-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Susan Kern, Caroline Frank. Objectifying China, Imagining America: Chinese Commodities in Early America., The American Historical Review, Volume 118, Issue 3, June 2013, Pages 842–843, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/118.3.842
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
In Objectifying China, Imagining America, historian Caroline Frank presents a new and surprising role that Chinese commodities played in the formation of the United States. At first glance, this is an object study working from particular artifacts—porcelain figurines and dishes, japanned screens, tea—and tracing them to the wider worlds that gave context to their use, trade, or manufacture. What Frank really does, however, is write a cultural, intellectual, and political biography of Chinese goods in the northern colonies over the course of the late seventeenth century and leading up the American Revolution.
Frank's first task is to convince the reader that Americans had direct and indirect contact with China through “Red Sea men” and other sailors whose routes regularly took them into contact with Asian people and goods. Through their tales of exotic people and places, as well as the small figurines and other wares they carried back, this maritime activity brought people, goods, and knowledge into American ports. Americans were part of a cosmopolitan exchange and formed ideas about China that were unmediated by official British regulation of trade. In a rich tapestry of voices and objects that range from Massachusetts to Pennsylvania, Frank portrays Americans developing a distinctly colonial—as opposed to British—association with Chinese objects.
