While the study of contacts and exchanges between China and non-Asian societies over the past several hundred years is still dominated by variations on the (Western) impact/(Chinese) response model, the recent reemergence of China as a major player on the world stage has led cultural historians increasingly to turn their attention to earlier moments in which China's presence was powerfully felt well beyond its borders. Their studies have foregrounded the significance of the roles played by Chinese objects and ideas in Enlightenment thought, early modern consumer society, and literary and artistic developments in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. The colonial American engagement with China has, until now, largely been regarded as merely imitative of British trends.
Caroline Frank, in her eminently engaging and often provocative new book, sets out to redress the consequent neglect of this topic and to challenge a number of misconceptions that have arisen from this oversimplified view. The most consequential of these is the assumption that “the Atlantic world” is an adequate geographical rubric for the cultural history of the early American colonies. The exposure of the colonists to Asian imports, Frank argues persuasively, was both more sustained and influential than has been acknowledged, and we require more capacious paradigms of early modern networks of trade and cultural affiliation in order to grasp fully its implications. Dislodging the focal point of early American history from the Atlantic basin requires coming to terms not only with the extraordinary quantities of Chinese goods (including 70 million pieces of porcelain) imported into the colonies before 1800, but also with their power to catalyze new meanings and associations for those who purchased and displayed them.
In exploring the cultural valences of Chinese objects, Frank cautions against the assumption that the objects evoked the same ideas in the American and British contexts. Attempts to enforce the East India Company monopoly on Asian trade were honored, in the colonies, more in the breach than the observance, and enterprising American pirates and privateers succeeded in smuggling shiploads of Chinese porcelains into the colonies long before the opening of a direct national trade with China. As a consequence of this history, Chinese vases, teapots, and figurines took on a distinct set of meanings within the colonies. Far from simply borrowing from the English an equation of porcelain with fashionable cosmopolitanism, American consumers actively and independently engaged with the imported visual aesthetic of the Far East, putting it to use for their own purposes in the service of specifically American identities. Chinese porcelains collected in England, for example, have most typically been associated with the women who tended to purchase and admire them. In contrast, Frank argues compellingly, Chinese goods often took on masculine associations in the colonies owing to the illicit trade pedigrees of porcelain in the pre-revolutionary period. Because most chinaware was imported illegally, the trade was a hazardous one, and one in which success promised both lucrative returns and affirmations of the trader's manly determination and vigor. Her conclusions will usefully shake up some of the more facile gendered readings of chinaware inherited from eighteenth-century English satirists.
An equally iconoclastic reassessment of the causes of the Boston Tea Party rounds out Frank's book. Traditionally understood as a rebuke to parliament for imposing unjust taxes on the colonists, the deep-sixing of a hundred tea chests by Boston's unruly patriots emerges in her account as the response to a more serious menace increasingly attributed, in the mid-century American imagination, to the commodity itself. Originally reviled by its detractors as an unhealthful beverage and an extravagant luxury, this “cursed weed of China's coast” gradually morphed into an enfeebling drug deployed by the British to sap the wealth and vigor of the colonists and reduce them to a condition of slavery and dependence. Given the frequency with which China had been cited as a positive model in Enlightenment attacks on abuses of church and state authority in Europe, the association Frank claims between the ideas of Chinese tea and the “oriental despotism” of the East seems, on one level, somewhat improbable, but the general lesson about the transformative potential of meanings attached to imported commodities in such a context remains a valuable one.
Objectifying China, Imagining America, grounded in an impressive array of careful and wide-ranging archival research, offers both a rich trove of colorful local details and a useful mapping of some neglected contours of early American material culture. More important, though, than the mountain of facts Frank has amassed from probate inventories, letters, and newspapers is the novel and revelatory framework she develops for interpreting them. While it is bound to face resistance in some quarters, the author's historical model brings strikingly into view both America's early participation in world trade networks and the significance of its bounty of Chinese goods in forging the colonists’ sense of their place in an already rapidly globalizing world.
