China and the Atlantic World: From John Cabot to the Age of Revolutions

• Main Author: Sun, Hongzhe
• Other Authors: Beckert, Sven, Deloria, Philip, Hall, David, Stauffer, John
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: 2021
• Subjects: American studies; Cabot; Northwest Passage; Northwest passage
• Online Access: https://nrs.harvard.edu/URN-3:HUL.INSTREPOS:37370185

Like modern-day Americans, Americans in the early modern period interacted with China extensively. They read books about China in libraries and purchased them from booksellers, they discussed both great things about the Chinese civilization and its tyranny, they speculated about the relationships between Chinese and American Indians, and they consumed Chinese commodities and complained about the loss of wealth that resulted. In order to understand the complex relationship today between China and the United States and that between China and the West, one needs to return to the origins. This six-chapter dissertation begins with Thomas Jefferson. The Preface first updates the scholarship on Jefferson and China. A historiographical essay then follows, focused on the “global turn” in early American history in the past two decades. With Jefferson as a lens, this dissertation is organized loosely chronologically, but mainly thematically. The first chapter begins with the English efforts to search for a Northwest Passage from the long sixteenth century to the long eighteenth century and the knowledge about Native America that such efforts brought to England. It then examines the British colonists’ own efforts to locate a continental or oceanic passage to China and the East. At the end, it discusses the British and British colonists’ efforts to transform Native America into “a new China.” The second chapter explores the relationship between the Chinese and the American Indians in the Europeans’ racial constructions in the early modern period. The idea that American Indians descended from Asians in general or Chinese in specific originated in the Spaniards’ interaction with the indigenous peoples in Latin America. The idea travelled to South Europe, North Europe, and ended up in North America, where the British colonists produced their theories. The third, fourth, and fifth chapters examine three unique commodities that connected China with the early modern Atlantic world: book, tea, and porcelain. The third chapter first examines the presence of European books about China and European translations of Chinese books in the catalogs of colonial American private, college, subscription libraries and booksellers’ catalogs. It then examines evidence of the colonists’ reading of them by looking at their commonplace books and published writings. The fourth chapter first looks at tea taxation and tea protests in medieval China when the mass consumption of tea began. After tea arrived in Atlantic world—first in Europe in the seventeenth century and then in America in the eighteenth century—it was drunk, coveted, discussed, traded, taxed, banned, destroyed, and tamed in different nations and different cultures. The fifth chapter studies the presence of Chinese porcelains in the Atlantic world and how European manufacturors, seeking to import-substitute them with European ones, explored American sources and American market. It ended with three colonial attempts to produce porcelains, which all failed. The sixth chapter deals with China and the American Revolution. With the largely forgotten nineteenth century local histories as the archive and with Massachusetts as a case study, the first section argues that there were three waves and dozens of tea protests before the American Revolution, even in this single colony. The second section examines the politicians’ reaction toward the opening of the China, emphasizing the direct commercial relationship with China as a legacy of the American Revolution, and how American founders envisioned their new country with China in mind. The third section argues that the American Revolution as an international event globalized American families, including the merchant families, whose activities had been confined in the Atlantic world. A close reading of the family letters of Samuel Shaw, the supercargo of Empress of China, from his soldiership during the American Revolution to his consulship in Canton, is provided. In sum, this dissertation argues that China was at the core of the origins, evolution, and disintegration of the early modern Atlantic world. It helped the European colonists understand their relationship with the land new to them and that with the indigenous peoples upon the land. It transformed the intellectual, cultural, social, and economic landscapes of the Atlantic world. And it helped end the first British Empire, the beginning of a chain of Atlantic revolutions.