From the Slave Trade to the Opium Rush: China-America Trade in the Making of the Global World

This talk by Sucheta Mazumdar (Associate Professor of History, Emerita, Duke) is part of the China Forum seminar series at Jesus College Cambridge (UK). This will be a hybrid event with an in-person component at Duke University. Online attendees must register in advance by emailing: china-forum@jesus.cam.ac.uk. Additional details can be found at: jesus.cam.ac.uk/china-forum

Abstract:

This talk centers on a simple question: in what ways does our understanding of American history and Chinese history of the crucial century, 1750-1850, remain inadequate if we fail to look at the intimate connections between the slave trade and the opium trade?

The Atlantic Triangular Trade and the Opium Trade to China continue to be treated as if these were occurring in separate economic world systems, and that what went down in Atlantic waters had little impact on China in the 1750s and up through to the Opium War. This is a partial view. Professor Mazumdar points instead to the integrations of the Atlantic and Indian-Pacific worlds that had already developed with the purchase price of slaves in Africa was set in Asian goods, textiles and cowries.

The Seven Years War (1756-63) forms a turning point in world history. Drawing on the private papers of New England based traders, Mazumdar shows how, in the wake of the Seven Years War and the American Revolution that followed as result of the War, saw the emergence of new group of American merchant-capitalists. A group of them linked activities in the Atlantic slave trade with entry into the India-China opium trade, and became the first generation of American industrialists, as they moved their capital accumulated through the China trade into banking, infrastructural and educational investments in America. And in at least one unusual instance, American merchants also invested the capital on behalf of a Chinese Hong merchant who had befriended them.

In conclusion, Mazumdar will touch on how the old slave trade ships were redeployed to bring indentured labor from China and India to work in the Caribbean, a closing note on the circulations of capital and labor in the making of the modern world.

About the speaker:

Sucheta Mazumdar is Associate Professor Emerita, Department of History, Duke University, specializing in the history of late imperial China. She focuses on the history of South China and Guangdong province in particular, and brings together the connective histories of China and India to explore questions of historical change in global perspective. Her undergraduate training and graduate work were in Chinese Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has studied in Taiwan and at Zhongshan University, Guangzhou as an exchange student. She has had postdoctoral fellowships at the Henry Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington and at the Fairbank Center, Harvard University. 

Grounded primarily in Chinese history, and secondarily in Indian history, she is excited by the intellectual challenges of writing and teaching comparative global history. Two broad questions frame her research agenda: the radical transformation of circuits of consumption and commodity production that underlie capitalist development, and the politics of this globalization as evidenced in the transnational circulation of ideas about race, and gender. Her monograph, Sugar and Society in China: Peasants, Technology and the World Market (Harvard, 1998), explored the limits to economic breakthrough to capitalist production in the Qing era, by focusing on a quintessential global commodity and investigating the distinctive technological and social trajectories of China, India, and the Americas. The book was translated into Chinese in 2009 as Guangdong renmin chubanshe.

In three edited volumes, Making Waves Writings By and About Asian American Women (Beacon Press, 1989), Antinomies of Modernity, Essays on Race, Orientalism and Nation (Duke University Press, 2003, Tulika Press Indian edition, 2003), and From Orientalism to Postcolonialism: Asia-Europe and the Lineages of Difference (Routledge, 2009), she focused on the identity politics of race and gender in the Chinese and Indian diaspora, and the making of civilizational discourse-based identity politics. She was the co-founder and co-editor (with Vasant Kaiwar) of two international interdisciplinary journals in the social sciences and humanities: “South Asia Bulletin” (1981-1991) and “Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East” [CSSAAME], 1992-2001.

Mazumdar is currently completing a monograph, From the Slave Trade to the Opium Rush: China-America Trade in the Making of the Global World, exploring the connections between American Atlantic slave traders and the India-China trade including the opium trade.