenth-century European trading presence at Canton suggests a narrow focus, this collection of essays explores U.S.-China commercial relations from 1700 to the twentieth century. As one might expect from an essay collection derived from a conference, the subjects addressed and techniques applied vary widely. Topics covered range from comparative bookkeeping (Paul A. Van Dyke) and food customs (May-bo Ching) to a trans-Pacific religious cult (Khun Eng Kuah-Pearce and Yedan Huang), with visits to diplomatic and intellectual history along the way (Yeewan Koon and Paul A. Bové, respectively). Other essays focus on single written works (Kendall Johnson and Rogério Miguel Puga) or single merchants or firms (John R. Haddad and Sebing He). The range of topics covered is testament to how much scholars are still learning about the history of American trade with China. Two sections of full-color illustrations point to the richness of sources on the topic.

The stand-out articles by Van Dyke, Haddad, and Puga must be related to larger projects, given the scope of archival sources they use. Van Dyke explores competition between independent American merchants and the well-organized East India trading companies of European nations in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. How and why were Americans whose business records consisted of piles of receipts “throw[n] in a box without any organization and never touch[ed] again” (p. 24) able to compete with the regimented monopolies of England and others? Van Dyke points to a more agile organizational structure, which did not need to maintain costly records, as the answer. Haddad, meanwhile, uses the Chinese artifact collection of American merchant Nathan Dunn to explain why, before the first Opium War (1839–42), most people in the United States held a high opinion of Chinese people and thought of China as a sort of “fantasyland” (p. 59). Through his Chinese contacts, Dunn was able to bring to Philadelphia a vast collection of Chinese materials, and display them as evidence of Chinese humanity and civilization. Puga similarly uses the life and writings of one woman, Caroline Hyde Butler, to explore what he terms “intertextual travel” (p. 117). In Puga's interpretation, travel writers understand the places about which they write as much through prior readings as through actual travels. One wishes there had been more space for him to explore the connections between Butler and the writings of the other American merchant-wives in Macao.

Praising these three essays is not to imply that the other essays are poor uses of space. Their main weakness, to the extent that they are less successful, is that they are finished. On balance, there is nothing wrong with new research and analysis pointing towards the need for further research and analysis. Ching freely admits (p. 114) that her investigation of cultural exchange between British and American merchants or diplomats and their Chinese counterparts over dinner tables is merely a glance at the topic. Johnson's essay similarly acknowledges that Samuel Shaw's interest in ginseng as an item for the young United States to export to China is part of a larger history. One hopes that a further study will embed itself more deeply in the historiography on republicanism in the early American nation instead of pointing repeatedly towards the eventual rise of Manifest Destiny and the coming of the U.S. Civil War later in the nineteenth century. He's essay introduces so many individual merchants and partnerships with connections to Russell and Company that one hopes it is part of a larger study of that American trading house and its competition and cooperation with the British. He has clearly done extensive research. Koon's study of portraits as diplomatic gifts between the imperial commissioner Qiying and American and British officials during the 1840s similarly reads like a preamble to, or call for, more study. Bové's close reading of the relationship between Henry Adams and John Hay's “Open Door” policy feels out of place in the collection because it takes place strictly in Washington or in the minds of Hay and Adams rather than in the Pearl River delta.

The volume has an introduction (by Johnson) but lacks a conclusion, leaving the reader alone after following Kuah-Pearce and Huang as they trace the cult of the goddess Tianhou from the Northern Song dynasty (ca. 960–1127) to San Francisco's Chinatown in 1996. While this transnational study, which shifts the focus at last from American merchants in China to Chinese merchants in America, is a rousing way to end the book, a coda bringing the reader back to the eighteenth century and reconnecting the various essays would have been welcome. This collection is a broad sampling of fresh perspectives on an old topic.