Why China Mattered to the American Revolution | Dr. Dael Norwood – Part I

Updated: February 10, 2026

Why China Mattered to the American Revolution

Most Americans don’t immediately link China to the Revolution—but trade with East Asia was intimately woven into colonial life in the eighteenth century. Chinese tea, silk, and other luxury goods weren’t just consumables; they were status symbols that helped define social identity and economic aspiration in the British Atlantic world. Colonial access to these goods was structured through imperial trade networks, monopolies like the East India Company, and widespread smuggling that shaped both consumption and resentment.

As historian Dr. Dael Norwood explains in this interview, understanding how Chinese goods entered colonial markets, how colonists perceived those goods, and how debates over who controlled that trade helps us see the American Revolution not as a purely local struggle against taxation, but as part of a broader global trade system. From Guangzhou and London to Boston, from porcelain teapots to tea taxes, the connections between China and colonial America matter more than most textbooks let on.

This interview with Dr. Dael Norwood about colonial trade and consumer culture contributes to the program by showing how global connections, economic choices, and material culture shaped political and social life in the American colonies.

Here’s how I’ve structured this post:

Part I (this post): Chinese Goods in Colonial America — How Imports Shaped Daily Life and Social Status.
Part II: Did Trade with China Influence the American Revolution — Trade, Desire, and Global Connections 
Part III: American Strategies To Out-Compete British Trade in China — Linking Transoceanic Trade to the Birth of a Nation (Part III will be published on Sun., Feb. 1, 2026)

 

 

 

 

China, Trade, and Consumer Goods in Colonial America

Long before the American Revolution ignited a global conflict, colonial Americans were already deeply enmeshed in a global web of trade. Goods from across the world—tea, silk, porcelain, and exotic spices—shaped daily life, social status, and even political debates. Among these imports, Chinese and Chinese-inspired products held a special place, not just for their rarity or beauty, but also as status symbols and tokens of connecting ordinary colonists to a larger, interconnected world.

Historian Dr. Dael Norwood emphasizes that understanding these trade patterns is crucial to understanding the Revolution itself. The importation of Chinese and Chinese-inspired goods through British merchants (and “inveterate” colonial smugglers) influenced not only consumption habits but also the ways Americans imagined their economic and political relationships with Britain. Tea, for example, was far more than a beverage—it symbolized imperial connections to Britain, status, and, eventually, defiance.

In this interview series, we explore how global trade networks, consumer culture, and perceptions of China influenced the political and social landscape of the colonies. From the merchant ships docking in Boston Harbor to the parlors and dining rooms of colonial homes, these connections help us see the American Revolution as part of a broader, international story—one that linked empire, economy, and everyday life across continents.

About My Guest – Dr. Dael Norwood

Dr. Norwood is a professor in the History Department of the University of Delaware, a historian of nineteenth-century America specializing on the global dimensions of U.S. politics and economics. He is particularly interested in the political economy of commerce: how the ideas and practices of international exchange have affected Americans’ relations with other powers, as well as their dealings with each other.

He has published extensively on these subjects, including the following book, which we discuss in this interview:

• Trading in Freedom: How Trade with China Defined Early America

 

 

Dr. Norwood is the 200th guest scholar of the History Behind News program. And Analyzing American Revolution is a special series of that program.

To learn more about Dr. Norwood, you can visit his academic homepage.

 

Transcript of My Interview with Dr. Norwood

The notes below are excerpts from the edited transcript of my December 2026 interview with Dr. Norwood. You can watch the full interview in the video immediately below, and for convenience, I’ve also linked specific video clips to their corresponding sections in the transcript.

 

 

Adel: Dr. Norwood, it’s a pleasure to have you in our program’s special series. Thank you for taking the time for this conversation with me about the American Revolution.

Before we talk about trade with China, the subject for which I invited you to our program, can you please paint a picture of how the American colonists thought about China?

And I think you may appreciate why I’m asking that question because for most of us Americans, when we think about the American Revolution, perhaps with the exception of the Boston Tea Party, we don’t really think about China, right?

That’s not something that’s in the forefront of our mind.

Did American Colonists Think About China?

Dr. Norwood: Yeah, yeah. Well, thanks so much for having me. I mean, great question.

So, pre-Revolution American colonists, meaning people in the British colonies, thought about China in…

Adel: British subjects, essentially.

Dr. Norwood: Yeah, yeah, British subjects… thought about China primarily in the context of their relationship to Great Britain.

And that actually is something that continues post-Revolution as well.

But, you know, they’re British subjects. They are part of a very large empire that has placed a lot of focus on Asian trade, right?

So legally, Americans, people living in North America and the Caribbean, cannot trade directly with China. That is a privilege reserved to the East India Company as a joint stock company and as a royal and then parliamentary monopoly company. And their monopoly is over a geographic region of trade. They’re the only ones who are allowed to mount voyages to South Asia and East Asia.

 

Coat of arms of the East India Company circa 1700s. (Public Domain).

 

In the lead up to the American Revolution, the East India Company becomes a problem for American colonists. That enters their consciousness, and specifically what they’re doing in India, but also specifically what they’re doing with their tea trade. And that connects back up to the Tea Party.

But kind of more generally, Americans think about China as a very distant place that they sometimes get luxury goods from, and that the luxury goods from that area, or the consumable goods, particularly tea, are part of the broader European and particularly British culture of gentility, of performing gentry status.

So you see a lot of high-ranking colonist homes, and of course, you know, high-ranking colonists are kind of mid-level in the hierarchy back in Britain, right? There’s the kind of top that’s cut off. The aristocrats really don’t come to the colonies.

But, you know, they’re drinking tea. They’re adding sugar to the tea, right? So there’s that Caribbean and this Chinese tea kind of situation.

They’re drinking, they’re using porcelain vessels.

For the most part of the Americas, those vessels are, you know, cups and saucers and stuff are coming from European imitations of Chinese porcelainware, Chinaware, right? So that’s even the name of it.

But we, you know, beginning in the middle of the 18th century or the first third of the 18th century, or second third of the 18th century, I should say, there’s increasing amounts of these kinds of goods in the colonies.

The 18th century goes through what some historians call a consumer revolution, where there’s a lot more access to all kinds of trade goods.

 

1768 Boston Newsletter, showing items sold by merchant Joseph Barrell (1740-1804).
Notice “Choice Bohea Tea” in large print. (Public Domain).

Consumer Revolution in American Colonies

And a lot of those trade goods that are particularly important to the performance of elite status are trade goods that are from very far away, and specifically from East and South Asia. So, you know, tea, lacquerware cabinets.

So there’s also a development within the colonies of artisanal and craft practices that mirror or imitate products that are coming from East Asia, lacquerware cabinets, Japanware, that kind of stuff.

So that’s colonists trying to imitate or create a similar aesthetic in their homes that they are, that they, you know, for the goods that they can’t afford, or maybe can’t as readily have.

So China is there is that kind of like, this is high level consumer goods, and it’s deeply connected into their understanding of what the British Empire is offering them access to, which is a world of trade goods.

And, and as the as the 1760s and 1770s heat up politically, the East India Company as the giant conglomerate that is doing terrible things that is in and leading to decisions in Parliament that are making colonists lives worse. That is all tied up together.

 

 

Adel: You use the word consumer in two different phrases that could mean separate things.

But you refer to the consumer revolution, remind me again, what era did that start 1740s, 1750s?

Dr. Norwood: Depends on where you’re talking about. In Europe, it’s a little bit in the it’s in the late 17th century. And actually, for Native American societies, they the introduction of new kinds of consumer goods that change the way people perform status and perform social bonds with each other.

So in Europe, access to these things comes a little bit earlier than it does among white populations or enslaved populations in the colonies.

But so we’re talking early 18th century and kind of continuing into the middle of the 18th century as a as a shift in culture, shift in culture.

Adel: So consumer revolution, that’s the phrase, that’s the term you use.

High-Level Consumer Goods: Tea, Porcelain, and Lacquerware

Then you said, this is another phrase, you said high-level consumer goods. Arguably, those are two different things that consumer revolution is not. So when you say consumer revolution, we’re not talking about the entirety of the public.

They’re not going to their to their Walmarts and Targets buying Chinese goods at that time, right? This is for upper class. That’s what you mean by consumer.

Dr. Norwood: As with a lot of luxuries, I mean, luxury start off the top of the chain, and then they move down, right, in terms of what people desire.

And also, in this period, the way that global trade networks start to expand, start to tighten, starting to make more things more accessible to more people.

So we find, you know, by the middle of the 18th century, there are some colonial elites, a guy by the name of Alexander Hamilton, no relation to the other one, is traveling up and down, he keeps a diary of his travels up and down the East Coast. And he encounters what he considers to be, you know, rude and ungenteel, meaning poor people, drinking tea, but they’re drinking it the wrong way, right, for him.

But that’s a, you know, they’re, they’re, you know, he claims he finds a guy who’s just like eating it, you know, eating a brick of tea. And you’re like, that’s not how you’re supposed to do that. Right. So who knows if that’s the case if he’s just being a snob.

But so by the middle of the 18th century, you know, tea is not necessarily an everyday thing for everybody. But it’s a widely established taste that like, you know, in the same way that Oh, you know, we’ve both lived through things that were once, you know, luxuries becoming more readily available. And we often attribute that to others better production processes or technology.

Yeah, sometimes and sometimes it’s, you know, better trade access, more efficiencies in terms of travel, lower shipping costs.

Adel: Yeah, well, when I was growing up, cell phones were luxury, right? But now everybody’s so yeah.

Dr. Norwood: Right. And that’s partly a story of technology. And that’s partly a story of mass production.

But it’s also a story of the production got moved to a place where it’s very cheap, and shipping across large distances became more readily available.

So, for things like tea, right, that’s a consumable, it’s really only grown in a couple of places in in the 18th century, it’s really just China and Japan, Indian tea takes longer.

So, more access and more shipping coming back and forth to these.

I should also say that part of what’s going on in the colonies, and part of what, you know, intersects with the revolution is that colonists are inveterate smugglers, right?

Colonists as Smugglers: Getting Around the East India Company

That’s the great American tradition is doing crime about taxes.

You know, today, it’s kind of the high level doing crime about taxes. But back in the in the 18th century, it’s more of kind of an everyday crime.

But there’s a lot of evasion of tariffs, there’s a lot of really ineffective enforcement.

 

 Bohea Tea tree. (Public Domain)
Bohea tea dominated tea consumption in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Bohea tea imported by Dutch merchants fueled widespread smuggling in the American colonies because it was cheaper than tea sold by the British East India Company. As colonists bypassed British tea monopolies, imperial efforts to reassert control—most notably the Tea Act of 1773—only intensified resistance, eventually leading to the Boston Tea Party and the other Tea Parties across the colonies.

 

And so the access to these goods comes through not just East India Company supplies it to London, and then you know, colonial merchants ship it to the Americas, but also the Dutch (later connect to Dutch episode), you know, some Portuguese, sometimes, and more rare instances, French.

And there are some Americans who, particularly in the early 18th century, late 17th century are, you know, have gone pirate, and go and raid other places.

And part of what they’re bringing back and selling are East Asian goods. For a little while, they’re notorious enough that they become known as the Red Sea Men, there’s a there’s a band of them that hang out in the Red Sea and attack shipping there.

Adel: Is there American colonists?

Dr. Norwood: Well, yeah, yeah, people from North America.

But I mean, you know, it’s part of the British Empire. So like, maybe they’re from Rhode Island, maybe they’re from, you know, Bermuda, but like, they end up on a pirate ship, you know, or a privateer or something like that.

So there’s, there’s widespread, there’s widespread, you know, access might be more widespread on these things.

And you might expect in part, because there’s a very lively smuggling trade.

Adel: So let’s go back, we identified two items, those were the top two that Americans imported via the East India Company, or through smuggling from China – one was porcelain, the other one was tea. And the third one, you said lacquer, but it seemed like you were attributing that to import from Japan.

Dr. Norwood: Well, there’s a there’s a form of lacquer kind of varnish that’s that’s, gets imitated, that’s known as Japanware.

But yeah, in terms of the things, if we’re ranking, in terms of volume and value, the things that Americans are consuming from China are pretty steady:

• It’s tea, overwhelmingly, like that’s the bulk, and that’s the total value is always tea.
• Then things like silks, or Americans for a very long time are buying
• cotton textiles known as Nankeens. That’s a certain cotton weave. China has a very large cotton textile manufacturing center, as does India. So those textiles, but silk, both in raw form and in.
• And in finished form, and then kind of lower down or kind of heavier manufactured goods, and that would include furniture, and
• porcelain and things like that.

“The Really Nice Stuff Never Reaches North America”

The really nice stuff never really gets to North America, either because it’s consumed in the East Asian markets, or it’s, you know, you know, it’s very expensive, so it ends up in Europe.

Often those luxury items get imitated. And so that’s how Americans are participating in that.

But some do end up in the colonies early on as imports.

And it’s always the East India Company is importing to the British Isles. And then that’s where their monopoly ends.

They don’t until, until the 1770s, they don’t get a franchise in North America. So then it’s a, it’s an auction market there, and there’s importers that bring it across the Atlantic.

So there’s a divide in London, basically, the East India Company brings stuff to London, and then London exporters export it to the colonies. So it’s, that’s, that’s where the monopoly sphere ends. But yeah, those are the products.

How Colonists Purchased Chinese Goods

Adel: I wasn’t planning to ask this question, Dr. Norwood, but now I’m curious.

Were, were there like, catalogs in the colonies of what things are available, or a list of things?

Like did, did the middle class or higher-class colonists in Rhode Island or say, whatever, South Carolina, did they order things from Britain, Chinese products to be brought from Britain? Or would a ship show up, let’s say in Charleston or Savannah, and then say, these are what we’ve brought and people will go purchase it?

 

 

Dr. Norwood: Well, little column A, little column B, there’s not really catalogs. That’s a little bit of a later development. That’s like a 19th century development in the United States.

But yeah, there’s, you know, shopping is a major social network phenomenon, right? So, and this is true for all kinds of things.

There’s, there’s a great book called The Ties That Buy (by Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor). That is, I mean, it’s a fun title, first of all. But it’s all about, it’s all about looking at two different port cities across that revolutionary period, and how women’s social networks are really forming these, these shopping networks. But so yeah, people, people kind of shop in a couple different ways.

But people shop, you know, if you had business with London merchants, if you were a planter, or a Boston merchant or a shipbuilder, if you’re a contacts, they would have called them correspondence, you know, people you regularly wrote to about business affairs or about political affairs, you could ask them, you could write them and say, like, Oh, you know, what I really want is, you know, a chest of drawers for my daughter’s dowry with red lacquer and get me the nice, you know, fragrant green teas and, you know, get that the next the next kind of auction you go to in London, or if you’ve got correspondence in London, get me a pattern like this, right?

It’s a little bit less common in the colonial period. But that continues into the post-revolutionary period when Americans have more direct trade.

But yeah, you can see if you look at any kind of newspaper, colonial newspaper, or post-revolutionary newspaper, it is a pretty regular phenomenon for a ship to show up and advertise all the kinds of goods that it’s got. It’s it basically shows up in port and lists and advertises all the lots it’s got for sale. If it if it doesn’t already have a regular buyer.

And if it does have a regular buyer, if merchants have, you know, got cargoes consigned, or they want to buy direct from the ship, or they made those arrangements, then they at their establishments, kind of general stores, right, it’s kind of they will take out ads that list just an insane number of goods.

I do this with my students, actually, I show them with they write, they do a little analytic piece where we analyze like, what is this listing of 100 to 200 categories of items at these 10 retail shops in Pennsylvania and Philadelphia?

Adel: Wait, these are not 100 to 200 items, there are categories in which there are multiple items.

Dr. Norwood: So it’ll say like, say like, you know, you know, McClintock and Sons, we have Hyson (a type of Chinese green tea), cassia root, we have ginseng, we have sugar, we have brown sugar, we have, and then especially with textiles, there’s a bazillion different kinds of textiles at the list, right? Because that is a that is a consumer product that is a high value, but also it matters a lot with the weave and the knit or the kind of fabric.

 

 Fresh Hyson Tea,’ newspaper advertisement clipped from the Charleston Courier, November 20, 1826. (Public Domain).
Hyson tea, also known as ‘Lucky Dragon,’ is a Chinese green tea traditionally produced in Anhui province. Made from young leaves rolled into long, twisted strands, the tea unfurls as it brews. The name ‘Hyson’ likely derives from an Amoy term meaning ‘flourishing spring tea,’ though some accounts suggest it may instead be linked to an English tea merchant named Phillip Hyson.

As a sidenote, the Charleston Courier became the Charleston Daily Courier in 1852 and is now known as the Post and Courier.

 

And then it’ll say, you know, and then furniture’s of diverse kinds and metalwares and da da da. And sometimes they will say the ship that came off of and sometimes they’ll say where the ship comes from.

But often they’ll just say, we regularly have all this in stock, and it’ll have tees as part of that, or it’ll have lacquerware as part of that, or porcelains as part of that.

So yeah, shopping is kind of an aggressive, but you can get this stuff. Yeah, this stuff is at the store, or you can ask your friends to buy it for you, but there’s not really catalogs.

Adel: So examples I use and the ones you responded to had to do with seaport, sort of coastal.

So, well, I guess my question also ties into different class hierarchies, but let’s say someone living out in the Appalachia, like, would they have access to this if they had the money?

Dr. Norwood: Yeah, sometimes.

Yeah, I mean, none of these people are living, I mean, very rarely it’s or these is anybody a hermit, right? They’re out there, claiming land to grow commercial crops to sell to the Atlantic market.

And actually, this is part of why the term consumer revolution is useful to historians, because what we see over the course of the late 17th and early 18th century is people orienting themselves to these global markets and rearranging their households to produce goods that can be sold on these global markets, because they want to generate cash, or at least credits with their merchants to be able to buy global trade goods.

So they want the ribbons from Italy, they want the silk thread from China, they want tea, they want sugar, they want chocolate, all that kind of stuff.

So yeah, I mean, in the countryside, there are general stores, it’s not quite a thick network, you know, it depends on a general store is like a guy’s house where there’s also goods, you know.

But there’s also, and there’s a network of people who peddle goods, so peddlers who go from town to town with packs or a cart, and they have a million different things.

A lot of that really focuses on, again, textiles, but sometimes it’s consumables like tea, and sometimes it’s things like metalware and things like that.

You wouldn’t see necessarily furniture, or porcelains moving on a peddler’s pack, that’s a little bit too breakable. Yeah.

But that kind of, the backcountry is definitely a part of that, and an important part, because a lot of what is, you know, flowing out of these colonies is back country products, right?

So I mean, furs in particular, become really important to later kind of considerations.

Franklin’s Experiments with Tea and Silk

I should also say that there’s some people, you know, and this is not only Ben Franklin, but Ben Franklin is one of the people you think about here, who are thinking about China, and the kinds of products that come out of China, in ways that map, they have an environmental imagination about weather patterns and climates, and they look at Philadelphia, which is pretty close to the latitude of other major Chinese cities, Guangzhou particularly, and they say, well, okay, if tea’s coming out of there, and silk’s coming out of there, we can grow tea and silk here, which is not in fact true.

The Bohea (Wuyi) tea hills in Fujian Province. Neighboring Guangdong Province—where Guangzhou was located—served as a major export center for Chinese tea. (Public Domain).

But there is this kind of, in the same way that, you know, the British Empire redistributes breadfruit trees and sugar, and you know, lots of different kind of agricultural items are taken from point A to point B, in an attempt to establish new kinds of plantation agricultures, and new kinds of commercially viable agricultural regimes, there is an effort to replicate East Asian goods, and particularly agricultural goods, in the colonies.

It never really comes to much, but there’s an effort to grow silk in Pennsylvania, that kind of thing, or at least plans to.

So that’s another way that colonists, at least in that colonial mode, and really, they’re thinking as British imperial subjects, right?

How can the British Empire, in its growing territories, match the Empire of China in its productivity?

Adel: They’re mostly thinking, based on what you said, how to grow things like silk or other agricultural products. They’re not, since the American colonies don’t really have a manufacturing base, they’re not thinking how they’re going to make Chinese furniture or porcelain into that.

European Imitation of Chinese Porcelain and Textiles

Dr. Norwood: Right, although individual craftsmen are, again, like they’re painting or using varnishes to give the appearance of lacquer, right?

So it’s, they don’t have, they don’t have the trees that produce the kind of varnish that there, but they will paint things red.

And you know, there’s a school of scholarship that looks at porcelain production in the Netherlands, and in England in particular, and has traced how the kind of patterns and some of the inspirations for, and some of the practices for the porcelain production process that becomes a big booming industry in both those places, are deliberate attempts to replicate Chinese porcelain manufacturing.

That’s also true in textiles.

A lot of the early textile manufacturing that’s not wool in those northern European places are directly trying to create imitations of East Asian products and South Asian products, and then those take off on their own, right?

So that is, that’s an important part of the story of industrialization is it’s initially an import imitation or import substitution entrepreneurship.

Porcelain espionage! A 1712 letter by French Jesuit priest and missionary François Xavier d’Entrecolles, written from Jingdezhen, exposed Chinese porcelain-making techniques to European audiences. Republished in 1735 by Jean-Baptiste du Halde, the letter played a key role in breaking China’s monopoly on porcelain production. (Public Domain).

Adel: Yeah, yeah, the imitation industry becomes an industry on its own, and it’s true now in, right, well, now it’s mostly in the, in the Far East.

I have a conclusion, I reached a conclusion based on what you shared with us, I’m going to share with you, Dr. Norwood, and you tell me whether or not I got this correct.

So you said there was no direct trade between the colonies and China. And we also talked about sort of the backcountry when I asked you about whether or not consumer goods were available there. You said, they grow crops to sell to the Atlantic market.

What I put together based on all of this is that the American colonies didn’t export to China.

Dr. Norwood: Yeah.

Adel: I just wanted to confirm that.

 

Explore Parts II and III to see how trade with China shaped the American Revolution and the early United States:

 

Did Trade with China Influence the American Revolution

 

American Strategies To Out-Compete British Trade in China
(Part III will be published on Sun., Feb. 1, 2026)