Stephen Girard's Trade With China, 1787-1824: The Norms Versus the Profits of Trade

This important new study examines the experience of one of early American China trader, Stephen Girard of Philadelphia. Girard lived from 1750 to 1831 and was one of America's first millionaires. The book considers the circumstances which brought Girard into the China trade in the first place, the factors which motivated him to build and manage a China trade fleet of his own, and the difficulties he encountered smuggling opium into China. Those pressures ultimately convinced him to withdraw from the China trade entirely. This book is an important contribution to the ongoing shcolarly dialogue between John Wills, Paul Van Dyke, Frederic DeLano Grant, Jr., and others about the alleged Chinese "passivity" in the face of Western economic and political encroachment. It helps define Canton's Pearl River estuary as a "vortex" in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries where complex international political and economic forces converged.