How the China Trade Helped Make America

The Daily Beast
Nov 4, 2012

This year’s presidential election has brought the latest round of China bashing, but the anti-Chinese strain in American politics ignores our long and highly profitable history of trade and commerce with the country writes Eric Jay Dolin.


China bashing has become a cottage industry during this Presidential season. Whether it’s griping about the trade deficit, decrying the amount of our debt China owns, or skewering China’s currency policies, Americans see bogeymen around nearly every corner. The merits of such concerns are debatable, and I gladly leave those arguments to policy wonks and modern-day China watchers. But, it is important to remember that our relationship with China goes all the way back to the beginning of the Republic, and in those dramatic and tempestuous years of America’s youth, the China trade provided a much needed, and greatly appreciated boost to the American economy. Back then, China wasn’t a threat, it was a golden opportunity.

It is not surprising that Americans pursued the China trade as soon as the American Revolution ended. After all, American colonists had long had a love affair with things Chinese. From the mid-1600s up until the eve of the revolution, the British East India Company supplied the American colonists with Chinese goods, most importantly tea, which Americans consumed at a rate of more than one billion cups annually in the early 1770s.

Before the revolution, Americans had been barred from entering the China trade on account of the British East India Company’s monopoly on Far Eastern commerce. But when America won the war, the Company’s monopoly no longer applied, and Americans were free to trade with China, and trade they did.

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