Description
Book SynopsisSpanning 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.
Trade ReviewThe New Middle Kingdom is at its core an account of those who shaped the US’ early relationship with China. By examining these figures through their own works and their national context, Johnson crafts a remarkable argument about the intricacies of both the China trade, and, more challengingly, the roots of American empire to be found there.
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American Literary History. . . in exploring, in so much depth and so persuasively, the “romance of free trade,” Johnson has prepared the way for further explorations of how different approaches to American political economy intersected with US-China relations, as well as provided a basis for interrogating why—and how—there could have been such ideological and narrative continuity amid such significant change in this complex relationship.
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H-Net ReviewsTable of ContentsAcknowledgments
Prologue
Introduction
Chapter 1. Characterizing the American China Trader: The Global Geography of Opium Traffic in Josiah Quincy's The Journals of Major Samuel Shaw (1847)
Chapter 2. Captain Amasa Delano, China Trader: Slavery, Sealskins, and Herman Melville's Dollar Signs of the Canton Trade
Chapter 3. The Troubled Romance in Harriett Low's Picturesque Macao: Transnational Family Fortunes and the Rise of Russell & Company
Chapter 4. The Sacred Fount of the ABCFM: Free Press, Free Trade, and Extraterritorial Printing in China 132
Chapter 5. Caleb Cushing's Print Trail of Legal Extraterritoriality: A Confederated Christendom of Commerce, from the Far East to the Far West
Chapter 6. Extraterritorial Burial and the Visual Aesthetics of Free-Trade Imperialism in Commodore Matthew Perry's Narrative of the Expedition of an American Squadron to the China Seas and Japan (1856)
Chapter 7. Passages to India from the Newly United States: Revising The Middle Kingdom (1883)
Notes
Bibliography
Index
