Dael Norwood University of Delaware
[email protected] Destabilizing Entanglements: How the Flow of Opium, Cotton, and Capital Restructured Americans’ Relationships with China, Britain, and Their Own Government in the Jacksonian Era Missouri Regional Seminar on Early American History February 1, 2019 Draft – Please do not share or cite Norwood / 2 When the ship Congress sailed from Boston harbor bound for Batavia in 1824, it went using some of the old habits of trade, and some of the new. Jacaob [sic] Caswell and Benjamin Brintnall entrusted “one Hundred Spanish milled Dollars” to an agent aboard the ship who promised to “Carey & Invest” it “from port to port.” This was a classic cabotage strategy, designed to make the most out of small capital resources – and used upon by American traders since the Revolution. William Gray, the Congress’s owner, chose a more sophisticated approach. Rather than simply sending a supercargo with specie, Gray instructed his captain, Nathaniel Kinsman, to communicated with trusted commission merchants, resident in Asia, to plot sales and purchases “calculated to promote my interest.” Gray’s cargo choices were finely reckoned, too. He packed the Congress with $7,786 worth of Western commodities (candles, beef, flour, seltzer water) that were readily salable at any European colonial port, and invested $19,318 in opium, a smokable narcotic with a large and growing market across Southeast Asia, and especially in China’s southern ports.1 Finally, he gave Kinsman access to a $50,000 line of credit with his London bankers at Baring Brothers & Co.. This would enable him to take advantage of low prices for return cargoes: teas at Canton, sugar in Manila, or cottons in Calcutta.