True
Yankees: The South Seas and the Discovery of American Identity (The
Johns Hopkins Studies in Historical and Political Science)
by Dane A. Morrison (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014, 280 pages,
$34.95) uses the voyages, writings, and experiences of American
traders and sojourners Samuel Shaw, Amasa Delano, Edmond Fanning,
Harriet Low and Robert Bennett Forbes during the period 1785 through
1840 to describe the expansion of American mercantilism in the South
China Sea and the Indian Ocean in support of his thesis that their
voyages helped spread the web of American influence and power while
establishing the newly founded country's legitimacy and to develop
the distinctive qualities of behavior and belief that firmly
established the American character during a period where the
existence and development of America a a nation and world power was
still very much in question.
The
five merchant world explorers in the book stand as representative of
those pioneers in post-revolutionary America who sought to build
their fortunes by following the China trade to build their lac
(fortune) exploring far from their New England origins as they
pioneered new routes to the Great South Sea, encountered new people,
cultures, and economic opportunities for themselves while helping to
build America's wealth back during a period of fragile economic
recovery and weak international recognition. They “progressed”
from seeking to trade in ginseng, cotton, seal furs and whale oils
to Chinese silk, ceramics, and east Indian opium in a triangle trade
similar to that between America, Africa, and the Caribbean islands in
slaves. Because all five were skilled writers who shared their
stories in personal journals, correspondence, and books, they
established an extensive record of their activities, developing
understandings of the world they functioned in, successes and
failures. Morrison weaves their stories together into an intriguing
period covering a little over half a century when the emerging
American character was developed and established through the success
of the efforts of people like them, picturing the excitement their
voyages generated in the commercial and popular minds of Americans
who were themselves on a voyage from being thirteen autonomous
colonies toward a continent-wide nation of distinctive character and
disposition. As we follow their voyages and writings, readers see the
development from questing merchants following their needs and ideals
to established world traders championing American exceptionalism
manifested as prejudice and closed-mindedness.
The
core of the book describes both exploring and trading. The
explorations included some genuine discoveries, but a number of first
visits by Americans to places where the British had already made bad
impressions, making it more difficult to establish relations. The
American traders saw the indigenous peoples of the Pacific islands as
barbarians or primitive peoples who were somewhat less than human,
manifesting little or no interest in the culture, language, customs,
or religions of the people they encountered. In the late 18th
century, when Samuel Shaw began his trips as supercargo on the
Empress of China, the
Pacific charts were inaccurate and travel extremely dangerous. Yankee
traders had been preceded to China by a couple of hundred years of
Portuguese, Spanish, and British traders. China, in order to protect
itself from cultural mixing, had established a foreign trade zone in
Canton, beyond which foreigners were forbidden to go. They had little
incentive to wish to discover the real China, anyway. By the late
1830's, when Harriet Low, a New England spinster lived in Macao and
Canton, attitudes had hardened as the Opium trade threatened Chinese
stability. Low viewed this disruption through the narrow lens of New
England superiority and fundamentalist Protestant judgment.
Meanwhile, Forbes made his fortune as an intermediary representing
traders being banned from China because of Opium.
Dane A. Morrison
Dane
A. Morrison is Professor of Early American History at Salem State
University in Salem, MA. He has published, written, and presented
widely in this his specialty. He has been at Salem State for twenty
-one years. This book is, essentially, an academic treatise with the
kind of annotation and references you would expect from such a book.
Nevertheless, it is a highly readable account of this important, but
not widely known component of American History.
True
Yankees: The South Seas and the Discovery of American Identity
(The Johns Hopkins Studies in Historical and Political Science) by
Dane A. Morrison (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014, 280 pages,
$34.95) is an academic treatise written to demonstrate the thesis of
Yankee traders in the development and nurturing of the expansion of
American vision of itself, the establishment of the U.S. as a “major
player on the world stage,” and the discovery of a unique national
identity. The book is fully annotated and contains interesting
illustrations. It serves well to fill a hole in the historical
knowledge base of many interested in American history and makes a
significant academic contribution while remaining highly readable. I
received True
Yankees as an electronic
galley from Edelweiss and read it on my Kindle App.
