With their Revolution completed, their constitution written, their nation officially (if shakily) established, the self-styled “Americans” faced the world in a fundamentally altered posture. Throughout the preceding two centuries, they had been colonists, and thus, in a broad sense, dependents. They had absorbed from elsewhere regular infusions of migrants and goods, of cultural nourishment and guidance.
But henceforth the currents would flow, also, in reverse direction. The new United States would increasingly—sometimes aggressively—turn out toward other groups and places. It would proudly proclaim its republican credo as a “beacon of freedom” for political reformers around the world. It would proffer its “go-ahead” spirit as the key to social development. It would urge its highly charged version of Protestant Christianity on all sorts of “heathen” unbelievers. Moreover, its people would rapidly multiply their physical contacts with the rest of humankind. Especially after about 1800, their travel and commerce would extend, quite literally, to the farthest corners of the earth.
The acme—the epitome—of this remarkable outreach was the so-called China trade. To be sure, Americans were followers, not pioneers, here. Britons, Russians, and Spaniards (among others) had preceded them along the route to Cathay since at least the beginning of the eighteenth century. The Portuguese had claimed the island of Macao (just south of Canton) in 1557. And occasional Europeans had been voyaging that way—singly or in small groups—from far back in the Middle Ages. The American colonists, meanwhile, had been expressly forbidden by their imperial masters from joining in most forms of international exchange.
Yet once independence was achieved, American traders hastened to assert their own claims to what they called the Far East. And, after little more than a generation, they had gained for themselves a leading role. From Boston and Salem, Massachusetts; from Newport and Providence, in Rhode Island; from New York and Philadelphia and Baltimore, further south, the ships poured out—by the dozens, and then by the hundreds, each year. Canton was their chief, but far from their only, destination. For the China trade was just one piece of a still larger “East India” (Asian) connection. Calcutta, Madras, Sumatra, Batavia, Port Jackson, Manila: these places, too, figured heavily in the traders’ itinerary. The eventual outcome would include some astonishing individual fortunes, and a burst of capital formation to fuel the first phase of American industrial development.
Even within itself, the China trade was a complex, multisided, many-splendored thing . . .