"Black Gold and White Gold: Weaving a Global Network through the Chinese-American Tea Trade, 1815-1842"

This research explores how the engagement of Chinese and American traders in the commodity and monetary markets reshaped the financial structure of China’s international tea trade and eventually led to the First Sino-British Opium War (1839-1842). To procure tea from China, American traders searched the world for goods suitable for the Canton market. However, until the 1830s, specie from South America remained the major U.S. export to China for American merchants to settle account balance or pay for tea. From the late 1820s, nevertheless, the thriving opium smuggling and cotton trade between India and China gave American merchants, the major provider of silver to China, a new way of gathering specie, as the British-Indian merchants’ demand soared for more bills of exchange to remit their proceeds from opium back to India and Britain. With prominent Chinese merchants’ endorsement, American traders sold millions of dollars’ worth of bills, generated in the trans-Atlantic cotton trade or issued by the Bank of the United States, in China, India, or Southeast Asia and reduced the shipment of specie to China. The structural change in U.S. exports to China aggravated the silver drain originally produced by opium smuggling, resulting in Chinese government’s crackdown on opium and the First Opium War in the 1830s. By tracing the flow of tea, opium, cotton, and bills of exchange through China, India, Southeast Asia, and the United States, this research disentangles how the commercial and financial networks, created by the collaboration of individual merchants, linked the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic Oceans.