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

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: Chinese Goods in Colonial America — How Imports Shaped Daily Life and Social Status.
Part II (this post): 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

 

 

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.

 

Dr. Norwood in this interview.

 

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.

 

 

Did Trade with China Influence the American Revolution

So let’s, let’s move on to the American Revolution.

And I’ll open it with this: did the colonies trade with China play any role in the American Revolution?

Dr. Norwood: Not directly, although in the aftermath of the revolution, China becomes a component. And I argue in my book [Trading Freedom: How Trade with China Defined Early America] of an important component, not that not a determinative one, but an important component of their geopolitical thinking.

But during the revolution, you know, the basic set of grievances, or the dynamic of the imperial policy changes and colonial protests that spins up the American Revolution is really about what role does the central government have in setting taxation policies in the colonies? And what role does the imperial government have to set and staff policing agencies, right? That’s maybe if we want to translate it into other terms.

Adel: Enforcement.

British Tighten Trade and Tariffs Enforcement

Dr. Norwood: Enforcement, yeah, but specifically setting up courts and enforcement officers, appointing officers, who gets to control who has the monopoly on domestic force, right?

And that dynamic is, because of the nature that of the taxation that early modern regimes are able to do, primarily is on trade, right?

That’s the place that the taxman can see most easy, or can see easiest.

You know, there are other kinds of wealth taxes, window taxes, real estate taxes, all kinds of other stuff, taxes on currencies and things like that. But you can see a boat on the river, you know, in the harbor, right?

You can count them, it’s not innumerable, right?

And smuggling exists, but that raises the cost of shipping quite a bit, if you have to go to a nowhere port without a dock and stuff like that.

So a lot of what the British government does is to, or what the, you know, King and Parliament government does, the Westminster governments do, is try to impose taxes on stuff flowing across the Atlantic. And some of those items are things like tea, right?

The tea tax, the Tea Act [passed by the British Parliament on May 10, 1773], the various taxes on tea and the enforcement arms of it come to play an important role.

And they come to play an important role because these taxation and these enforcement mechanisms are not only a protest about rich people not wanting to pay taxes, although also that, like, I don’t want to underplay that, like, that is important, but it becomes a societal-wide crisis, because it is a crisis of constitutional governance, right?

Do these local governments have the ability to set their own policies as they imagine that they did in the past? Or does the central government have the right to set, to reach all the way down as far as the local level and install local officers in the way that they imagine that they have always had? And neither side is exactly true, but those are the imaginaries.

The East India Company’s Role in Colonial Unrest

And this comes to a head around tea, because the East India Company does a couple of things in the 1770s that catch colonists’ attention.

One is that after winning control of Bengal and inserting itself into the actual governance of the Mughal Empire, the East India Company immediately causes a famine through mismanagement.

The Battle of Plassey
June 23, 1757
A decisive victory of the British East India Company that enabled it to completely control Bengal by 1773.
(Public Domain). 

Millions of people die because they’re focused on extracting rents rather than stockpiling food. And that’s a major scandal.

And then even worse than that, from the British Parliamentary perspective and from the colonists’ perspective, is that they also mismanage their tea markets.

They see a boom in tea prices, and they stockpile huge amounts, and they overdo it, and they’re unable to sell things.

So they cause a crisis of governance resulting in millions of deaths in South Asia, and they also cause a crisis of solvency for the East India Company, which is a problem, because in Parliament and aristocrats more generally in England are deeply invested in it. And you know, the guy’s a major fortune.

Adel: Members of Parliament are also investors in the East India Company.

British Corruption and the East India Company: Famine, Finance, and Favoritism

Dr. Norwood: Yeah, and in some places, former officers and servants. That was the title for someone who in executive capacity was a servant, right?

So they’re known locally in London at this period as nabobs, which is a kind of corruption of a Hindi term for aristo.

 

Satirical cartoon (1783) mocking corruption in the British East India Company. Thomas Rumbold is shown disgorging coins to Henry Dundas, a jab at “nabobs,” imperial wealth, and political influence. (Public Domain).

 

So they’ve come back, and they’ve corrupted Parliament, right?

And what Parliament decides to do is bail out the East India Company, so their East Asian empire that is controlled through this corporation, at the expense of their Atlantic colonies, which are really also a set of corporations, right?

You know, corporation now primarily means business corporation, but that’s not actually what it is. It’s a division of the sovereign authority of a government with monopoly rights over a territory in this period.

So Mass Bay is a corporation, right? In the same way that a city is a corporation.That’s the legal structure.

So these colonies, so the way they do that is with the Tea Act, which raises taxes on tea, creates an enforcement mechanism that is staffed by the central government to collect those taxes. And then they give the East India Company the ability and the right to appoint direct vendors of their tea and to ship directly to the colonies.

So they’re cutting out a smuggling trade of a good that everybody likes and thinks is important for elite presentation and gentry status, but also is a nice warm thing to drink in the winter, right? In the morning.

And they’re doing it in a way that eliminates local governance, cuts out lucrative side gigs, and cuts out the business of a lot of the major players in colonial governments, which are the import-export merchants.

So it seems like a massive intrusion of governmental authority, and it’s on the basis of, it’s in benefit of this corporation that just killed millions of people through its corruption.

Why the Boston Tea Party Became a Revolutionary Flashpoint

And so that’s why you get the Tea Party. It’s like the reaction to the Tea Act is to try and prevent the landing of the tea so as to stave off a further constitutional crisis by not letting the tea land at all, and thus making the act unenforceable.

 Boston Tea Party
Dec. 16, 1773
Click for image backstory.

 

Adel: Two follow-up questions.

One, do the American colonists, A, know of the famine in India?

Dr. Norwood: Yes

Adel: And B, are they aware that members of the British Parliament are also investors in the East India Company? Because if they’re aware of that, that’s going to tick them off.

Dr. Norwood: Yeah.

I mean, it’s all very, yeah. I mean, they interpret all these things through a particular, or at least the radicals around them, interpret a lot of these moves that if you describe them in a different way, seem a little bit more anodyne. Oh, the government needs money, so we need to raise taxes. Okay.

But they’re interpreting all this through, their keywords are corruption and tyranny. Because they’re interpreting all these events, they’re getting this news through the London Papers, which is a lively debate, and through other kinds of sources. They have their own newspapers.

They’re interpreting all this through the lens of political philosophy of the country Whigs, which is a school of thought that regards tyranny is always ascendant, and are always rising that you need to fight off, and specifically tyranny through what we would say today is financial corruption.

So the king gets rich and buys off Parliament, and then you’re screwed, is the general idea.

And then the government’s coming for your property and your life.

And so they look at what’s happening with Parliament making decisions to protect their investments. And they look at what Parliament’s doing, and what the king is doing, and to assign individual enforcement officers in their homes, and say, well, here it is, this is it, this is what we always were afraid of, was that a central government greedy after its own ends, is going to install local controls and deny us our control over our property and our lives.

And so that they interpreted in kind of apocalyptic forms, right, or at least the radicals among them.

So you get folks like Sam Adams in the Massachusetts General Assembly saying things like, this is a new kind of slavery.

Adel: New kind of slavery.

Dr. Norwood: Yeah, which like, you know, for a place where there are enslaved people in Massachusetts, like that is an institution in Massachusetts, as it is everywhere around the colonies, that is, you know, it’s not that they didn’t know what they were saying. They thought this was a political slavery of taking away their own power, but also that this would leave them with no recourse if they let it continue, right?

So, and so they would be as degraded as the people that they are enslaving.

Adel: Wow, suddenly the Boston Tea Party represents a much bigger sort of resistance to British tyranny.

Now, I told you I had two follow-up questions. The second one is that, just confirm for me, please, Dr. Norwood, we all grew up in school, Boston Tea Party, Boston Tea Party, we all know that.

But there were multiple Tea Parties in other ports as well?

Beyond Boston: Other Colonial Tea Parties

Yeah, yeah. Boston’s not actually even the violent one.

In Rhode Island, there’s the Gaspee incident [The Gaspee Affair of June 9, 1772] where they burn a British Navy ship to the waterline.

 

 The Gaspee Affair
June 9, 1772 – Near Gaspee Point, RI
(Public Domain).

 

Adel: Wow.

Dr. Norwood: Yeah.

So, but in other ports, there is a little bit more kind of finessing on the part of the royal governors or the local governors, who in some cases deny the East India Company’s tea ships the right to dock and land the tea.

And so they refuse to issue them passes, basically, in the same way that if you were bringing a ship into port now, you need to get your checks and all that stuff. And they say, no, we’re going to deny you these, you have to turn around and go home.

And that’s what the Sons of Liberty or the group, the radical group that’s calling themselves the Sons of Liberty in Boston demands. And that’s what the kind of, you know, the Tea Party is this linking up of elite radicals and working class people. Like it’s not Sam Adams throwing the tea off the ship.

It’s a bunch of people who know how to load ships and unload ships who are going out there and doing that. And they do it very quickly without any murders.

But in other places, it’s more violent and where there’s mobs that form to protest against this and threaten violence.

And in other places, you know, those mobs are successful in destroying the products through other means.

And in other ports, they just deny permission to land. And so it’s a way of, you know, obeying but not enforcing.

Adel: So why didn’t they, you know, take that route in Boston, just deny the ships from coming to port?

Dr. Norwood: Well, the governor wasn’t on the same page.

Adel: There you go. You answered my question.

Dr. Norwood: Yeah. He was, he was, he thought what the, he thought the protests were incorrect and that, you know, you need to bring these people to heel.

Adel: So was that Hutchinson or was that someone before Hutchinson?

Dr. Norwood: I believe that is Hutchinson. [Acting Governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay: August 2, 1769 – March 14, 1771. 12th Governor March 14, 1771 –May 17, 1774]

Adel: So, Governor Hutchinson.

So, another just follow up to this tea party story.

In Rhode Island, they burned a ship, a British ship.

Why the Boston Party Stood Out More Than Other Tea Parties

Adel: Why is it that we know all about the Boston Tea Party versus the one in Rhode Island?

Dr. Norwood: I mean, it causes a much bigger blowback. Massachusetts is much more radical movement. They, um, you know, Boston’s entire legislature is basically in, in active rebellion for a while. And parliament decides to make Boston an example.

So they levy a set of acts that the columnists call the Intolerable Acts that basically try to kill Boston as a city.

 

 

They ban trade. They start loading even more soldiers there than were there before.

So it’s an occupied town or an even more occupied town. They ban trade, and that signals to everyone else that, okay, well, you know, we all kind of protested this thing and then here they’re trying to, you know, hang a prisoner as a, as an example. And so that sets off, um, the exact opposite of what parliament had hoped.

It sets off a wave of solidarity.

Not among everybody, not everywhere, but like you get, you get folks who are, you know, pretty, um, pretty on the fence about all this stuff.

Like George Washington writing to his friends, um, saying now, listen, would I protested that way? Absolutely not. That kind of protest is too rude for a guy like me, but they did. And this is how they responded and that’s tyranny and we can’t be doing that.

And so you start to see, you know, it provides a lot of fuel, um, for, um, consolidation and cooperation among other revolutionaries.

Adel: I’m sorry. I just want to rephrase, review what you just said.

So George Washington is saying that I would not have done what the Boston Tea Party did, but now that has happened, we got to help him and resist tyranny. Is that?

Dr. Norwood: Yeah.

I mean, he’s, he’s a kind of a classic, um, uh, moderate who says, well, you know, that kind of protest was rude and impolite. Yeah. My kind of protest was more polite.

You know, like I, I have back channels are the right way to do it boys. But now that like, you know, it’s, it’s, this is the dynamic familiar to our time, right? Everyone’s always got a critic about, of, of how someone else protests, right. Or critique.

Um, but yeah, but his reaction to this in particular is, you know, now that parliament has reacted so extra with such extreme measures, now we have to act and, you know, and consolidate and, and, and, you know, start sending supplies to Boston, start raising an army, you know, we need to move on this because otherwise this, this noose is coming for us all.

Adel: I see. And I want to cap off this segment with something that I’m curious about.

I just want to confirm it. Um, you know, how we went out to France and then later Spain and the Netherlands to rally support for the American cause for the American revolution. Was there ever talk of going to China to rally support for the American revolution?

Dr. Norwood: Uh, not in, not, not in the same way.

No, um, again, there’s, there’s post once major hostilities are over, there’s, uh, the geopolitics that some American revolutionaries imagine may play in their favor have to do with, um, uh, out competing, British or in some other way, damaging British trade with China as a way of cutting off support to the empire. But they’re not really thinking that in the revolution itself. Interesting.

As far as I know. I understand. Let’s take a break here.

In the next segment, I asked Dr. Norwood about America’s trade with China after America gains its independence. We’ll be right back.

 

Explore Parts I and III to understand the consumer revolution in the American colonies and how later trade with China shaped the United States’ position in international commerce and global geopolitics:

 

Chinese Goods in Colonial America — How Imports Shaped Daily Life and Social Status.

 

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