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Asia-Pacific in the Making of the Americas: Toward a Global History

Ezra Stiles, President of Yale University

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An East Indies Trade for the United States Republic
In the spring of 1783, several months before the signing of the Treaty of Paris, Ezra Stiles, the president of Yale University, gave a sermon announcing with pride the entrance of the United States of America, a new sovereign state, onto a global stage of great imperial powers. “This great American revolution, this recent political phenomenon of a new sovereignty arising among the sovereign powers of the earth, will be attended to and contemplated by all nations.”
“Navigation will carry the American flag around the globe itself; and display the thirteen stripes and new constellation at bengal and canton, on the indus and ganges, on the whang-ho and the yang-tse-kiang; and with commerce will import the literature and wisdom of the east.”[14]
Stiles did not confine his perspective to the Atlantic. The speech contained over sixty references to India and the Far East, comprising about a third of his remarks directed toward major geographic locations, including Britain against who the Americans had just fought a long, grueling war. Stiles was looking forward, not backward, and it was East Asia that drew his attention. Indeed, within a few months, owners of at least eight U.S. vessels had managed to pull together the capital required for the long journey across several seas. The famous Empress of China, the first of these ships to reach China, was ready to sail in January 1784, the same month the peace treaty was signed.
In 1785 future U.S. president John Adams stated, a bit after the fact, “There is no better advice to be given to the merchants of the United States than to push their commerce to the East Indies as fast and as far as it will go.”[15]
Within only the first six years of American independence from Britain, U.S. ships made fifty-two recorded voyages beyond the “Atlantic World”. By way of comparison, there were fifty-six English vessels recorded in those years, indicating the strong showing by the United States in Asia immediately following the war. Moreover there were likely more American voyages but it is difficult to get Indian Ocean data for this early period of U.S. mercantile history.[16] By 1795, the United States needed clauses in treaties with Britain specifically protecting their vessels in the “East Indies.”
Stiles’ sermon was anything but boastful hyperbole. The United States developed a competitive presence in the Eastern hemisphere immediately on the heels of independence, just as Stiles had predicted at the close of the war. American merchants did not wait for the formalities of imperial politics or the crush of post-war economic depression to ready China trade vessels.
Recent data show that at least 618 American vessels stopped at Canton and Macao from 1785-1814.[17] This does not include voyages to India and the Spice Islands that did not touch China. While the actual number of voyages to the Caribbean, Europe, and South America were much more numerous than those to Asia, the amount of time, capital, and risk invested in the Asian voyages outpaced all those to nearer parts of the globe, and these China Trade voyages engaged the wealthiest and most established members of the early republic’s business community. By the late 1790s, U.S. merchants were shipping 3 to 5 million pounds of tea a year from Canton, making them second only to the English East India Company in the tea export business and all but destroying French and Dutch trade in China.[18] In 1806 Americans shipped over 12 million pounds of tea from Canton, more than Britain that year.[19]
Tea was without a doubt U.S. merchants’ most important export from China, and one of their most important import/export commodities. Turning the tables on the East India Company, much of the U.S. tea cargo was smuggled back into Europe. In a newly globalized economy, many Americans would become lukewarm toward tea, turning to coffee instead. Samuel Shaw, the supercargo of the Empress of China and informally designated U.S. minister to China, refused to drink tea from Chinese merchants while in Canton. In his journal he noted, “If it is necessary that the Americans should drink the tea,” and that was not a given for this Patriot, “it will be readily granted that they ought to employ the means most proper for procuring it on the best terms.” [The Journals of Major Samuel Shaw, Bedford, MA: Applewood Books, 2009 (1847), pp. 190, 305.] Shaw’s role as a “diplomat” to China was to find and preserve a trade advantage over a vitally important commercial commodity. But he did not want Americans to be its dupes as well or all the profits might be lost on purchasing tea.
Why did Americans race to China before the ink was even dry on the peace treaty ending the War for Independence from Great Britain? Why did Yale University president emphasize the importance of China in his 1783 speech?” The storyline of American colonial history has been divorced from Asia. Clearly the "East Indies" was significant to the new United States economy and to state status, so we need to better understand the commercial and ideological background of this race to China—of the “Old China Trade," as U.S. Americans now affectionately call their initial East Indies ventures. The commercial place of China globally as well as the idea of China locally were contributing factors in the American Revolution and the formation of an independent American state.

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^{[14] “The United States Elevated to Glory and Honor,” sermon given before the Connecticut General Assembly in Hartford, May 1783.>
[15] Memoir of the Life of Henry Lee and His Correspondence, v. 2, (1825) Philadelphia: H.C. Carey and I. Lea, pp. 142-44; and The United States and the Pacific: Private Interests and Public Policies, Donald Dalton Johnson with Gary Dean Best, Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1995, p. 13.
[16] James R. Fichter, So Great a Proffit: How the East Indies Trade Transformed Anglo-American Capitalism, Harvard University Press, 2010, pp. 35-39.
[17] Sucheta Mazumdar, “Slaves, Textiles, and Opium: The Other Half of the Triangular Trade,” paper presented at the John Carter Brown Library at the Asia-Pacific in the Making of the Americas symposium, Sept. 27, 2010.
[18] Downs, Golden Ghetto (1997) p. 67; Alejandra Irigoin, “Westbound for the Far East: North American’s Intermediation in China’s Silver Trade,” paper presented at “America and the China Trades,” as part of Asia-Pacific in the Making of the Americas research initiative, Brown University, Sept. 28, 2010.
[19] Downs, Golden Ghetto (1997) p. 67; Alejandra Irigoin, “Westbound for the Far East: North American’s Intermediation in China’s Silver Trade,” paper presented at “America and the China Trades,” as part of Asia-Pacific in the Making of the Americas research initiative, Brown University, Sept. 28, 2010.}