Abstract

Reinventing the China Merchant as an American Businessman

At 9:30 am on January 7, 1893, Abiel Abbot Low died. His death was not unusual, in itself. Born eighty-one years earlier in Salem, Massachusetts, the Brooklyn transplant lived a long, well-remunerated life, winning a fortune by trading opium in China, and then playing financier. While not unexpected, his passing provoked a surprising reaction from his colleagues at the New York Chamber of Commerce. At a special meeting, the members of this exclusive club of capitalists paid Low tribute as the “last of our old style merchant” – and lauded him for making mercantile careers obsolete. Low's investments in submarine telegraph cables and steamships, the members noted, had transformed their world. In New York, as elsewhere, these new connections brought consumers closer to producers, eliminating the middleman niche that grand merchants like Low had occupied. Despite the passing of the last "old style merchant," neither the New York Chamber of Commerce nor its membership faded away. By reinvesting China trade profits into the sinews of globalization, Low helped hasten a critical reinvention for himself, and his associates: the transformation of the American "merchant" into the American "businessman." Using memoirs, eulogies, and other biographical narratives, this paper will trace how the "businessman" emerged as an influential and broadly-claimed identity in the late 19th century. More politically palatable than other career capitalists like merchants or bankers, the "businessman" emerged in a Gilded Age U.S. growing rapidly through international exchange – even as American commerce declined. The rise of the "businessman," these narratives suggest, was made possible by the spread of globalization's physical infrastructure, like telegraph cables, as well as the growth of the commercial associations, like the New York Chamber of Commerce, that promoted it; both contributed to reinventing the merchant as a “businessman,” and cementing him as the country's durable national protagonist.