"The Bailout of 1846: Canton, Michigan and the Canton Trade"

In March 1846, John Murray Forbes organized a bailout of the Michigan Central Railroad. Once hailed by Michiganians as the pride and future of the state, funding for the railroad collapsed as a result of the Panic of 1839—a financial crisis that was triggered in part by the Opium War. By tapping on his connections to the China trade, Forbes arranged for the purchase of the railroad for four million dollars and served as its first President, completing his transformation from a China merchant to a what he called a “R. R. man.” In exploring the trajectory that Forbes and other China traders took from merchants to capitalists, I suggest new and surprising connections between the US-China trade and American industrial development. My paper also recasts the American Midwest—a region typically divorced from the literature on the China trade—as part of a shared economic frontier shaped by international capital flows.