This lively conference volume is a useful update on recent scholarship concerning China's relations with the maritime world in the period leading up to the Opium Wars, especially relations with the United States. To cite the recent work in this burgeoning field would use up all the space of this review, a job which is better performed by this volume in any case. The authors cite the foundational surveys and compilations, some a century old, by Hosea Ballou Morse, Kenneth Scott Latourette, and Tyler Dennett, which used only English-language sources, as well as the monographs of the next generation, such as those by Earl Swisher and John King Fairbank, which tapped newly opened Chinese archives. These articles put the Canton Trade in the context of the larger maritime world and the “great divergence” between China and Europe, citing work by such scholars as Leonard Blussé and his group at Leiden and Chinese historians (though only a few Japanese scholars, such as Hamashita Takeshi).
The introduction by John E. Wills, Jr., and Van Dyke, followed by Wills's “Revolutions and Divergences: The Macao Vortex in a Transforming World,” together form an incisive précis of recent historiography. Wills, for instance, makes in passing an insightful comparison between the Erie Canal and the Grand Canal, illustrating the argument that Qing China's problem was not so much decay as “centrifugal growth” (p. 12). China was not an “eternal,” “immobile” or “sleeping” empire, but a dynamic, hobbled one.
Jonathan Goldstein's tightly knit but wide-ranging “A Clash of Civilizations in the Pearl River Delta: Stephen Girard's Trade with China, 1787–1824,” drawn from his recent book, is a gem. Girard's career spanned the transition from the easy golden days of personal respect and mutual profit to the opium boom and mutual exploitation of the 1820s. Girard ultimately withdrew from the Canton trade to invest in calmer Philadelphia.
Where some earlier scholars saw Sino-American “partnership,” Stephen Davies, like Goldstein, shows “intricate and exasperating confrontations” (p. 31) in his “American Ships, Macao, and the Bombay Marine, 1806-1817: Delicate Lines for a Junior Officer to Tread—the Role of Daniel Ross in the Charting of the China Seas.”
Van Dyke's publications, based on exhaustive research in global archives, challenge old findings and shift paradigms. Here, his chapter, “Smuggling Networks of the Pearl River Delta before 1842: Implications for Macao and the American China Trade,” proposes to solve a mystery: why did the previously separate contraband opium networks based in Macao, Whampoa, and Lintin Island consolidate at Lintin Island around 1820? Van Dyke offers a multi-stage explanation: first, compradors in rice and tea moved to Lintin to evade new and extortionate “connivance fees” at Canton; then, Macao and Canton officials, who needed imported rice to supplement local markets and paid for it with silver earned from selling tea, had to compete with each other to lure back these compradors by offering favorable treatment. Opium smuggling at Lintin could not be curbed without affecting the intertwined but also illicit rice trade. The result was to keep the price of opium down and the trade safe. Beijing need never know of these networks of “competition and protection” (pp. 71–72). Likewise, Frederic D. Grant, Jr., follows the money in “The April 1820 Debt Settlement between Conseequa and Benjamin Chew Wilcocks.” Although the loan discussed here was illegal, Conseequa pursued his debtor, Wilcocks, to Philadelphia, a story that involves the British East India Company, the Hong merchant association, the Canton Custom House, and the Imperial Household Agency. Both of these chapters show that the brutal opium trade was not simply forced on China but also created protective Chinese constituencies.
American domestic cultural politics are dramatized in Michael Block's “The Importance of the China Trade in American Exploration and Conquest in the Pacific, 1830–1850.” Block cogently argues that the Chinese chimera drew Americans into the Pacific and whetted appetites for California well before the Gold Rush of 1848.
Isabel Morais's “Henrietta Hall Shuck: Engendering Faith, Education, and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Macao” and Susan E. Schopp's “Five American Women's Perceptions of China 1829–1941: ‘A Yard-stick of Our Own Construction’” each give us cameo portraits. Sad to say, this was not at all a woman's world. Both articles are enlightening on family life and experience of China, but not on the “trade, smuggling, and diplomacy” in the volume's title. I look forward to books from these two scholars.
Vincent Wai-kit Ho's “Duties and Limitations: The Role of United States Consuls in Macao, 1849–1869” draws on his vast research to give five cumulatively revealing biographical sketches of the retired traders, patronage appointments, or missionaries who served as American consuls, a lightweight post for which Washington did not even provide a living salary.
In sum, while this volume is not intended as a comprehensive survey, it does give a stylish and thoughtful representation of this lively field.
