Objectifying China Imagining America

Author : Caroline Frank
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226260283
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.80/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Objectifying China, Imagining America written by Caroline Frank and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the ever-expanding presence of China in the global economy, Americans more and more look east for goods and trade. But as Caroline Frank reveals, this is not a new development. China loomed as large in the minds—and account books—of eighteenth-century Americans as it does today. Long before they had achieved independence from Britain and were able to sail to Asia themselves, American mariners, merchants, and consumers were aware of the East Indies and preparing for voyages there. Focusing on the trade and consumption of porcelain, tea, and chinoiserie, Frank shows that colonial Americans saw themselves as part of a world much larger than just Britain and Europe Frank not only recovers the widespread presence of Chinese commodities in early America and the impact of East Indies trade on the nature of American commerce, but also explores the role of the this trade in American state formation. She argues that to understand how Chinese commodities fueled the opening acts of the Revolution, we must consider the power dynamics of the American quest for china—and China—during the colonial period. Filled with fresh and surprising insights, this ambitious study adds new dimensions to the ongoing story of America’s relationship with China.

Author : Nancy E. Davis
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0197581986
Total Pages : 345 pages
Book Rating : 4.88/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Chinese Lady written by Nancy E. Davis and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1834, a Chinese woman named Afong Moy arrived in America as both a prized guest and an advertisement for a merchant firm--a promotional curiosity with bound feet and a celebrity used to peddle exotic wares from the East. This first biography of Afong Moy explores how she shaped Americans' impressions of China, while living as a stranger in a foreign land.

Author : Paul A. Van Dyke
Publisher : Hong Kong University Press
ISBN 13 : 9888390937
Total Pages : 208 pages
Book Rating : 4.39/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Private Side of the Canton Trade, 1700–1840 written by Paul A. Van Dyke and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-13 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is not often recognized that China was one of the few places in the early modern world where all merchants had equal access to the market. This study shows that private traders, regardless of the volume of their trade, were granted the same privileges in Canton as the large East India companies. All of these companies relied, to some extent, on private capital to finance their operations. Without the investments from individuals, the trade with China would have been greatly hindered. Competitors, large and small, traded alongside each other while enemies traded alongside enemies. Buddhists, Muslims, Catholics, Protestants, Parsees, Armenians, Hindus, and others lived and worked within the small area in the western suburbs of Canton designated for foreigners. Cantonese shopkeepers were not allowed to discriminate against any foreign traders. In fact, the shopkeepers were generally working in a competitive environment, providing customer-oriented service that generated goodwill, friendship, and trust. These contributed to the growth of the trade as a whole. While many private traders were involved in smuggling opium, others, such as Nathan Dunn, were much opposed to it. The case studies in this volume demonstrate that fortunes could be made in China by trading in legitimate items just as successfully as in illegitimate ones, which tellingly suggests that the rapid spread of opium smuggling in China could be a result of inadequate, rather than excessive, regulation by the Qing government. ‘For this absorbing book, Van Dyke and Schopp have convened excellent scholars, junior and senior, to throw new light on the foreign merchants outside the East India companies who shaped China’s engagement with the world at least as much as the companies’ men did, if not more. The slumbering field of foreign trade in Qing China has come back to life.’ —Timothy Brook, University of British Columbia ‘Much scholarship on the China trade has focused on the activities of the vast state-sponsored companies. This book flips the script. Now we know that, right under the noses of those economic behemoths, smaller private traders from Europe, America, and China were quietly reshaping the trade with their innovation, networking, grit, and dreams.’ —John R. Haddad, The Pennsylvania State University

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Publisher : U of Nebraska Press
ISBN 13 : 1496221761
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.66/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Weird Westerns written by and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Dane A. Morrison
Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 1421415437
Total Pages : 363 pages
Book Rating : 4.37/5 ( download)

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Download or read book True Yankees written by Dane A. Morrison and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2014-12-04 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[A] fascinating perspective on how America’s early voyages of commerce and discovery to the exotic South Seas helped the new nation forge its identity.” —Eric Jay Dolan, bestselling author of Black Flags, Blue Waters Drawing on private journals, letters, ships’ logs, memoirs, and newspaper accounts, True Yankees traces America’s earliest encounters on a global stage through the exhilarating experiences of five Yankee seafarers. Merchant Samuel Shaw spent a decade scouring the marts of China and India for goods that would captivate the imaginations of his countrymen. Mariner Amasa Delano toured much of the Pacific hunting seals. Explorer Edmund Fanning circumnavigated the globe, touching at various Pacific and Indian Ocean ports of call. In 1829, twenty-year-old Harriett Low reluctantly accompanied her merchant uncle and ailing aunt to Macao, where she recorded trenchant observations of expatriate life. And sea captain Robert Bennet Forbes’s last sojourn in Canton coincided with the eruption of the First Opium War. How did these bold voyagers approach and do business with the people in the region, whose physical appearance, practices, and culture seemed so strange? And how did native men and women—not to mention the European traders who were in direct competition with the Americans—regard these upstarts who had fought off British rule? The accounts of these adventurous travelers reveal how they and hundreds of other mariners and expatriates influenced the ways in which Americans defined themselves, thereby creating a genuinely brash national character—the “true Yankee.” Readers who love history and stories of exploration on the high seas will devour this gripping tale. “The book is informative and entertaining, a rare combination. Highly recommended.” —Choice

Author : Annelise Heinz
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190081791
Total Pages : 361 pages
Book Rating : 4.99/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Mahjong written by Annelise Heinz and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Mahjong: A Chinese Game and the Making of Modern American Culture illustrates how the spaces between tiles and the moments between games have fostered distinct social cultures in the United States. This mass-produced game crossed the Pacific, creating waves of popularity over the twentieth century. Mahjong narrates the history of this game to show how it has created a variety of meanings, among them American modernity, Chinese American heritage, and Jewish American women's culture. As it travelled from China to the United States and caught on with Hollywood starlets, high society, middle-class housewives, and immigrants alike, mahjong became a quintessentially American pastime. This book also reveals the ways in which women leveraged a game for a variety of economic and cultural purposes, including entrepreneurship, self-expression, philanthropy, and ethnic community building. One result was the forging of friendships within mahjong groups that lasted decades. This study unfolds in two parts: the first half is focused on mahjong's history as related to consumerism, with a close examination of its economic and cultural origins. The second half of the book explores how mahjong interwove with the experiences of racial inclusion and exclusion in the evolving definition of what it means to be American. Mahjong players, promoters, entrepreneurs, and critics tell a broad story of American modernity. The apparent contradictions of the game - as both American and foreign, modern and supposedly ancient, domestic and disruptive of domesticity - reveal the tensions that lie at the heart of modern American culture"--

Author : Kendall A. Johnson
Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 1421422522
Total Pages : 384 pages
Book Rating : 4.27/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The New Middle Kingdom written by Kendall A. Johnson and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2017-04-25 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looking at the Far East and American ambition in China through the lens of literature. In the imaginations of early Americans, the Middle Kingdom was the wealthiest empire in the world. Its geographical distance did not deter commercial aspirations—rather, it inspired them. Starting in the late eighteenth century, merchants from New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Salem, Newport, and elsewhere cast speculative lines to China. The resulting fortunes shaped the cultural foundation of the early republic and funded westward frontier expansion. In The New Middle Kingdom, Kendall A. Johnson argues that—for the merchant princes who speculated in the global Far East, as well as the missionaries and diplomats who followed them—Manifest Destiny spurred more than the coalescence of the fractious regions into the continental Far West. It also promised a golden gateway to the Pacific Ocean through which the nation would realize its historical destiny as the world’s new Middle Kingdom of commerce. Examining the influential accounts of westerners at the center of early US cultural development abroad, Johnson conceives a romance of free trade with China as a quest narrative of national accomplishment in a global marketplace. Drawing from a richly descriptive cross-cultural archive, the book presents key moments in early relations among the twenty-first century’s superpowers through memoirs, biographies, epistolary journals, magazines, book reviews, fiction and poetry by Melville, Twain, Whitman, and others, travel narratives, and treaties, as well as maps and engraved illustrations. Paying close attention to figurative language, generic forms, and the social dynamics of print cultural production and circulation, Johnson shows how authors, editors, and printers appealed to multiple overlapping audiences in China, in the United States, and throughout the world. Spanning a full century, from the post–Revolutionary War era to the Gilded Age, The New Middle Kingdom is a vivid look at the Far East through Western eyes, one that highlights the importance of China in antebellum US culture.

Author : Peter J. Kitson
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1107045614
Total Pages : 329 pages
Book Rating : 4.13/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Forging Romantic China written by Peter J. Kitson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-21 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first major study to focus on British and Chinese cultural relations in the Romantic period.

Author : Lisa Sturm-Lind
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 900435641X
Total Pages : 202 pages
Book Rating : 4.12/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Actors of Globalization: New York Merchants in Global Trade, 1784-1812 written by Lisa Sturm-Lind and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-12-18 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Actors of Globalization offers an account of how global events in the late eighteenth century contributed to U.S. economic and social change by detailing the global entrepreneurship of New York merchants and the repercussions of their business at home.

Author : Emma Roberts
Publisher : Liverpool University Press
ISBN 13 : 180207919X
Total Pages : 248 pages
Book Rating : 4.97/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Art and the Sea written by Emma Roberts and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2022-04-15 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited collection re-examines the relationship between art and the sea, reflecting growing interest in the intersections between art and maritime history. Artists have always been fascinated by and drawn to the sea and this book considers some of the themes and approaches in art that have evolved as a result of this captivation. The chapters consider how an examination of art can provide new insights into existing knowledge of port and maritime history, and are representative of a ‘cultural turn’ in port and maritime studies, which is becoming increasingly visible. In Art and the Sea, multiple perspectives are offered as a result of the contributors’ individual positions and methodologies: some museological, others art historical or maritime-historical. Each chapter proposes a new way of building upon available interpretations of port and maritime history: whether this be to reject, support or reconsider existing knowledge. The book as a whole is a timely addition, therefore, to the developing body of revisionist texts in port and maritime history. The interdisciplinary nature of the volume relates to a current trend for interdisciplinarity in art history and will appeal to those with an interest in art history, geography, sociology, history and transport / maritime studies.