Joe Adelman raised an interesting point on Twitter today: should we commemorate the War of 1812? And if so, on what grounds? Joe’s ably summarized and commented on the conversation that ensued  in a blog post here. Take a look!

Now, from that you’ll see that I placed myself firmly in the “War of 1812 isn’t worth commemorating” camp. It’s been a solitary experience.

Before I get into why I think that’s a reasonable position to hold, let me clear one thing up first. Savvy scholar that he is, Joe redefined the terms of debate somewhat in his post: the slippage I see is between the word at issue in our earlier discussion – “commemorate” – versus the term he uses in the title of his post: “remember.”

If it’s the latter that is under discussion, I concede the field immediately. I am no partisan of forgetting! Nature’s own efficiency in that realm is more than adequate, with no need for any obstreperous historian to douse spotless minds with excessive sunshine. You know how archive-rats feel about sunshine. <shudder>

But I don’t think that’s the real issue here. The source of my original consternation – commemoration –  is, in truth, the subject of Joe’s post. The abbreviated list of points about of the War of 1812 that he suggests make it worthy of commemoration strike me as short sighted. It’s all fine (American) nationalist historiography, so long as one’s horizons extend … to 1815.

To take the points in order:

1.) It established that Canada would remain British.
Er, not exactly. Or maybe better said, not everyone was convinced. The extent to which Canada was ever really up for grabs is debatable, but in any case, it remained a target for American filibusters well after the war; that these were only slightly less disastrous than the official feints in 1775 and 1812 had been is surely no point against them. (Further: the internet tells me that contingency plans for invading Canada were part of the U.S. Army’s standard prep after WWI , too.)

2.) It established the United States’ right to exist
The U.S.’s right to exist wasn’t quite the object of the British invasion – there was this pesky thing with Napoleon that the U.S.’s bellicosity was making more complicated – but even (let’s say) if it was, the dream of extinguishing the proud republic on the North American continent remained unsettled for decades; what was all that trouble about the British helping to arm the Confederates, again? Aiding and abetting the slaveholders’ rebellion was a far more serious incursion than sacking the Capitol. And as for the impressment of seamen and capturing of U.S. vessels for violating British law – well, that continued apace for decades after 1815. Ask John C. Calhoun or Daniel Webster.

3.) The War of 1812 was an event of important significance in several locales.
Well… sure. And Delaware’s gubernatorial election of 1912 was of important significance in several locales, while we’re at it. (Though its commemoration might be at least a bit dapper, and probably include more interesting cocktails, given the era). More seriously, I would not begrudge, say, Baltimore drumming up some tourist dollars and doing some public educational service by highlighting the city’s connection to 1812′s events – but that’s not what we’re discussing, really, is it?

To Joe’s list one could also add the boost the war gave to Andrew Jackson’s political career, or its impact in the U.S.’s war against native peoples (AJ again, mainly). And while I’m not a huge fan of the national anthem, the Francis Scott Key fanboys presumably have something get excited about, too…

Okay, so far so snarky. I’m not really an adherent of historical nihilism. What I’m trying to point out here is that while every grain of historical sand is unique and special in its own way, they are not equally worthy of state-funded commemoration.

Joe is right on to say that the War of 1812 was an important event, culturally and politically productive in many ways. Should we remember it? Sure. Better to analyze it in context, though, while we’re at it. But commemorate it? By funding bicentennial celebrations? Naw. I say leave the hoopla in storage, or for other things.

What does a commemoration mean? Well, we commemorate accomplishment. We commemorate tragedy, or sacrifice. The blood spilled to end slavery, for example (an anniversary whose coincidence with 1812 is lamented in both the storify narrative and the WSJ article, incidentally). I think the difference between 1812 and these other moments lies in whether the things that serve as the object of commemoration remain contested objects, with political resonance – and, in some cases, debate.

And, indeed, so it is with the War of 1812. The commemorative push is being driven by Canadian politics, more than antiquarianism or interest in historical analysis. From the WSJ:

“The country’s ruling Conservative party is promoting the war as a crucible of Canadian nationhood, uniting English and French Canadians and Native groups. … The left-leaning New Democratic Party has accused Prime Minister Stephen Harper of using the bicentennial to promote flag-waving nationalism centered on Canada’s British roots.”

So there are dogs in this fight for parties on one side of the border. But what about this in the U.S.? Why is a frivolous war noted primarily for its egregious political miscalculations and epic leadership failures worthy of formal – codified, stale, state-centered – remembrance?

If you are going to spend money – public money, though in amounts that are laughably small compared to other expenditures, to be sure – there should be some kind of public education, and public use beyond adding a coat of varnish to the nostalgia. And there is certainly fodder in the War of 1812 for that! Alas, from the evidence, that’s not the kind of thing the push for the commemoration of the War of 1812 is about. And therein lies my disagreement with Dr. Adelman.

But never fear: we’re only nine years from the dodransbicentennial of the Mexican-American War! Good times to be had by all.

Also Known As: No Captain & Tenille Jokes Here, No Sirree

  by  Stephen Begin 

Everything old is new again. At least, so says Matt Yglesias. Slate’s economic analyst reports (base on an entertaining Wall Street Journal article) that muskrat pelts from the Upper Midwest are fetching record prices due to rising demand in China. Historically nimble as always, he notes that fur trapping was a key “motive for early (largely French) white exploration” in the former Middle Ground – and so this is yet more evidence that old patterns appear to be reasserting themselves: ”Asian industrialization seems to be pushing America back to its roots as a natural resource extraction hub.”

He’s not wrong – but I think he misses an important historical trend line by stretching as far back to the heyday of the coureur de bois. Collecting furs was indeed a key part of French colonialism in North America, but the direct connection to Asian markets (specifically, Canton) was not made until the  American Revolution.

~

In 1778, as part of his third, final, and fatal voyage of exploration, James Cook visited a small inlet on the western coast of the island of Vancouver. He named it King George’s Sound, after his reigning sovereign; less patriotic visitors later referred to it by the name given to the native inhabitants, the Nootka. Cook and his crew planned on only a short stay, just long enough to replenish supplies of wood and water so that they could continue their search for the Northwest Passage.

But while they were there, they traded inexpensive metal goods with the locals for a large number of sea otter skins (1,500 of them, according to one estimate).⁽¹⁾ Though they had only intended to use the furs as winter clothing, the sailors were surprised to find that each pelt sold for seven pounds sterling at Petropavlovsk, a Russian trading outpost on the Kamchatka peninsula in the North Pacific (the Russians had for some time been trading overland with the Qing Empire). Later in the voyage – after Cook’s death at Kealakekua Bay – the remaining officers and crews of the Resolution and Discovery exploited what they learned from the Russians, and traded their remaining furs for even higher prices at Canton, collectively earning £2,000 (worth roughly $541,000 in 2011 money, by purchasing power parity.) The lure of such “quick” gain – if you consider crossing the Pacific over the course of several months an easy way to join the 1% – was sufficiently strong to persuade two sailors to steal one of the Resolution’s boats and flee Canton to obtain more pelts.

News of the large profits to be made in the sea otter fur trade was publicized officially by James King, captain of the Discovery, who wrote the relevant volume of the Royal Navy’s narrative of Cook’s third voyage, published in 1784. But news spread fast through unofficial channels, too. In the U.S., the bearer of the good news was John Ledyard, a Connecticut native who had served on Cook’s voyage.

Back in his newly new country in the late spring of 1783, Ledyard made the rounds, sounding out investors for a China-bound fur expedition – and nearly convinced Robert Morris, the Superintendent of Finance and key backer of the Empress of China expedition, to put up funds. Though plans with Morris et al. eventually fell through, Ledyard published an account of the voyage in 1783, and his ideas were picked up and put successfully to practice by a group of Boston merchants, beginning in 1787.⁽²⁾

In the years following, American exports of furs to China were a key branch of the booming China trade, providing a commodity that could be used in the place of hard-to-come-by silver specie. But the real master of the American fur trade to Asia was one of the pioneers, but rather a wily Walldorfian who came ten years late to the game, John Jacob Astor.

You may have heard of him, or maybe visited his place in search of a tattoo or cheap head-shop paraphernalia. But did you know that the millions that allowed him to buy up so much of Manhattan’s real estate were first earned by selling the corpses of small squeaky rat-like things? (Always a messy business, fortune-making). Over the course of the 1790s and early 1800s, Astor built on the hard-won fur trading expertise of his youth – and his connections to the great fur trading houses of British North America based in Montreal – to secure a dominant hold over the collection and export of U.S. furs.

His operation, which like his sometime British partners encompassed the Pacific Northwest along with the whole of the Mississippi River Valley, funneled furs eastward by way of Atlantic ports as well as the Pacific, sending shipments through Europe, the Mediterranean, Russia, or direct to Canton, as prices dictated. Attentive to the political connections which helped protect his business, he only very occasionally engaged in outrageous  deceptions of the high federal officers to further his interests (someday I’ll tell the story of Punqua Winchong, or “Astor’s mandarin,” a ruse by which he was able to send a ship to Canton during Jefferson’s embargo – with permission! – much to the consternation of his rivals.)

~

The first US-Asian fur trade of which Astor was a part was subject to dramatic booms and busts, as the Canton market was periodically flooded with pelts from the Americas and beyond. The very first narratives about the American China trade, in fact, complain bitterly about the unpredictability of the market. In this regard the current spike in demand seems eerily similar – almost entirely driven by demand from Asia, and especially China. The top five destinations, by value, for American furs for the last ten years (2001-2011) are China, Canada, South Korea, Greece, and Germany. Of those, China has grown from taking just 2.7% of U.S. fur exports to accounting for 62% – driving the overall sector’s expansion by one and a half times.⁽³⁾

From these figures, and the WSJ report, it seems the routes which Americans used in the early 19^th-century are still active corridors of trade. The companies buying American muskrat pelts are Canadian – just like Astor’s partners – and function as wholesaling operations that deliver furs to manufacturers located at key points connecting Western supplies to Eastern demand. Greece is on the top five list, for example, because it is a center for making things out of raw furs, not consuming them: Kastoria, a centuries-old Greek fur processing center apparently named after its most profitable commodity (castor is the genus of the North American and European beaver), feeds markets in Eastern Europe and the Central Asian ‘stans, same as it always has.

Eventually, the 19th-century trade in furs declined in importance (though it did not disappear) as other commodities with steadier returns were discovered; above all, Indian-grown opium, backed by British guns. I expect things will go differently this time, at least for a while. China’s increasing wealth make the prospects for a continued positive slope on the demand curve much more of a sure thing, especially in contrast to the waning powers of the late Qing elite. And maybe those conditions will make other, more imaginatively extravagant early American fantasies of geopolitics by way of resource extraction come true. Maybe North American furs, timber, and grain will, as Senator Thomas Hart Benton predicted, make the U.S. the thoroughfare (but not the market) of all mankind? But more on all that anon…

——————

(1.) Barry M. Gough, Distant Dominion : Britain and the Northwest Coast of North America, 1579-1809, Vol. 2 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1980), 43.

(2.) John Ledyard, A Journal of Captain Cook’s Last  Voyage to the Pacific Ocean, and in Quest of a North-West Passage,  between Asia & America; Performed in the Years 1776, 1777, 1778,  and 1779. Illustrated with a Chart, Shewing the Tracts of the Ships  Employed in this Expedition. Faithfully Narrated from the Original Ms.  of Mr. John Ledyard (Hartford, CT: , 1783). For more on Ledyard and the fur trading ventures he helped inaugurate, see: James R. Gibson, Otter skins, Boston ships, and China goods : the maritime fur trade of the Northwest Coast, 1785-1841 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992); Mary Malloy, “Boston men” on the Northwest Coast : the American maritime fur trade 1788-1844, (Kingston, Ontario; Fairbanks, Alaska: Limestone Press; Distributed by the University of Alaska Press, 1998); Edward G. Gray, The Making of John Ledyard: Empire and Ambition in the Life of an Early American Traveler (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).

(3.) Statistics Canada, Trade Data Online, U.S. Census Bureau (accessed on 15 January 2012)

I’ll be direct: Lin-Manuel Miranda is a genius, as a musician, a writer, and possibly as an historian, too.  Grand words, no? Admittedly, I tend toward hyperbole – but indulge me and watch the video above, and tell me if it doesn’t ring true.

I’ll wait.

I know, right?

That’s an early sample of Miranda’s ongoing project to depict Alexander Hamilton’s life musically, in what he calls the Hamilton Mixtape. Now imagine a hour-long performance of songs of that bent, with that level of lyrical and musical skill, realized with an entire cast and chorus, band and all, on the stage at the Allen Room at Jazz at Lincoln Center, with Columbus Circle and Central Park serving as the backdrop. Courtesy of an amazing Christmas gift, I had the pleasure of seeing exactly that last week – on Hamilton’s birthday, natch – and it was awesome.

For me, the whole show followed the emotional arc set by that clip.  While slyly acknowledging the ridiculousness of rapping about the American Revolution, the virtuosity of the composition cleared a space for sincerity, and then realistically evoked the earnest emotion that (a certain view of) Hamilton’s life holds.

I know only enough about musical theatre to be conscious of how ignorant I am of its subtleties. So I won’t go into details about that end of things here – for that you can see the NYT review, or this detailed write-up for more and better commentary than I can offer.

Suffice to say that I agree with those ecstatic reviewers.

~

The central conceit of the show is that Hamilton’s life – and perhaps that of other founding fathers, like Aaron Burr – fits both the mythos and themes of hip-hop. And surprisingly, this works. Hamilton, as Miranda points out in his introduction,  made his mark through words, and conflict over words. Re-imagined as a tragic poet-statesman, his life fits the arc of a Biggie Smalls or Tupac Shakur.

The Mixtape was based on Ron Chernow’s desk-busting biography, and hews very, very close to the material – to the point that the witty rap battles near the end of the show depict disputes in Washington’s cabinet over the assumption of states’ debt, and Citizen Genêt. (Miranda acknowledged Chernow in the audience). If it weren’t for the real accomplishments of the rest of the show, I’d say that this was its crowning strength; it sure as hell isn’t anything I’ve ever seen pulled off before, much less set to music.*

The historical inspirations for Mixtape make it impossible to consider without bringing up Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. The Mixtape is not, and may never be, a full-blown musical with sets and costumes and the like; right now it seems to be more of a live-performance concept album. And while I doubt that this pair of shows together herald a new era of historical musical theatre – as the Times reviewer suggests – the comparison is a useful one.

Bloody Bloody was a hell of a good time, but erred on the side of preachiness, especially in the last act, where the tragedy of Indian removal took center stage – a move which I can understand from the perspective of wanting to tell a whole story, but one which screwed up the chronology, and, more seriously took the action away from the characters. Harrumphing historians will surely practice their trade with Mixtape, too, though with even less justification, as Miranda has taken pains to make the primary source bases for his characterization clear. Hamilton’s human story is intertwined with his policies, and so the problems with narrative weight that Bloody Bloody stumbled into aren’t present.

But judgments of Hamilton, like those concerning Jackson, are shorthand for too much historiographical investment to cause any practitioner to be moved too far by the Mixtape version. Personally, I see less of a hero in him than Miranda or Chernow – but then, outside of the Mixtape he exists for me mainly as a bureaucrat, author of treatises on central government finance. It’s hard to sympathize with a guy who wrote such reports, much less to empathize with him as a fellow struggling New York transplant. But Miranda succeeded in getting me to forget the impressions of the Serial Set, and try out some others – at least for a while.

~

Which is something, actually. My preferences for historical entertainment (such as it is) tend to skew mightily toward those productions which play faster & looser with the details, for comic effect –  the Amazing Screw-On Head, 1776, or that cartoon about George Washington’s, uh, prowess.

Costume dramas, which work hard to provide a detailed setting, often fail to get the core emotional experience about a lived historical reality, instead grafting modern-day sensibilities on to past events – and leave me cold. I’d argue that most “good” historical movies have this flaw (Glory, for example). Closer to my taste are the Dakotan agonies of Deadwood profane-civilizers or the on-the-jugular analogies of Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, but with these self-seriousness is part of the suspension of disbelief.

Part of the brilliance of Mixtape, I think, lies in how it successfully has it both ways. It is unabashedly comic – what Broadway show couldn’t be, these days? Singing is silly. – but also evokes the real stakes Hamilton faced, without falling head-over-heels into a pre-formatted Hollywood narrative arc. For that, if nothing else, I hope it eventually gets into some kind of form where more people can see it.

Plus, the sight of George III lamenting America’s lost love while wearing a Burger King crown is too good to pass up.

(The clip here doesn’t do it justice, but it’ll get you the visual at least: http://broadwayworld.com/videoplay.php?colid=328956)

——————————————————————————

* I like the Keynes & Hayek rap battles (round 1, round 2), but for all their slickness they aren’t good history, or anywhere near as clever (or, frankly, anywhere near as good policy).

  by  ecstaticist 

How evenly distributed was the future, in the past?

Yesterday, Alexis Madrigal distilled novelist Teju Cole’s tweeted critique¹ of what’s wrong with #firstworldproblems – as a concept – and it got me thinking.

His post goes into a bit more detail (and explains what #firstworldproblems signifies), but here are the key lines of Cole’s analysis:

I don’t like this expression “First World problems.” It is false and it is condescending. Yes, Nigerians struggle with floods or infant mortality. But these same Nigerians also deal with mundane and seemingly luxurious hassles. …

… people don’t wake up with “poor African” pasted on their foreheads. They live as citizens of the modern world. … the interesting thing about modern technology is how socially mobile it is–quite literally. Everyone in Lagos has a phone.

Quite so. The approach that twitterers using #firstworldproblems take to the developing world mirrors, in no small part, the approach Europeans (and later, Americans) took to the “new” worlds of the Americas, Africa, and Asia. To assume that no one in Lagos is frustrated with her iPad’s inability to sync properly is to assume that Lagos exists in a different stage of history, a different time – pace Gibson, “[t]he future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” But listening to Cole, it seems the future is actually very well distributed – at least geographically; in our brave new world, wealth forms more of a barrier than oceans.²

The key difference in both usages is history, represented by technological gadgetry (and sometimes infrastructural abundance). Time passed, in this view, is progress achieved — a view echoed, from another vantage point, in a related meme-driven complaint about the lack of flying cars. In this, as in so many ways, our way of seeing the world is an iron Enlightened Victorian imperialist cage, albeit one with some of the sharp edges sanded off.

It’s been this way for a while, of course. Early modern Westerners, as they pushed the boundaries of their power into everywhere that wasn’t Europe, classified others as more “primitive” and by that they meant both poorer, less technologically adept, and, crucially, as living in the past. (I’m not a enough of an intellectual historian to feel confident outlining the precise history of seeing different human peoples as occupying distinct stages of history, so assume I’ve made some gestures toward various Spanish theologians, Scottish moral philosophers, and French salonistes and we’ll go from there). The key move here was to map societal and economic structure onto historical stages of civilizational development – such that more “advanced” societies must necessarily be farther down the path of progress, and thus farther along in “history.”

The problems with this worldview are numerous, and quickly complicated once you start to play language games. To present just one: everyone living at a given moment, by virtue of their coincidence, must have roughly the same number of ancestors – some early marriages or generational gaps notwithstanding – and thus the same amount of “history.” You and I, dear Reader, are of the same time: we share, in a significant sense, the same past, present and future. So in this very real sense, we are all living through the same “modern” time. Hence iPhones in Lagos.

But the barrier presented by wealth – the idea that societal structures are what define different stages of history – is a crucial one. Certainly, it presented problems for the Americans of the past. So though in long run and in the aggregate these lines between “present” peoples and peoples of “the past” (or, worse, people “without history”) were quite sharply drawn, these theories had flourishes you might not expect. For example: a politically significant number of Americans wanted to keep the US at a “less advanced” stage of economic development so as to ward off the moral ills that came with commercialization — at least, that’s what Jefferson et al. claimed on their more lucid days.

When the U.S. was young, when even its most loyal citizens were ambiguous about the nation’s chances for survival (never mind prosperity!), and when the political culture of the nation was in the grip of a republicanism that did not taken European structural superiority for granted, also for reasons of progress in history — well, then, the intellectual gears could grind against each other in interesting ways.

China, in particular, posed a problem – where in history to put it? Though long , it was also acknowledged as wealthy and powerful. For some theorists – especially those, like the French physiocrats, who looked to agricultural productivity as the key measure of progress — it provided a positive example. Thus, you can find Jefferson citing China as an desired outcome in his correspondence:

You ask what I think on the expediency of encouraging our states to be commercial? Were I to indulge my own theory, I should wish them to practice neither commerce nor navigation, but to stand with respect to Europe precisely on the footing of China. We should thus avoid wars, and all our citizens would be husbandmen.^2a

TJ is being a bit glib here – and his motives are complex, driven in no small part by his frustration that his independent nation was still dependent on European capital. Even so, I think it’s not too much to say that China is at least an ambiguous instance of historical development for him; the empire’s landed wealth and administrative mitigating other minuses in the progress column (non-Christian religion, despotic political system, etc).

Samuel Shaw, one of the first Americans’ to go to China, also struggled with this problem — though at first glane, it might seem as though he did not. The published version of his memoirs — issued over fifty years after his death — his biographer advertised the work as still up-to-date, because of the “unchangeableness of Chinese habits and policy.”³ And he at times emphasizes the static nature of the Qing Empire, taking it out of history by emphasizing how little changes there were. For example, he argued that “the nature of the commerce,” at Canton, was “exceedingly uniform” – meaning its structure was set, and unchanging.⁴

Elsewhere in his writing, Shaw – a product of that earlier, Revolutionary moment – was less sure. He took pains, in one of his reports home, to note that the vaunted agricultural production of the Qing Empire was rendered useless by poor administration. Its people were, he said, starving:⁵

Though little can ever been known of China by persons restricted to such narrow limits as are the foreigners who trade here, yet we see enough to give us very unfavorable ideas of its government. The laws may be good, but its police is extremely defective. It would should your humanity, were I to give a sketch of the misery which is here daily exhibited; and what excites the indignation of every foreigners is, that the number of these wretched objects being inconsiderable, it is evidently in the power of the magistracy amply to provide for them.

As if to refute Jefferson’s theory directly with observed facts, immediately after reporting on the troubles of the Empire, Shaw asserted that political structure – not just laws but administration as well – was the key variable, and the key benefit Americans held in their favor:

From this painful view of the effects of despotism, I turn with pleasure to the contemplation of what happiness which an American enjoys, under the government of equal laws and a mild administration. Surely, if we avail ourselves of the experience of other nations, and make a proper use of the advantages with which Heaven has pleased us, we cannot fail in due time of becoming a great and a happy people.

Absent the context of this debate over stadial theories of history (development economics), Shaw’s reports can seem randomly assembled; he zooms from counting ships to speculating on the value of North American ginseng and back to analyzing why British merchants treated him rudely. The even distribution of the past in an unquestionably round world was still at issue for Shaw and his coincident interlocutors. It was not a settled thing that Americans, dependent, by design and in practice, on agricultural surplus, would prosper in the modern world — why else would an American visitor feel the need to suss out the reasons behind Chinese hunger?

After all, it mattered little to his trade, or that of the rest of the Americans at Canton; the purchasers of their goods were not impoverished Chinese, but rather the elite. But Shaw cared because what was at stake was a question of development under new, and untested institutions – republican government – which was, in turn, a question of the distribution of the future.

This was a brief moment. Later China traders, like Shaw’s biographer, were more fully convinced of their own self-same superiority, and of the fundamental identity between American and British modernity – and, as a result, less disposed to see China, or the Chinese, as anything but backward. But that too was a creation of history.

(1). Alexis Madrigal, “What’s Wrong with #FirstWorldProblems?”, The Atlantic, 21 Nov 2011.

(2). I fear in sharing all this I’m revealing how low the thread-count actually is, in the skein of quotes that makes up my mental model of the world. But did you know that “skein” is a synonym for a flock of wild fowl, like geese? Maybe that saves it all in the end.

(2a). Thomas Jefferson to G. K. van Hogendorp, Paris, 13 October 1785, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson Digital Edition, ed. Barbara Oberg and J. Jefferson Looney 33 vols. (Charlottesville, Va: University of Virginia Press, 2009), Main Series, 8:633.

(3). See: Samuel Shaw, The Journals of Major Samuel Shaw: The First American Consul at Canton: With a Life of the Author, Josiah Quincy, ed. & comp. (Boston: Wm. Crosby and H.P. Nichols, 1847), vi.

(4). Shaw, Journals, 342. Needless to say, in these moments Shaw and his biographer are showing their ignorance; the Canton system they regarded as unchanging was an invention of the early 18th-century. Further, even as his memoirs were being published (in 1847), the China trade was undergoing huge changes – with significant consequences for China as a society and an empire.

(5). Shaw to Secretary for Foreign Affairs (John Jay), Canton, 21 December 1787, in Shaw, Journals, 354, 355.

  by  melingo wagamama 

Some folks make it look easy, but really, international commerce can be a lot of work – and mightily dull at the same time (all those currency conversions, ugh!). But let it never be said that China traders didn’t know a good time when it flew at them in a panic.

(Okay, I’m not sure that it has ever been said, and besides, we’ve covered similar ground before — but just go with me here).

While doing business at Canton and Macau during the 1786/1787 trading season, Major Samuel Shaw – revolutionary hero, pioneer merchant in the China trade, and official U.S. Consul – took some time out to party.

A circumstance that occurred at the entertainment given us by the Portuguese ought not to be omitted. The dessert, which was very elegant, was prepared in a room adjoining that in which we dined, and the tables were ornamented with representations, in paper painted and gilt, of castles, pagodas, and other Chinese edifices, in each of which were confined small birds. The first toast was Liberty! and in an instant, the doors of the paper prisons being set open, the little captives were released, and, flying about us in every direction, seemed to enjoy the blessing which had just been conferred upon them.

How’s that for an evening’s entertainment? This flighty soirée comes up in Shaw’s posthumous memoir-cum-biography, as a footnote in a section kvetching about how the English merchants being, well, bitchy. They hadn’t invited Shaw or any other Americans to dinner, you see, and that was breaking some serious social coding (a breach of, cough, cough, food diplomacy, if you will – though I suspect in this case “food” meant “copious amounts of Madeira and/or rum”):

On [the English's] arrival at Canton from Macao, the usual visits were made to them by us, and by them returned; and while every other nation paid us the customary civility of giving and receiving a dinner and supper, the English alone omitted that attention, not only to us individually, but to the Americans generally.

Shaw was an old hand at the casual snub, and beyond that, a professional – and so he assures his reader that such bad behavior “did not prevent or interrupt that intercourse which will ever exist among gentlemen.” Ahem.

In classic Early American style, though, he adds a final note of paranoia, suggesting that the lack of keggers was an order from on high:

It is true, that the Court of Directors [the governing body of the English East India Company], in their instructions to the supercargoes…enjoined it upon them to use every endeavor to prevent the subjects of Great Britain from assisting or encouraging in any shape the American commerce ; but if this prohibition was intended by the directors, or construed by their servants, to extend to the civilities heretofore paid the Americans, it cannot be denied that such conduct was extremely illiberal.

Illiberal indeed. Given the weight that Shaw and his compatriots back home gave to the treatment of Americans abroad, such behavior probably only confirmed their worst suspicions about Britons’ incorrigible arrogance.

But at least the Portuguese had the courtesy to stockpile pigeons, right?

Source: Josiah Quincy, ed., The Journals of Major Samuel Shaw: The First American Consul at Canton: With a Life of the Author (Boston: Wm. Crosby and H.P. Nichols, 1847), 234. [Bold emphasis mine, rest in original.]

  by  rsambrook 

The Exchange, with the delightfully old-school subtitle of “The Business History Conference Weblog,” offers a more-or-less daily posts describing items of interest to business historians and others of their ilk.

If you haven’t already, it’s well worth adding to your rss feeds; no one else is as up-to-date on the scholarship and happenings in the field.

Recently they’ve introduced me to a bunch of neat things, to wit:

Steven Mihm’s new project over at Bloomberg.com, Echoes, which connects current economic news to the past

“Railroads and the Making of Modern America”  a digital history site at the University of Nebraska Lincoln, which “seeks to document and represent the rapid and far-reaching social effects of railroads and to explore the transformation of the United States to modern ideas, institutions, and practices in the nineteenth century”

…and some exciting new books, of which the following especially caught my eye:

• Caroline Frank, Objectifying China, Imagining America: Chinese Commodities in Early America (University of Chicago Press, Dec 2011)
• Brian Schoen, The Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal Politics, and the Global Origins of the Civil War (JHU, September 2011) (bonus review)
• Robert Gudmestad, Steamboats and the Rise of the Cotton Kingdom (Louisiana State University Press, October 2011)
• William G. Thomas, The Iron Way: Railroads, the Civil War, and the Making of Modern America (Yale University Press, September 2011)

Also by way of the The Exchange, I found Civil War Book Review, which is my new go-to (alongside H-Net) for timely reviews.

Finally – though you’ll pardon me for mentioning what is likely old news to any reader of this blog –  the folks over at Digital Humanities Now have re-grouped and re-vamped that aggregation as a Press Forward publication with a multiplicity of feeds to meet the needs of every infonaut / digital humanist. See this post by CHNM’s Dan Cohen for a more lucid (and accurate!) explanation of how the new edition works.

And now off to read…

  by  sincerelyhiten 

Historians like to think that even as we study the past, we’re doing something new. Bringing fresh light to unexplored recesses, listening, patiently, to quiet, pained voices – or, more aggressively, stripping away the accumulated decades-deep varnish of myths and flipping the table on complacent “just-so” stories about how we got into our present mess. And so on.

I’m no different. Part of the sales pitch for my own work (Hellloooo future employers and funders!) is that early American trade with Asia is understudied – and so, by examining at its sources we can not only learn more about the trade itself, but also overturn long-standing debates in “wider” fields (e.g. American early republic or antebellum history). This is should be a familiar tune to all of you, I’ve sung it enough…

But history, in its modern incarnation, is not a new field; these habits are old. Even (or perhaps especially) when it comes to studying early American trade with Asia.

Allow me to illustrate. In 1937, in his monumental study of the Jackson and Lee merchant families Ken Porter complains, at length, that the American China trade is too well known , romanticized, even – and that the trend in the extant literature is to obscure an equally important topic: U.S. trade with British India.*

It was the trade with the Far East which gave early American commerce its characteristic flavor, but although the early history of the China trade has been told and retold, the story of the trade with Calcutta and other ports in India remains un-recounted either in scholarly or popular form. [emphasis mine]
…
The very simplicity of the Canton trade, emphasized by the exotic and fantastic characteristics of its physical background, has made it a favorite theme for writers on American foreign trade. Far otherwise was the situation at Calcutta, a British port, where the lack of any such rigid monopoly as the co-hong or any exclusive policy toward foreigners, coupled with the undeveloped character of native industry, rendered the trade situation almost infinitely more complex. This complexity, which calls for a thorough analysis, has instead produced the effect of repelling investigators, who found in the background of Calcutta trade no such compensatory romantic elements as were furnished by the forbidden world of China. Anecdotes of Houqua, the great hong merchant, abound; but who has more than the name of his millionaire Caclutta contemporary, Ram Duloll Day? [Ramdulal Dey]
~Porter, Jacksons and the Lees, I:28, 52

And, for what it’s worth, Porter was right: at the time he was writing, the U.S. public and scholarly community had been inundated, for at least thirty years, with wistful remembrances, detailed annals, and historical examinations of the American China trade.** That itself was a retread: the China trade, and it’s romantic clippers and secret hongs and smuggling, was celebrated well in to the Gilded Age in travelogues, stories, poetry, and images. Indeed, Porter’s own work was part of a new resurgence of interest in the early history of US-Asia relations, prompted, in all likelihood, by near-term threats to American interests in the Pacific (<cough>WWII</cough>).

Alas, all this kvetching was for naught; not until our own fallen times has U.S. trade with India (as well as China) come under proper consideration (though much good work is being done now).

Porter himself appears to have lost interest – some uphill battles are not worth fighting, I guess? – and devoted the rest of his (extremely long) career to working on the African American experience on the U.S. frontier.

Even among professionals, our historical memory is only the length of a lifetime, if that – and so trends cycle, if not predictably so. This is true, I suspect, in all sub-fields, but certainly in early American history, where once again innovative work is being done by adopting perspectives that echo (at least superficially) those of earlier generations, though hopefully with the benefits that the treadmill of time has provided us.***

But part of that innovation is also a calculated forgetting. Speaking for myself, it would be impossible to write anything new, if I felt obligated to fully represent every quantum of prior work equally in my own scholarship — the accumulated weight of the dust alone would crush me.

Turns out that the the dead hand of the (professional study of the) past is just as easily shrugged off as the past itself; even necessarily so, I think. History, no less than the earth, belongs in usufruct to the living  – though perhaps we would do well to be better stewards of it than we’ve been with the land.****

*Kenneth Wiggins Porter, The Jacksons and the Lees: Two Generations of Massachusetts Merchants, 1765-1844, 2 vols., 3rd ed., Harvard studies in business history 3 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1969; orig 1937).

**To give but a brief taste of the recent (c. 30 years) lit that Porter might have been frustrated with:

John Watson Foster, American Diplomacy in the Orient (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1903); Frank Erastus Hinckley, American Consular Jurisdiction in the Orient (Washington, D.C: W.H. Loudermilk, 1906); Hosea Ballou Morse, The International Relations of the Chinese Empire, 3 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, and Co, 1910); Charles O. Paullin, “Early Voyages of American Naval Vessels to the Orient,” Proceedings 36, no. 2, United States Naval Institute (USNI) (June 1910): 428-463; Robert Ephraim Peabody, Merchant Venturers of Old Salem; a History of the Commercial Voyages of a New England Family to the Indies and Elsewhere in the XVIII Century, (Boston and New York, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1912); Robert Glass Cleland, “Asiatic Trade and the American Occupation of the Pacific Coast,” Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1914 I (1916): 283-289; Thomas Franklin Waters, Augustine Heard and His Friends, Ipswich Historical Society publications no. 21 (Salem, Mass.: The Society, 1916); Frederic William Howay, “The Fur Trade in Northwestern Development,” ed. H. M Stevens and Herbert E Bolton, The Pacific Ocean in History (New York, 1917), 276-86; Kenneth Scott Latourette, The History of Early Relations Between the United States and China, 1784-1844, Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences 22 (New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 1917), http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000521723; State Street Trust Company, Other Merchants and Sea Captains of Old Boston; Being More Information About the Merchants and Sea Captains of Old Boston Who Played Such an Important Part in Building up the Commerce of New England, Together with Some Quaint and Curious Stories of the Sea (Boston, Mass: Walton Advertising and Printing Company: Printed for the State Street Trust Company, 1919); James Christy Bell, Jr., Opening a Highway to the Pacific, 1838-1846 (New York: Columbia University, 1921), http://books.google.com/books?id=uPRYAAAAMAAJ; Tyler Dennett, Americans in Eastern Asia: a critical study of the policy of the United States with reference to China, Japan, and Korea in the 19th Century (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1922); Samuel Eliot Morison, The Maritime History of Massachusetts, 1783-1860, 1st ed. (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1922); Shü-lun Pan, “The trade of the United States with China” (Ph.D. diss., New York: Columbia University, 1924); Charles H Barnard et al., The Sea, the Ship and the Sailor; Tales of Adventure from Log Books and Original Narratives (Salem, Mass: Marine Research Society, 1925); Sydney Greenbie and Marjorie Latta Barstow Greenbie, Gold of Ophir; or, The Lure That Made America (Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1925); George Granville Putnam, Salem Vessels and Their Voyages, III (Salem, MA: The Essex Institute, 1925); Robert Ephraim Peabody, The Log of the Grand Turks (Boston ;New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1926); Charles Frederick Remer, The Foreign Trade of China (Shanghai, China: The Commercial Press, Limited, 1926); Kenneth Scott Latourette, “Voyages of American Ships to China, 1784-1844,” Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences 28 (1927), http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000521723; Samuel Eliot Morison, “The India Ventures of Fisher Ames, 1794-1804,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 37 (April 1927): 14-23; George H Danton, The Culture Contacts of the United States and China; the Earliest Sino-American Culture Contacts, 1784-1844 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931); “Perkins and Company, Canton 1803-1827,” Bulletin of the Business Historical Society 6, no. 2 (March 1, 1932): 1-5; Basil Lubbock, The Opium Clippers (Boston: Charles E. Lauriat company, 1933); E. H. Pritchard, “The Struggle for Control of the China Trade during the Eighteenth Century,” The Pacific Historical Review 3, no. 3 (September 1934): 280-295; Eliot Grinnell Mears, Maritime Trade of Western United States,, Stanford business series (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1935); Chen Ching-Jen, “Opium and Anglo-Chinese Relations,” The Chinese Social and Political Science Review 19 (October 1935): 386-437; Amy Christine Carlson, “References to China in American Juvenile Periodicals During the Days of the Old China Trade, 1784-1844.”, 1936

And so on.

***I was having a conversation with a colleague just today about how it’s time to take the doughfaces seriously again! This is an ancient heresy of the worst kind, I tell you.

**** Said with all due obeisances to the lord master of Monticello, of course.

  by  Kris *V* 

Amidst some recent research,I ran across a pro-Jeffersonian Embargo (probargo?) newspaper piece which opened its partisan catechism with a curious saying:

~

“For the Columbian Phenix,” Columbian Phenix (Providence, RI), 12 November 1808

The editorial itself is a dialogue, where one side, expressed in italics, offers simple opinions by someone who opposes the Embargo (I admire the administration of Washington or I like not your republican principles etc), and the longer answers, in plain text, offer detailed rebuttals. Since the Phenix [sic] appears to be a Jeffersonian newspaper, the piece seems to be a preaching-to-the-choir editorial, aimed at mobilizing the base — a GOTV operation. (The catechism form of political hackery is a bit different from how we present things today, but you could think of it as a sort of talking points memo).

But as someone with a vested interest in things brantaïc, I was more curious about the epigram than the Republican politicking.

From a few searches in the usual places (Google Books, HathiTrust, etc), it seems the phrase was common enough – and old enough – to be rooted in the primers and spellers, the basic textbooks of the 16th through 19th centuries. Specifically, it proverb appeared in an often-reprinted list of the “best English proverbs” in books like the New England Primer:

~Westminster Assembly. The New-England primer, improved, for the more easy attaining the true reading of English. To which is added, the Assembly of divines catechism (Hartford : Printed by Hudson & Goodwin, M,DCC,LXXXVIII. [1788].)

Perhaps unsurprisingly –- and despite its later Republican bona fides –- these geese-centric proverbs don’t appear in Noah Webster’s (successful) attempt at a nationalist reconstruction of language, A Grammatical Institute of the English Language (1783). The more influential of his works during his own lifetime and for well after (who reads a dictionary after all?), the GIEL included a speller, a grammar, and a reader, all aimed “[t]o diffuse an uniformity and purity of language in America, to destroy the provincial prejudices that originate in the trifling differences of dialect and produce reciprocal ridicule, to promote the interest of literature and the harmony of the United States…” — or so, at least, he explained in the Preface to the American Spelling Book.

In that light, one can hardly expect the best English proverbs to have remained, once all the thoroughly monarchist and colourful extra vowels have been removed, right? And as go the English proverbs, so go the geese. Flown away, but not forgotten.

Earlier this summer I read (consumed, devoured) the latest installment of George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire, and perhaps that’s why I can’t help but see in my sources a certain Westerosian tinge now and again.

But honestly, I’m only reading that into it so far –- sometimes it’s just there. For example, doesn’t this French official make the semi-desperate, post-Revolutionary mariners of New England sound a bit…Ironborn?

“Those [states] that manage best are the Northern States; New England especially displays astonishing activity and resources: I am assured that this year Massachusetts alone has put to sea 900 ships of 70 to 180 tons. Forty have been Whaling in the seas off Brazil and on the coasts of the Country of the Patagonians up to the Falkland Islands. These voyages are long and perilous. But the Seafarers of the North are hardened to fatigue and to the Sea: they live with an extreme sobriety, and the size of the profits makes them scorn danger.” ¹

A bit less raiding, I suppose. But is it so much of a stretch to think that Ahab’s ancestors, limned here, might have worshipped the Drowned God in a slightly different universe?

Image: Abraham Storck, “Walvisvangst bij de kust van Spitsbergen — Dutch whalers near Spitsbergen,” Stichting Rijksmuseum het Zuiderzeemuseum. 022296, Wikimedia Commons, accessed 16 September 2011.

You may celebrate the Jacksononians for their commitment to democracy, or you may loathe them for their violent, heathenish, small government ways and fanatical campaign against of sensible currency regulation.

But whatever the case, I now offer you proof that must come together and appreciate their foresight in at least one area. For the Dems did get one thing right: America runs on Dunkin’! Or rather, cheap caffeine. Sweet cheap caffeine … And in the 1840s, that meant the cry of FREE COFFEE echoed throughout Congress’s halls alongside meeker requests for free soil and labor, etc.:

No person can deny that the Democrats came into power with professions against a tea and coffee tax; and it is equally undeniable that to the Democratic party is entitled the credit of keeping those articles free ever since the year 1832. Sir, this good old Democratic policy of keeping the foreign necessaries of life down as low as you can, has gained our party a great many votes; and both policy and justice require that we should not turn our backs upon it. Had Mr. Clay been for free tea and free coffee and Mr. Polk against it, who doubts but the election of 1844 would have differently resulted?

~John Wentworth, Free Tea, Free Coffee, Free Harbors, and Free Territory.: Remarks of Mr. John Wentworth, of Illinois, Delivered in the House of Representatives, February 2, 1847, Upon the Civil and Diplomatic Appropriation Bill, with His Personal Explanations, in Answer to the Attacks of the Washington Union. To Which Is Added a Portion of the Speech of His Colleague, (Mr. Douglass,) Touching the Course of the Union’s Reports Thereof (Washington, D.C.: Printed at the Office of Blair & Rives, 1847). Emphasis mine.

UPDATED:Turns out that coffee is still free! and tea nearly so (for some reason, only green tea imports are taxed, but then only at a very low 6.4% rate).

So it would seem that our current union still maintains some vestiges of the old, pure Democracy… or that modern governments are funded by income taxes rather than customs.

But definitely one of those, for sure.