The relationship between America and China is unique, fascinating -and if you’ve seen recent media source headlines it is complicated.
I went back into the show archives and found a 2016 interview we featured with American author Eric Jay Dolin. At that time we conversed about his book When America First Met China: An Exotic History of Tea, Drugs, and Money in the Age of Sail.
It was only eight years after the founding of the United States of America -then the world’s youngest nation- that Americans encountered China -one of the world’s oldest enduring civilizations. Relations since then have been anything but dull.
Brilliantly illuminating one of the least-understood areas of American history, best-selling author Eric Jay Dolin traces our fraught relationship with China back to its roots: the unforgiving nineteenth-century seas that separated a brash, rising naval power from a battered ancient empire.
It is a prescient fable for our time, one that surprisingly continues to shed light on our modern relationship with China.
Indeed, the furious trade in furs, opium, and beche-de-mer—a rare sea cucumber delicacy—might have catalyzed America’s emerging economy, but it also sparked an ecological and human rights catastrophe of such epic proportions that the reverberations can still be felt today.
Peopled with fascinating characters—from the “Financier of the Revolution” Robert Morris to the Chinese emperor Qianlong, who considered foreigners inferior beings—this page-turning saga of pirates and politicians, coolies and concubines becomes a must-read.
It is my hope that an examination of the historical context of the relationship between China and America will shed new light. I recommend Dolin’s book as a first-step in that direction.
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