The New Middle Kingdom: China and the Early American Romance of Free Trade by Kendall A. Johnson (review)

A resurgence of studies of the China trade, Indies trades, and the Pacific has emerged in the years since Rosemarie Zagarri called for a "global turn" in her 1991 eponymous essay "The Significance of the 'Global Turn' for the Early American Republic: Globalization in the Age of Nation-Building." The response has been a remarkable outpouring of fresh approaches and exciting findings from scholars in history, American studies, and a broad range of other fields. Kendall Johnson contributes to this corpus with The New Middle Kingdom. Following upon Johnson's edited collection, Narratives of Free Trade: The Commercial Cultures of Early US-China Relations (Hong Kong UP, 2012), The New Middle Kingdom is organized as a series of discrete essays or reflections that examines the development of American free trade ideology in the China trade through the lens of nineteenth-century literature. Johnson covers a long view of the literary construction of the China, from first contact with the Empress of China in 1784 to Samuel Wells Williams's The Middle Kingdom (second ed., 1883), to craft a study of how American writers appropriated China trade archives to retell historical accounts as "romances" that extolled free trade theories.

Chapter 1 examines the first direct American contacts with China in the voyage of the Empress of China (1784–85). Johnson sets out his approach by reviewing the journals of supercargo Samuel Shaw (1847), locating themes of national identity, the operations of the China trade, and the emergence of the opium trade, then reinterpreting Shaw's study through a nineteenth-century print legacy. Johnson's strategy telescopes the journals toward Josiah Quincy's introduction to the published journals, Herman Melville's Israel Potter (1854), Thomas Cary's Memoir of James Perkins (1856), and speeches celebrating the dedication of the Bunker Hill monument in 1843, in which "China featured prominently in the ceremonies that were celebrated" in speeches from Daniel Webster, Caleb Cushing, and other prominent figures (65). Two problems weaken the argument. Shaw's journal was not itself so much a "romance of free trade" as it was a practical guide to doing business in the East and documenting a historical moment when Americans were fitfully trying to find their place in the world. Consequently, "the character of the American China trader," of the first generation, seeking national and personal recognition, is eclipsed.

Chapter 2 employs another Boston trader, Amasa Delano, as a vehicle for examining the "romance of free trade." Delano is a not particularly apt figure for signifying the representative "China Trader," as the chapter title styles it, or as a "merchant prince," a term that historians have abandoned for some time. Delano understood the travels documented in his 1817 Narrative of … Three Voyages Round the World as global journeys in which China was one of many possible destinations. As with Shaw's journals, Delano intended his Narrative to serve as a practical guide to doing business across the globe, describing commercial practices, navigational directions, and regional customs. Certainly, Harriett Low, William C. Hunter, Robert Bennet Forbes, and a host of others documented the American experience of China in more detail. Ironically, Johnson wants to explore a different "geographic incongruity," setting Delano's famous encounter with the slave ship Trial against his endeavors in China. Returning to the canon, Johnson interprets Melville's Benito Cereno "as a satire of the era's prevalent free-trade rhetoric that glorifies New England's merchant princes" (67), and plays against it Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1849 essay "The Young American," as a paean to expansive democracy.

Chapter 3 is organized around Harriett Low, a visitor who accompanied her merchant uncle to Macao and Canton from 1829 to 1833. In his retelling of Low's nine-volume journal of letters to her sister in Brooklyn, he conflates the literary genre of romance with Low's reflections on her efforts to find a husband and navigate...