Direct trade with China promised merchants in the young United States amazing profits, but often delivered much more modest results. Much like the commercial history that it explores, America's First Adventure in China does not live up to its lofty promise. John R. Haddad seeks, over the course of nine case studies, to demonstrate how the American presence in China between 1784 and 1870 was distinctly American. The work's ambitious scope is laudable, even if the result falls short. The trouble with the book is that it cannot seem to decide what it is trying to do beyond that straightforward thesis. As a work of original research, there is too much reliance on prior scholarship. As a critical synthesis or survey of the state of the field, there are too many major works missing from its bibliography (no Jonathan Goldstein or John Kuo Wei Tchen?). As a work of comparative history, it largely leaves its readers to infer how the American adventure in China differed from the British adventure. But as an introduction to early US-China relations for novices, America's First Adventure in China is a fine replacement for Foster Rhea Dulles's venerable The Old China Trade.Footnote ² The book is engagingly and accessibly written, and smartly calls readers' attention to some of the contradictions in current scholarly understanding of the topic.

America's First Adventure in China begins with the story of the Empress of China, the first American ship to sail to China immediately after Independence. It is a well-worn trope to begin studies of American trade to China with this first American ship, but Haddad manages to make the story fresh. Familiar characters like John Ledyard, a young man from Connecticut who had sailed on James Cook's final voyage, also make their mandatory appearances. The second chapter, “System Men,” takes readers through the rise of Perkins and Company of Boston. Houqua, the most prominent Chinese merchant handling American trade, and John Perkins Cushing, an American pioneer in opium, receive short biographical treatments. These sketches help to move the narrative forward, but one wishes for a contrast between these standout successes who systematized trade and other merchants who did not. As Haddad rightly notes, “Perkins and Company did not monopolize America's China trade” (p. 55), but that Boston firm and its Forbes family descendants come close to monopolizing historical thinking about the trade. This would have been a fine place for Haddad to press beyond the established scholarship.

“All for a Cup of Tea” surveys the range of exotic goods like sea otter furs, fur seal skins, sandalwood, and birds' nests that Americans shipped to China. Furs receive more attention here than other products, but even then the discussion could have gone on at greater length. The California coast is notably absent from the discussion of the fur trade, though this may say more about the limitations of the scholarship Haddad synthesizes than about anything else. The machinations of American merchants seeking sandalwood at the Hawaiian Islands could have provided the same sorts of telling vignettes that Haddad uses to discuss the opium trade, but he allows them only a page or so (p. 63). Haddad is refreshingly direct with his readers in discussing the apparent contradiction between the great effort American traders put into obtaining exotic goods for the China market and the relatively small proportion of trade those products represented. His discussion of the importance of bills of trade, drawn on English banks like Baring Brothers, is an important corrective to the older scholarship's fixation on material commodities.

The chapter exclusively about early American Christian missionaries in China is an important innovation. Usually, scholars of American trade with China ignore missionaries as non-traders. Since the scholarship on missionaries focuses on their New York connections, while Haddad's earlier discussion focused on Boston, the chapter does not fit as well as it might. Happily, the threads of the missionaries and opium (which gets a chapter of its own) come back to greater purpose later in the book. Really, America's First Adventure in China is at its best once it moves beyond the confines of the “Old China Trade” scholarship. Some details meant to draw readers into the narrative seem suspect—would the hulk of a wooden warship lie “rusting” or would it rot? (p. 146)—but the overall effect works.

Including Chinese migration to the California gold rush in the study and devoting a chapter to the Taiping Rebellion help the second half of the book to push beyond the “Old China Trade” story. Scholars used to marking a sharp watershed with the 1842 Treaty of Wanghsia (the Cushing Treaty that marked the first formal diplomatic relations between the United States and China) will do well to follow Haddad's lead into the ensuing decades.