Things Chinese in the Making of Early America

When textile merchant Margrieta van Varick lived in Flatbush, New York, in the 1690s, she occupied a home with an amazing assortment of "Cheenie" dishes, "Indian Babyes," "East India" silver and furniture, Turkish carpets, and Indian cotton textiles—just some of the more than two thousand objects listed in her probate inventory upon her death in 1695. (These are now the subject of a recent Bard Graduate Center exhibition and book, Dutch New York, between East and West: The World of Margrieta van Varick [2009].) Born in Amsterdam, the orphan moved to Malacca where her uncle and two future husbands worked for the Dutch East Asia Company. She returned to the Dutch Republic and soon married Rudolphus van Varick, later moving with him to Flatbush, where he served as a minister of the Reformed Dutch Church. What seems to our modern imagination as an exotic treasure trove turns out, in the deft hands of historian Caroline Frank, to be representative of an equally fascinating if quite different story: the deep immersion of colonial Americans in Chinese commodities and visions of China in their homes and their imaginations.

Frank moves comfortably between the macro- and micro-levels of historical analysis, going from counting the number of colonists venturing to the Indian Ocean for trade, to an analysis of the "japanned" interiors of a Rhode Island Georgian house, and on to a discussion of how to bring the commodity of tea back into the subject of the Boston Tea Party. But at its heart, Objectifying China, Imagining America is a book arguing that our increasingly dominant Atlanticist paradigm for understanding early modern North America represents an overly restrictive vantage point. American mariners and merchants, colonial consumers and cultural critics, like their counterparts in Europe, lived in a global age. "Prenational British Americans did not view themselves as living in an Atlantic world" (p. 4), Frank asserts, and we need to pay attention to the circulation of people, objects, and ideas across the Cape of Good Hope and into the Indian Ocean, Southeast Asia, and East Asia. Why does this trans-oceanic perspective matter? In the standard textbook account, the China trade enters our historical consciousness after independence, with the voyage of the Empress of China to Canton in 1784-85. But here we have a China trade before the China trade, as Frank writes that "colonial Americans were deeply involved in the buying, selling, and owning [of] Chinese porcelain long before direct, nationalized trade in the East" (p. 141). As depicted, this is a dual process taking place at two levels: "Globally and locally, they sought out entrepreneurial gain in the commerce of tea and porcelain, and they were discriminating consumers of these Chinese commodities at home" (p. 141).

Moreover, Objectifying China, Imagining America contains important ways of understanding colonial American political identity, as colonial British Americans use these experiences and objects for developing their own identity vis-à-vis Great Britain. Finally, Frank informs us about "learning to look" at these "Chinese babys" and Asian objects in general and provides an exemplary analysis of how objects matter—not as mere illustrations of historical events or as static evidence of social processes, but as complex carriers of symbolic meaning that can act as historical agents and can change that meaning as they move over time and space. Following Frank, the well-established narratives of refinement in the eighteenth century and the growing discord between Great Britain and the North American colonies will look quite different.

The book opens with a sweeping chapter about this first American China Trade, with detailed discussions of the "Red Sea men," as they were called in the colonies, who crossed the Atlantic and rounded the Cape of Good Hope into the Indian Ocean. An estimated 2,900 men, many of them pirates and privateers, sailed heavily armed vessels in search of the Chinese commodities available in western Indian Ocean ports. Indeed, one case demonstrates...