The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: America and China, 1776 to the Present by John Pomfret

America and China, 1776 to the Present

The year was 1776, and the American colonies were seized with revolutionary fervor. But in New Hampshire, a twenty-five-year-old student studying to be a missionary dropped out of Dartmouth College and shipped out with the Royal Navy on Captain James Cook’s third and final voyage. Six years later, after Cook was killed in Hawaii, the sailor, John Ledyard, returned to America’s shores to proselytize not for God but for trade—with China. John Ledyard was fired up by a scheme to dispatch Yankee ships around the tip of South America to the Pacific Northwest to collect the pelts of the northwest sea otter for the China market. Coastal Indians would barter a pelt for “only a hatchet or a saw,” Ledyard wrote. But the Chinese would pay one hundred Mexican silver dollars for a single fur, a markup that his contemporary Adam Smith could love. A Connecticut Yankee with a hooked […]