Capitalism in China and America

This panel brings together three historians of China and the United States to showcase new research on the history of U.S.-China trade. They present three largely unexplored episodes in the shared political economy of China and the United States: the connection between southern slavery and the nankeen trade, the China trade and the bailout of Michigan Central Railroad, and the intertwined collapse of the tungsten ore industry and the Kuomintang in postwar China. The first paper by Dan Du examines the rise and fall of the nankeen trade, revealing how nankeen imports, following American independence, spurred early textile innovation in the United States. But after nankeen cloth fell out of fashion, it found a new use among southern planters as the preferred fabric for clothing enslaved people. The second paper by Alastair Su revisits John Murray Forbes’s 1846 bailout of the Michigan Central Railroad. After the railroad declared bankruptcy as a result of the Panic of 1839, Forbes became part of a generation of China traders who redirected their fortunes from tea and opium toward developing the American Midwest. The final paper by Judd Kinzley explores the role of U.S. regulations in undermining the Chinese tungsten ore industry after World War II. An unintended consequence of these policies was that the resulting decline in tungsten revenues contributed to the financial crisis that destabilized the Nationalist Party in China. Together, their research presents fresh material for reevaluating the history of capitalism in China and the United States.