新书 | Trading Freedom: How Trade with China Defined Early America

Trading Freedom explores the surprisingly rich early history of US-China trade and its unexpected impact on the developing republic.

The economic and geographic development of the pre-twentieth-century United States is usually thought of in trans-Atlantic terms, defined by entanglements with Europe and Africa. In Trading Freedom, Dael A. Norwood recasts these common conceptions by looking to Asia, making clear that from its earliest days, the United States has been closely intertwined with China—monetarily, politically, and psychologically.

Norwood details US trade with China from the late eighteenth through the late nineteenth centuries—a critical period in America’s self-definition as a capitalist nation—and shows how global commerce was central to the articulation of that national identity. He examines how much of the country’s early growth and definition was influenced in important ways by its multifarious Chinese relations. Trading Freedom illuminates how crucial Federalist-era debates over political economy and trade policy, the building of the transcontinental railroad, and the looming sectional struggle over slavery were all influenced by Sino-American relations. Deftly weaving together interdisciplinary threads from the worlds of commerce, foreign policy, and immigration, Trading Freedom thoroughly dismantles the idea that American engagement with China is anything new.

Dael A. Norwood is assistant professor of history at the University of Delaware.

“An impressively ambitious book, surveying US commercial involvement with China from the departure of the Empress of China, which sailed from New York in 1784, to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Books on China and the United States in this period typically cover either trade or immigration—Trading Freedom is the rare book to tackle both.”