New England merchants, the China trade, and the origins of California

2011-08-01The central concern of this dissertation is how Americans thought the China trade worked, and how trade with China drew Americans into the Pacific and to California not long after Independence. It is about communication and the construction of knowledge, since Americans who traded with China, or thought about trading with China, did not have perfect knowledge of the world in which they lived. Rather than manifest destiny, the desire to trade with the world, and particularly with China, drove the earliest American ventures into the Pacific. Before the bombast of Manifest Destiny or the frenzy of the California gold rush, Americans were already interested in the Pacific generally and in California specifically, as an outgrowth of their desire to trade with China