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

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: Did Trade with China Influence the American Revolution — Trade, Desire, and Global Connections 
Part III (this post): 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 Revolution turned violent, 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 for the way they connected 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 East Asian goods through British merchants 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 loyalty, 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.

 

 

China Trade After Independence

Adel: Dr. Norwood, so the Treaty of Paris is signed in 1783. How does this affect the American state’s relations and trade with China?

American Strategies to Out-Compete British Trade in China

Dr. Norwood: Yeah, so the Treaty of Paris does a couple of different things.

Even in the lead up to the Treaty of Paris, as he’s getting frustrated with how the Brits are dragging their feet on recognizing American independence, John Adams, who’s one of these negotiators, argues that what Americans should do, some American merchants should do, is send ships to China, this is his language in a letter, in order to start that direct trade with China and put a little bit of fear into the British merchant class that they might get out-competed for these things.

So he’s looking to use private economic activity to create geopolitical bargaining power, right?

Adel: Build leverage in this negotiation.

Dr. Norwood: Yeah. And, you know, Adams’s perspective is shared by other kind of nationalists and diplomats and, you know, the Continental Congress kind of folks, people who have a kind of a vision of independence that is national in scope. And they’re thinking about what are the sources of British power?

And for them, the sources of British power are primarily trade, and specifically Britain’s massive share of European and Atlantic world trade with Asia.

And the most lucrative part of that trade is trade with China.

So, there are a number of efforts among that, or a number of ideas among that set to kind of celebrate, encourage, advocate for American merchants to start trading directly with China.
And some American merchants take them up on that pretty directly.

So the Treaty of Paris is signed in 1783. It’s ratified by the Continental Congress and loaded on a ship to be sent back.

The treaty is coming into New York court to be ratified on the same day that the first American trading vessel that is going out to China is going out on the same day.

They’re both going through New York Harbor in early 1784.

It’s also George Washington’s birthday. So it’s just a very, it’s a very, I’m sorry, I got that backwards.

The ratified treaty is also leaving, sorry, I want to make sure I get that detail right.

So both boats are leaving, both ships are leaving New York Harbor at the same time, one to go to China, one to go to London, and it’s George Washington’s birthday.

So it’s a very, you know, sometimes history is like thuddingly hitting you over the head with a stick of symbolism, right?

 

Treaty of Paris
Click for image backstory.

 

What America Shipped to China in the 1780s

Adel: Let’s pause there for a moment. This ship is leaving New York Harbor for China.

What is it taking to China?

And I want to be even more specific, Dr. Norwood, and if my, you have to pardon me, if my understanding of this trade is limited.

As I understand it, China wanted silver. That’s what they wanted.

They even, I’ve read many different places that China was saying, we don’t need anything from the West. They didn’t need anything. They would kick out Russians and English and Dutch and all of that.

So if, when this ship leaves New York Harbor, and many ships that follow over the years, what are they taking to China?

Dr. Norwood: So the Empress of China, that’s that first ship that’s leaving, is loaded up primarily with silver. And specifically, there’s a specific kind of silver that is acceptable in Guangzhou and Canton, the only market that Americans are able to, and other Westerners are able to access in China directly at this period.

What those, what that market wants is Spanish silver dollars, which since the 15th century had been a, or 16th century, I suppose, had been kind of a global currency, not unlike how the dollar is now, right?
There’s lots of people who use the dollar in trades that never touched the United States, right?

And that is, that’s the dollar, the dollar as a global trading currency predates and almost certainly will post-date the United States as a global power.

Because the first dollar is the Spanish dollar, and which is what the US dollar is pegged to and named after. And that is, that dominates global trade from the beginnings of the Spanish empire in Mexico and in South America.

And specifically, what the Chinese markets like about the Spanish dollar is that in this period, it has an assured quality, it has assured percentage of silver in it.

And so, the Carolus dollars, in particular dollars, dollar coins that have the King Charles’s face stamped on them, are what Chinese merchants will exchange goods and services for.

So, that is also the circulate, that’s the high value money that circulates all over the Americas. If you want to do long distance trade, and you don’t have credit arrangements with the people that you’re doing long distance trade with, then you send a keg, so a barrel, small barrel of, filled with Spanish silver dollars.

 

CAROLUS IIII DEI GRATIA 1806
“Charles IV by the Grace of God, 1806.”
Silver eight real coin of Charles IV
King of Spain (r. 1788-1808)
(Public Domain).

 

But they also send ginseng, that is also packed down to the Empress of China. It’s a different kind of ginseng than is what is grown in East Asia, but it’s a similar plant that is collected in Appalachia.

And since the 17th century, Americans and colonists, both in the British Isles and British territories and in French territories, had recognized that there’s a plant in North America that looks a lot like, and has some of the same chemical properties as ginseng, which is used in Chinese medicine, and particularly in medicine around male potency, per se.

Adel: So, if the Chinese have their own ginseng, why would they need American ginseng? Is it a different variety that is just-

Dr. Norwood: It’s a lesser variety. It’s not really in demand in the market. Americans note that it is in demand and commands high prices, or they have heard that.

There’s a moment in the late 18th century where the ginseng, it’s not something that’s a plant that’s cultivated, it’s kind of gathered, it’s a little bit like truffles.

So there’s an interruption in the supply of ginseng coming from Manchuria in the middle of the Qing Dynasty, and that is the market opportunity that Americans hear about, and then keep trying to fill with very mixed success.

Silver at Sea – Could the U.S. Afford Trade with China?

Adel: Okay. So the ship Empress of China sails out of New York Harbor in 1784 – to be precise, on George Washington’s birthday in 1784.

Takes silver, takes ginseng.

But we are a highly indebted nation. Our currency is virtually worthless, the Continental dollars.

Can we continue to do this and send silver over there? At some point, we got to start trading like normal countries with credits, right?

Dr. Norwood: Well, the way that this industry evolves is kind of interesting, right? So yeah, I mean, there’s no one American currency, there’s currencies.

Adel: Currencies. Okay.

Dr. Norwood: Yeah. And that situation persists all the way to the end of the Civil War, really. So in the 1780s, the United States is in a bad economic place, but it’s got really high hopes.

So part of what the China trade plays into, or what I argue in the book is the China trade, because they have such high hopes for it, and those hopes are to some degree dashed by the realities of global trade, that that is part of the impetus or part of the argument that people make for the constitution is we need a stronger central state so that we can have improved trade outcomes. And the China trade’s not failure, but the issues that Americans run into is part of that.

Young United States’ Big Bets and Hopes on China Trade

So part of what happens with the China trade is that people go hard and they invest too much and that blows up in their face in a way that sometimes happens.

But part of what they learn is that China doesn’t recognize any other European powers as treaty. There’s no treaties between the Qing Dynasty and England or France or anywhere else.

American traders then show up and actually are integrated into a system that is much more friendly than other places than they might expect.

In the Mediterranean, for example, they’re immediately victims of privateers because they’re not part of the treaties that they would have been part of while British subjects.

They have no treaties with the Ottomans or Ottoman sub-provinces, and so they’re fair game for privateering.

And that is the US Navy compiles a series of really extraordinary losses for the first 15 years or so in the Mediterranean because they just get smoked by various Ottoman privateering fleets.

But that’s not true in China. Privateering is a problem as you go along. But they show up in China and the Chinese authorities are great, great.

Here’s another bunch of people who want to trade with us. Here’s the rules. Here’s how you do it.

We have a very specific system of taxes and regulation. And you show up with silver, you can buy tea and silks, and then you’re on your way. We are limited to a specific season.

You can only stay here during specific months and you go home.

 

American Ships in Guangzhou. The Thirteen Factories, the area of Guangzhou to which China’s Western trade was restricted from 1757 to 1842. (Public Domain).

 

So in some ways, they’re annoyed that they can’t do all the smuggling things that they want to do. But it’s a better system, but it shows them that the weakness of their geopolitics is a problem.

They can’t. So yeah, I don’t know if that gets to your question. I could talk about the structure of the trade a lot more.

But the early 1780s is part of this kind of, the United States can’t make treaties with other powers, and specifically other Atlantic powers, and that is costing them the ability to finance the China trade.

They don’t have good relations that generate supplies of silver dollars, and that leaves them at a disadvantage in the China trade.

How Americans Financed Trade With China

Adel: That sort of answered my question, because you confirmed that the American colonies and later, well, in the 1780s and later when the United States forms in the 1790s, they don’t have enough Spanish silver dollars or any hard currency to constantly do this.

At some point, they need to have credit systems, and it’s difficult for them to establish that because of their-

Dr. Norwood: Well, it’s not exactly credit systems they establish. So okay, so the 1780s happened, there are some experiments in trade. There’s a lot of firms that go into it.

There’s ports up and down the East Coast get involved. Salem is a big East Asia or in South Asia trade port, and particularly in Sumatra. Boston tends to specialize a little bit more in China, New York.

So there’s, through the 1780s, really into the 1810s, there’s a lot of different diverse merchant firms getting into it, and they’re all pretty small scale. No one-

There’s an early suggestion that the Continental Congress should grant a monopoly to form an American East India Company, and it gets immediately shot down, because of the revolutionary experience. Like, hey, we fought a revolution to get away from that kind of imperial consolidation, and the sovereign playing favorites with a corporate company, or something with a corporate situation.

So there’s a lot of small merchant firms, they’re almost all organized as one-off partnerships. But over time, what happens is that a lot of them fail when they hit choppy waters.

Cabotage: The Secret of Early U.S.-China Trade

But then there’s also Americans develop the China trade into a global version of what they’ve already been doing up and down the East Coast in their colonial trade with the Caribbean, which is to say, they’re doing arbitrage at a global scale.

So the term for this among merchants is cabotage, where you’re going from a voyage, and you’re making lots of stops, and turning over a part of your cargo, or all of your cargo at each stop, until so that you have the cargo that’s appropriate for the next stop.

So what American China traders do is, yeah, so they’ll export something, they’ll export, you know, you build the ship in Massachusetts, you send it with Pennsylvania wheat to some Caribbean port, where you pick up sugar, you bring the sugar to Hamburg, in Hamburg, you exchange for silver dollars, then you go to Mauritius with, you know, you exchange for silver dollars and like candles or something, then you go to Mauritius, sell the candles, get more silver dollars, you end up in China, where you exchange the silver dollars and maybe some ginseng, or maybe some, you know, beef tallow, or something like, for the local merchant community, you’re selling it there. And then you exchange that for silks and for tea, and then you ship that back to Europe and to the Americas, right?

So it’s a bouncing, it’s a big ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, bouncing around, right?

Adel: That ship has gone for a long time.

Dr. Norwood: Yeah, yeah, it is. Yeah. And the crew’s turnover and the captain’s turnover, I mean, it’s not, you know, it’s a couple of years, usually, or a year at least, to go there and back, not because you can’t make it in shorter times, but I mean, it does take about a year and back to go back and forth.

But it’s because you’re bouncing around all these places, because you don’t have financing and you don’t have credit relationships.

Some firms start to figure out that they can set up regular cabotage routes and use multiple links of the chain, and they’re managing it from Boston or New York, but they’ve got offices in Izmir or Smyrna.

They’ve got offices in Hamburg and London.

They’ve got offices, you know, various different places.

And they’re also financing voyages to, they’re always chasing what you kind of pointed to in the beginning. They’re always chasing, what’s the product that’s cheaper than silver, right? Because silver is a high-value money.

You want to save it for only the things you really think will pay out, right? So you want something that’s cheaper than silver to exchange instead.

So they choose ginseng. In the Pacific, they find any number of goods that are, and try to corner the market on luxury goods that are viable in East Asia that have short-term market booms.

So Americans get into trading with the Sandwich Islands, with Hawaii, for sandalwood. They bargain for and hire and exploit native peoples to gather pêche de mer, which is a kind of sea slug that is a delicacy in East Asia at some points.

They gather bird’s nests.

And a particularly successful China firm sets up a network where they conduct trade with Latin America and European goods to generate silver.

But then they also send out voyages to what is now the Pacific Northwest and the tip of South America for hunting parties in the Pacific Northwest. They are paying native peoples to gather sea otter skins, and in the tip of South America, it’s just kind of hunting parties that are clubbing seals.

And they’re gathering that stuff and selling that in the Russian and the Chinese market for furs, which are booming because, you know, northern China’s cold, so is Russia.

So you’re selling these furs to these markets, but they’re doing the gathering. And that’s to generate either direct trade, furs actually have a ready market in Guangzhou for a while, but it’s to generate credits to be able to buy tea.

Adel: This is the funny thing about this is that after the success of the American Revolution, we are directly trading with China.

Dr. Norwood: Yes, immediately.

Immediately. Immediately. But that direct trade is actually not direct.

We have to go through multiple stops before we finally reach China. That’s fascinating.

Visions of Global Trade: Politicians vs. Merchants

Dr. Norwood: It generates a particular vision of what the China trade is.

So among politicians, you know, your Thomas Jeffersons or something, they imagine that there can be a direct, we’ll exchange American agricultural goods, and the Chinese will love our ginseng or our wheat or whatever. And the merchant class always knows it’s bouncing through 10 different things. And so they have a global vision of what the world economy is that is out of sync with what politicians in Washington think.

And that causes some friction at various points.

Adel: Were politicians just naive or did they, on purpose, just ignore this reality?

How Drugs Shaped Early U.S.-China Trade

Dr. Norwood: You know, that’s not their business. That’s not their business.

They have different visions of it. They also, you know, until way late, even if they understand a version of the China trade by the 1820s or so, the trade is very different, is formed on a credit basis, it’s a credit and opium, it’s a credit and a narcotic business, where American traders are deeply dependent on their connections with British traders in India to buy drugs and also to leverage credit, which they’re all doing to substitute for silver.

So in that, that vision of what the China trade is, does not catch up to American politicians, because they’re primarily, you know, local gentry, slave owners, their business is a very different kind of thing.

They are in the make your money by lending money to people who grow agricultural goods using slave labor, or directly enslave people themselves, like that’s the American political class by and large. And they don’t have this vision. So they imagine trade with China can just be direct.

Adel: Yeah, it goes from New York and directly goes to China, but that’s not how it works.

What Compelled Dr. Norwood to Research Early U.S.-China Trade

As I was reviewing your book, Trading Freedom, How Trade with China Define Early America, I thought of this question, how did you get into this?

How did you pick this field for your research and scholarship?

Dr. Norwood: Yeah, I came to it in a way that a lot of people come to their subjects. I was puzzled by some things I found in the archives. And I was frustrated by what the scholarship was when I started the project.

So as an undergrad, I interned at a house museum in Middletown, Connecticut, which as the name implies, is in the middle of the state, it’s not on the coast. And the house museum had the papers of a guy who was active in the opium trade with China.

And that was just kind of a factoid that lived in the back of my brain that here’s this guy in Connecticut who made his money and one of his mansion was a building on the college and all the kinds of the Greek Revival, like beautiful building.

I was like, huh, well, here’s this guy in the middle of nowhere, Connecticut, who then turns his fortune and invests in industry. He builds a rubber plant in a textile factory.

But he earned his money by trading drugs in East Asia. That’s weird. Okay.

I don’t really hear, but you don’t really hear about that. And so that was in the back of my mind.

And then I did some other things and eventually I ended up in grad school, and I did my exams in grad school.

And I read a lot of early American history and it’s different now. I mean, it takes a long time to do the scholarship. So I’m part of a wave of people who’ve written about both the US-China trade, but also kind of the US and the world more generally.

But when I started this project, there was a lot of scholarship that really internationalized and saw the American Revolution and the colonial period in a wide perspective, in the Atlantic world, but even beyond that, seeing it in the context of the British Empire. You can’t understand the Boston Tea Party in the way that I’ve just explained without knowing about India, that kind of thing.

And then there’s a wave, there was a very well-established scholarship on US history that saw the Gilded Age and the beginning of the 20th century as fundamentally US in the world, the Spanish-American War, the colonies in the Philippines, America as an industrial power that is looking for markets abroad.

And then there’s this middle period, where the literature was like, and all that mattered was Missouri.

And you’re like, I don’t think that only Missouri, did people stop knowing the rest of the world?

And Missouri’s important. I don’t want to say Missouri’s not important.

So my question when I started this project was like, well, I know there’s an opium trader living in Connecticut in the 1830s and he knew about China. So where else, who else did?

And I was writing this in this kind of early, the first and second Obama administrations where it was kind of like, for a very long time, US relations with China have been really at the center of a lot of politics and a lot of geopolitics.

And so I was like, okay, so how far back does this go? What does it look like? And what does it mean for either Americans to have ignored the rest of the world or to have only looked at the Atlantic world or to only have been a continental vision?

China’s Prominent & Enduring Presence in U.S. Trade History

And what I discovered in getting into this stuff is that China is always there.

China is there from the beginning. It’s part of trade policy. The first tariffs that the United States puts in place privilege American trade with China, direct trade.

You pay cheaper tariffs if you were an American and you went direct to China and brought stuff back as opposed to if you bounce through Europe. So that was an industry subsidy for the shipping industry primarily.

And it becomes, the way that Americans think about China and their relationship to China and the goods of the China trade play into how they think about citizenship, how they think about slavery.

It’s there all the way throughout.

So it was kind of like discovering, oh, the reason that the, not discovering, but recognizing that, oh, the reason that the orbit of this planet kind of does this little wiggle over here is because there’s another star, right? And that was kind of, that’s how I would, that’s how I think about like, China always exists for Americans. They’re always aware of it.

They’re not always accurate about what’s happening there or what their relationship to it is in the trade level, but it’s always a component of their thinking and that affects their politics and that affects their sense of self and it affects their decisions. So that’s how I got into it.

Adel: Thank you for sharing that.

And the way that impacts American national identity, again, based on, I deduce based on everything you shared is that now we can trade directly with China.

From China Trade to Constitution: Commerce and the Birth of a Strong National Government

Dr. Norwood: Yeah, that is a big deal, right? It’s a big deal at first and it’s crowed about.

It gets written up in the newspapers. You have the, you know, when the Empress of China leaves New York, it gets a salute or I’m sorry, when it comes back, it gets a salute from the fort and the harbor. It’s a big deal, but it also exposes problems, right?

So it exposes that, you know, hey, because we, because no European powers will enter into treaty agreements with us because we don’t have a consolidated national government that they recognize as able to control trade, right?

There’s a national government, but it’s like Rhode Island can still do what it wants trade wise, because we don’t have that.

We should have a consolidated national government that can make treaties and that will improve our ability to engage in trade more generally.

Adel: And that leads to the constitution. Yeah.

Dr. Norwood: So, and you see this in the actually in the Federalist Papers, John Jay, who’s not the most famous of the Federalist Papers authors, but he writes a pamphlet for the Federalist Papers that makes this argument pretty explicitly is that we have a problem where our flag is not being respected. It is subject to more attacks and we’re not getting the trade deals we should have. And so our business is frustrated and our economies in the toilet.

So we need a stronger national government to secure those things.

And then once that constitution is in place, the first thing that the U.S. Congress does is set up a regulatory trade regime that lays tariffs to fund the national government, both for terms of revenue, but also to encourage trade in specific areas that they think will be geopolitically beneficial. And the first and only place they do that in that first tariff is to privilege trade with Asia and specifically China.

Just One Point

Adel: Wow. That’s fascinating. Dr. Norwood, we talked about a lot of stuff.

So if you wanted our audience to remember just one point about America’s trade with China and during the American Revolutionary Era, what would that one point be?

Dr. Norwood: I think that when U.S.-China relations have been at their most successful, it’s when Americans have regarded their trade with China as a way to improve and expand the circle of freedom for all parties involved.

There are moments, and this is kind of where my book ends in the 1870s, there are moments where Americans have decided that Chinese people are a problem and that China as a market is a problem for them in terms of competition or limits on liberty and things like that. And so the response is to clamp down and impose restrictions on Americans and Chinese.

And that is, I think, a tragedy because there is another history that you can pull on where Americans have looked to China and their relationship to China as a mutually beneficial one that can expand the capacities of both places and do so in partnership to some degree.

But that starts with the recognition of the sovereignty of each place and starts from the recognition that it’s better to freely trade and respect each other’s human and civil rights than it is to clamp things down.

And there have been moments of revolution, both in the American Revolution, where that’s true, in the Civil War, where American policy reorients around fixing freedom as part of the relationship between the US and China, rather than trying to control, narrow, restrict, and create an oligarchy.

Adel: Wow, we can use this history for our current relations with China.

Dr. Norwood: Yeah, not to be too naive about it. I mean, there’s a lot of things that have happened since my book ends. They had some revolutions, right? You know, yeah, there’s been some stuff, but yeah.

Dr. Adel: But it sort of provides some inspiration.

Dr. Norwood, thank you so much for educating me and our audience about the American Revolution. And to our audience, if you know of any history that could provide more perspective about the American Revolution, please share it with us and tell us what’s your perspective.

Thank you so very much, Dr. Norwood.

Dr. Norwood: Thank you.

Pleasure.

 

Explore Parts I and II to understand the consumer revolution in the American colonies and how the desire for Chinese goods influenced the American Revolution:

 

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

 

Did Trade with China Influence the American Revolution
— Trade, Desire, and Global Connections