This panel explores how Chinese and Americans reinvented their commercial and financial systems, communication technologies, as well as national and business identities to cope with the changing transnational environments and local needs from the mid-nineteenth to the twentieth century.
Dan Du examines the financial techniques that Chinese and American tea merchants reinvented after the Opium War (1839-1842). Chinese merchant‑bankers issued newly invented promissory notes, named zhuangpiao, and native bills of exchange to streamline their transactions with foreign buyers. American companies employed “Compradors’ Orders” issued by their Chinese employees to pay Chinese tea sellers. These new financial instruments restored the credit system of the postwar tea trade.
Those engaged in the U.S.-China trade transformed not only the trans-Pacific trading environment but also their identities. Peter Thilly examines how American firms reinterpreted their Chinese partners’ national identities to establish new modes of profit-seeking and political protection, thus placing the role of the Augustine Heard firm within a regional uprising during the 1850s, when members of the Chinese diaspora began leveraging foreign business connections and foreign citizenship against the Qing state. On the other side of the Pacific Ocean, American merchants reinvested their profits and hastened the emergence of a new business identity. Dael Norwood traces how China traders’ investments in the globalization’s physical infrastructure – communication technologies – weakened the influence of “old-style merchants” but produced a more politically palatable identity, “businessman,” in the Gilded Age United States.
Extending the discussion into the new communication technology, aviation, in the twentieth century, John Wong explores U.S. intervention in the construction of aerial networks in Asia. Situating his study at the growing aviation nexus of Hong Kong, John examines how mounting American influence in the region interacted with British administrative control and the continued appeal of the Chinese market, thus wiring Hong Kong in global networks.