Free Trade & Family Values: Kinship Networks and the Culture of Early American Capitalism Rachel Tamar Van Submitted in partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2011 © 2011 Rachel Tamar Van All Rights Reserved. ABSTRACT Free Trade & Family Values: Kinship Networks and the Culture of Early American Capitalism Rachel Tamar Van This study examines the international flow of ideas and goods in eighteenth and nineteenth century New England port towns through the experience of a Boston-based commercial network. It traces the evolution of the commercial network established by the intertwined Perkins, Forbes, and Sturgis families of Boston from its foundations in the Atlantic fur trade in the 1740s to the crises of succession in the early 1840s. The allied Perkins firms and families established one of the most successful American trading networks of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and as such it provides fertile ground for investigating mercantile strategies in early America. An analysis of the Perkins family’s commercial network yields three core insights. First, the Perkinses illuminate the ways in which American mercantile strategies shaped global capitalism. The strategies and practices of American merchants and mariners contributed to a growing international critique of mercantilist principles and chartered trading monopolies. While the Perkinses did not consider themselves “free traders,” British observers did. Their penchant for smuggling and seeking out niches of trade created by competing mercantilist trading companies meant that to critics of British mercantilist policies, American merchants had an unfair advantage that only the liberalization of trade policy could rectify. Following the Perkinses allows for a reconsideration of the Anglo-American relationship in the East Indies, especially China. For example, the special relationships the Perkinses established with the Wu family of Canton as well as the London-based Baring Brothers & Co. proved critical to their success in business. Yet these relationships developed out of the Perkinses’ geopolitical position as Americans. Further, the project shows that family life, gendered ideals, and particular visions of the life cycle were central to how Americans came to terms with expanding trade and evolving markets. In the late eighteenth century, Americans began to exalt family as a sentimental unit whose central aims were personal fulfillment and the raising of future citizens. But this new ideology of family masked the institution’s continued political and economic utility. Family has never been the promised “haven from the heartless world” of market perils; in fact, well into the nineteenth century it was the opposite: family was a core market institution used for protection from risk and speculation. Even as the Perkinses embraced the speculative potential of commerce and investment, familial and gendered ideals shaped how they understood profit, risk, and even what it meant to be a merchant. Finally, in recent years, scholars have integrated New England into the Atlantic World; I demonstrate the importance of New Englanders in shaping American involvement in Asia and the Pacific as well. The Pacific continues to be a central space of American empire and influence, from former colonies to trust territories. Its history merits a more robust place in American historical consciousness. TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements iii Abbreviations ix Introduction 1 Chapter 1. Atlantic Foundations, 1740s-1792 28 Chapter 2. Experiments & Expansion: the Perkins Network in the French Revolutionary Wars, 1793-1815 71 Chapter 3. That Family Feeling: At Home with Homo Economicus 145 Chapter 4. Intangible Assets: Paternalism, Patronage, and Global Financing in the American China Trade 225 Chapter 5. The Woman Pigeon: Sociability, Sexuality, Marriage & the Anglo-American Community in Canton & Macau 276 Chapter 6. Free Trade as a Way of Life: Americans and the “Commercial Interest” in China 341 Conclusion 409 Selected Bibliography 423 Appendices 460 Glossary 460 Key Genealogies 463 Major Firms Connected to/Emerging out of the Perkins Network 468 i LIST OF CHARTS, MAPS, & IMAGES Chart 1. Key Perkins Firms. 26 Chart 2. Perkins Genealogy, G1-G3. 27 Map 1. Saint Domingue and Santo Domingo circa 1770, with the principal towns. 38 Map 2. Pacific Northwest Fur Trade in World Context, circa 1790 to 1840. 51 Image 1. Thomas Handasyd Perkins. 53 Image 2. A view of the Town of Boston in New England and British ships of war landing their troops, 1768. 157 Map 3. Boston, 1796. 159 Image 3. James Perkins’s Residence at 13 Pearl Street. 162 Image 4. John Perkins Cushing’s Residence at Belmont. 164 Table 1. Demography of Macau, 1583-1834. 302 Image 5. Copper Coin showing British East India Company Trademark, 1791. 370 ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS There is nothing quite like graduate school to strip away the myth of the autonomous individual. This dissertation, warts and all, would not have been possible without the assistance and generosity of mentors, funders, friends, and family members. I am humbled and moved by each of them. I only hope that I can pass on their kindness. It is hard not to start my acknowledgments anywhere but with Alice. To this day, I remember the morning when Alice Kessler-Harris walked into a room full of prospective Columbia graduate students, including me, and asked immediately to be directed to the coffee. She had my heart from that moment and hasn’t lost it since. Her generosity, support, and insight at every level have been both breathtaking and inspiring. I have been tremendously fortunate in having Alice as an advisor and mentor. The wonderful thing about Columbia is that there is no shortage of brilliant, perceptive scholars to work with, many of whom are astoundingly accessible and giving. Eric Foner, Adam McKeown, Steven Mintz, and Betsy Blackmar all repeatedly took the time to read and critique my work, to point me in new directions, to write letter after letter of recommendation, and to offer much needed wisdom. Madeline Zelin, Sven Beckert, Evan Haefeli, Nara Milanich, Nick Dirks, Chris Brown, and Susan Pederson all shared advice at crucial points in the process. I am extremely grateful for the financial support from Columbia University in funding my early years of coursework, research, and writing. The university’s shift to full funding for incoming students a few years before I arrived, I am convinced, was an important ingredient in fostering such a warm, collaborative intellectual environment amongst my peers and I think we all produced better work for it. I know we are better iii scholars for it. The research and writing of this dissertation would not have been possible without fellowships from the Massachusetts Historical Society, the New England Regional Consortium, the New York City chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Vaughan Family Maritime Scholarship from the Independence Seaport Museum of Philadelphia, the Mary McEwan Scholarship from Wellesley College which helped to defray day care costs for my daughter so that I could write, a Mellon Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship, and a generous completion fellowship from the Mrs. Giles M. Whiting Foundation. The governments of the United States and Taiwan both contributed toward foreign language study, for which I am grateful. Librarians, archivists, and research directors helped me at many steps along the way. While a saner dissertation topic might have kept me in New York, I could not have chosen a better group of repositories based on the kindness and openness of their staffs than those I visited in Massachusetts, London, and beyond. These individuals proved consistently helpful, resourceful, and willing to hear out ideas and share notes about how we imagined the personalities and dynamics of people we knew largely through the residue of letters and ledgers left behind. In this respect, I am especially grateful for Jane Waller and John Orbell whom I met through the Baring papers and the many opportunities afforded me through the Massachusetts Historical Society to share my work. Conrad Wright in particular offered insight, encouragement, as well as a much needed push to declare a dissertation a dissertation with the reminder that unlike physicists, historians do their best work as they age. His continued enthusiasm for my research in its various incarnations has been most welcome. iv The families studied in this dissertation, above all the Forbeses, proved unfailingly kind and generous in their willingness to share resources and discuss their family legacies with me. I would especially like to thank Paul Elias, Beatrice Forbes Manz, W.H. Crosby Forbes, and Robert Forbes. Thanks as well to Andrea Wilder who, in my time staying in her home, introduced me to her own New England heritage (yes, those Wilders, as she liked to say) and to Houqua tea. Two institutes on campus also provided intellectual, institutional, and financial support for this project, and I am proud to have been a part of them both. The Institute for Research on Women and Gender (IRWaG) was a home away from home. I am thankful for Page Jackson and Vina Tran for their hard work, their humor, and their willingness to accommodate overly enthusiastic graduate students, as well as faculty and students who have given so much of their time to help foster an amazing interdisciplinary community of scholars. Victoria de Grazia