The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 7 | Issue 45 | Number 3 | Article ID 3248 | Nov 09, 2009

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Clean Politics: Race and Class, Imperialism and Nationalism,Etiquette and Consumption in the Chinese and AmericanRevolutions

Sarah Schneewind

Clean Politics: Race and Class,Imperialism and Nationalism,Etiquette and Consumption in theChinese and American Revolutions

Sarah Schneewind

“Why doesn’t this story stick whentold?”

Clive James1

Every generation of historians rediscovers andthen forgets the history of Western views ofChina: the s low process in which theadmiration of Marco Polo in the thirteenthcentury, Jesuit missionaries and otherEuropean visitors to China in the sixteenth andseventeenth centuries, and Enlightenmentthinkers like Voltaire turned to contempt asnineteenth-century Europe gained the upperhand in world politics and economy.2 Manynegative perceptions – that China was weak;the government despotic and venal; the peoplesupine, hypocritical, and dirty; and that nothingin China ever would change without Europeanintervention – were inversions or new readingsof material the more admiring Jesuits andothers had put forward. To tie them to sharperobservation of Chinese realities, as scholars dowhen they speak of the “revelation” of Chineseweakness, of “a new literature of hardheadedappraisal,” or of “new information” and “a freshdomain of realistic reportage,” is to buy intothe discourse’s own representation of itself as

truthful.3

The genteel Chinese, portrayed inAthanasius Kircher, China Illustrata,

published in Amsterdam, 1667

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“The Miracle Teapot.” Russian cartoon,1901

Did reality inform imagination or vice versa? Inhis history of the Chinese revolution, JohnFitzgerald presents Defoe’s claim that “OneEnglish, or Dutch, or French, man of war of 80guns, would fight and destroy all the shippingof China” as a result of the real experience ofbuccaneer Captain George Anson’s successfulbullying of Canton’s officials to let him into theport proper, while merchants were limited tothe outer harbor, on his way home loaded withSpanish gold in 1743.4 But Crusoe’s FartherAdventures had appeared in 1719 (and Defoedied in 1731). It is more likely that Anson’spresentation of himself as a firm, manlyBritisher rightfully opposing the obstructionismof timorous Chinese officials with patheticallyinsufficient arms was shaped by Defoe’s fiction,and by the basically Sinophilic Le Comte. TheFrench Jesuit’s letters on China (based on a

ten-years’ stay) had appeared in English in1737, and included the observation that if only“Lewis the Great” were not so far away inFrance, he could easily conquer the Chineseempire, for the Chinese are “but meansoldiers.”5 Since Anson was specificallyinstructed by George II, when he set out in1740, to come home by way of China ifconvenient, it is highly probable that hisreference material included Le Comte’s book;indeed one of the early, unofficial accounts ofhis voyage drew heavily on it.6 Perhaps LeComte’s observations and Defoe’s literaryspleen were what gave Anson the confidence toconfront the Cantonese authorities with theunequivocal demands to let him into the port –if that is even what really happened. ForAnson’s bluster, expressed in his statementthat “the Centurion alone was an overmatch forall the naval power of that Empire” is mitigatedby the details of his account: his stridentdemands were accepted only after he hadearned the Viceroy’s gratitude by helping toput out a fire.7

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George Lord Anson

Fitzgerald writes that “no sooner had Ansonsucceeded in gaining his forced entry toGuangzhou than the picturesque edifice ofearlier [admiring] Western representation ofChina came tumbling down.”8 This is toosimple. First, negative portrayals had predatedAnson, and positive portrayals continued toappear after him. Ronald J. and Mary SaracinoZboray find, for instance, that even in Bostonright after the Opium War, an exhibit on Chinaput together “in the heady context of atriumphal mission” to claim trading rights“demonstrated… that China had developed arefined and complex civilization.”9 Second,even the reports of the failed Macartneymission from George III to the Qianlongemperor (1793) mingle praise and blame, andPeyrefitte points out that Anson’s account ledMacartney to the conclusion that bluff andbluster at the local level were not as good asgoing straight to the top and acting polite. Third, Fitzgerald relies on a biography thatappeared almost a century later, in 1839, at thetime of the first Opium War.10 Rather than byAnson ’ s ac tua l exper ience o r evencontemporary accounts , S inophi l icrepresentations were reversed by complexdynamics involving the later change in thebalance of power between the Qing and theBritish empires and nineteenth-centuryaccounts of events including Anson’s exploit.

The Opium War, 1840

Anson’s biographer was Sir John Barrow. As

plain John Barrow, he had been a member ofMacartney’s mission in 1793, and he hadpublished an account of the mission as Travelsin China by 1804 (reprinted in Philadelphia thenext year), and an account of Macartney’spublic life shortly thereafter. As Fitzgeraldnarrates, Barrow was an adventurer-naturalistwho rose to permanent under-secretary in theAdmiralty, where he was a moving force behindthe Navy’s systematic mapping of all coasts andwaters and collection of rocks, plants, andanimals from all over the world. Barrow’sarrogant and explicit imperialism was beyondthe norm of the Colonial Office; in Fitzgerald’swords he sought “without apology to extendscience and civilization throughout all of thenewly charted lands of Asia and Africa underthe exclusive dominion of the Union Jack… andhe did his personal best to bring the [Qing]empire down.”11 Barrow was advising theBritish government on the Opium War while hewas writing Anson’s biography. Little wonderthat such a man took Anson’s exploit and his“moral courage” to new heights.12 The easyBritish victories in the mid-nineteenth centuryseemed to validate Anson’s bold claims in themid-eighteenth, and gave weight to theimagined dichotomy of firm, manly Brit andtimid, wimpy Chinaman.

Nonetheless, even Barrow did not thoroughlydespise China, as later became fashionable. Hedescribes the role of the fire in getting boldAnson into Canton, and both in Travels in Chinaand in his autobiography he commentsfavorably on a variety of matters, including aChinese doctor, individual officials, travelarrangements, and food. Barrow also drewanalogies unflattering to England: forced laborwas like impressment into the Navy. Travels inChina ends with a story of how it was possiblefor an Englishman to obtain justice underChinese government – contrary to claimsdeployed to legitimate the Opium War – and aplea for Englishmen to study Chinese.13 Evenin the biography of Anson, Barrow notes thatChinese ideas of law and justice, as well as

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their ignorance of international law, left them“puzzled [about]… on what principle a ship-of-war went round the world, seeking ships ofother nations to seize them.”14

Antique dealers, c. 1868-72. Photograph byJohn Thomson

But Barrow apparently did crystallize one ofthe most powerful stereotypes about China toplay into Chinese self-hatred and revolution. Asking why revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen,amid matters of national and internationalimportance, paid such attention to the detailsof personal hygiene among the population,Fitzgerald answers that foreigners sinceMacartney had connected Chinese “personalethics, hygiene, and deportment” with thefailures of Chinese government and socialorganization. Sun Yat-sen, having lived longabroad, was, Fitzgerald reports, “acutelysensitive” to foreign reactions to Chinesepeople, and “came to regard his owncountrymen much as Lord Macartney haddone.”15 The Chinese people would not be ableto rule themselves, Sun held, until they cuttheir nails, brushed their teeth, refrained fromspitting and farting in public, and dressedneatly and cleanly. Historian Ruth Rogaski haspicked up on Fitzgerald’s study of Chinese“awakenings,” to argue that cleanliness wasfundamental to modern Chinese el iteunderstandings of national weakness. Rogaskitraces the process by which, beginning in the

mid-19th century, and particularly in the wakeof the Boxer movement of 1900, “hygienebecame the most basic constituent of anindelible rhetoric of Chinese deficiency,”associated with questions of nationalsovereignty. Sun’s obsession appears as a mid-point in a process that began with post-OpiumWar settlement of Europeans in the treaty portsof China, was amplified by Meiji concerns,continued through (inter alia) Chiang Kai-shek’s faux-Confucian New Life Movement ofthe 1930s, and echoes today in ubiquitousposted injunctions against spitting in thePeople’s Republic of China.16

The European idea that Chinese people weredirty does not appear before Barrow, even inearlier accounts that mingled criticism withadmiration. On the contrary, in the sixteenthcentury Pereira wrote of “the cleanliness oftable manners of all people of China.”17 Slightly later, Gaspar da Cruz expanded on theobservation, writing that “because they eat socleanly, not touching with the hand their meat,they have no need of cloth or napkins.” Hefurther noted that “there are some Chinas [sic]who wear very long finger-nails… which theykeep very clean.”18 I have not found referencesto dirtiness and or disgusting personal habits inthe other early sources. In Robinson Crusoe(1719), Defoe paints a portrait of one “countrygentleman” of “mixed pomp and poverty,” a“greasy don” in “dirty callicoe” and “a taffatyvest, as greasy as a butcher, and whichtestified that his honour must needs be a mostexquisite sloven.”19 But Defoe does not defame“the Chinese” as a whole with this particulartrai t , as he does in other cases. Thecontemporary report of Anson’s encounter saysnothing about dirtiness, nor does Le Comte in1737. It was Barrow’s contribution.

It is not urban dirtiness that concerns Barrow;on the question, for instance, of sewage, hefollows the sixteenth-century writers. Pereiracommented that the trade in human manurewas “good for keeping the city clean.”20 Da

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Cruz explained admiringly that “Even the dungof men brings profit, and is bought… to cleansetheir houses of office… When they carry it ontheir backs through the city, in order to avoidthe evil smell, they carry it in tubs very cleanwithout, and although they go uncovered,notwithstanding it showeth the cleanliness ofthe country and cities.”21 Barrow echoes thistreatment (which may or may not beaccurate).22 What strikes him, rather, ispersonal dirtiness. As one of the sectionheadings for Travels in China puts it: “Chinesean uncleanly and frowzy people.”23 The sectionitself credits Swift with the word “frowzy” andmoves from dirty footbinding cloths (known toBarrow only by report) to dirty underwear,public lice-catching, the use of paper instead ofhandkerchiefs, spitting (like Frenchmen), thelack of pajamas, total failure to bathe, andunfamiliarity with soap.24

On Sun Yat-sen’s view that to prove themselvesworthy of self-rule Chinese had first to provethat they could (in the language of the key Neo-Confucian text “The Great Learning”) “cultivatetheir persons,” Fitzgerald comments that “Sunwas, as always, highly perceptive. Fromclassical Rome to the age of modernity, thehigh culture of Europe [had] countedcompetent government of the body’s naturalfunctions… as a necessary condition forcompetent government of the city.”25 But if thiswas a constant in Europe, why did personalcleanliness suddenly emerge as an issue inrelation to China in 1793, or in 1804? Why didit appear first in John Barrow, and become animportant part of anti-Chinese racism from thatpoint forward? To answer this question, and toproperly historicize the connection of personalhygiene and politics in the Chinese revolution,we need to turn back to British history.

James McNeill Whistler, “Purple and Rose:The Lange Leizen of the Six Marks” (1864)

John Barrow was, on the McCartney mission,an Englishman facing Chinese people. But hewas also a middle-class man working for anaristocrat, dealing with a great monarch andhis high-ranking officials. Eighteenth-centuryBritish politics was dominated by about athousand aristocrats, their children, and to alesser extent the gentry, centered on 15,000squires who rented out farmland, defined forpurposes of qualifying as justices of the peaceas “Anglicans worth above ₤100 a year.” Thesemen were qualified for government by their“leisure” – that is, in historian John Rule’swords, “their ability to live from propertywithout working, which was the fundamentalmark of a gentleman.”26 But their domination

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of political power was increasingly challengedby the professionals working for the gentry –lawyers, estate managers, stewards, and thel ike – and men in bus iness as we l l . Increasingly, especially in the later eighteenthcentury, such middle-class men turned theirown social and civic associations to politicalfunctions, supporting candidates who foughtfor more freedom of speech and a moreinclusive political world.27

Sir John Barrow of the hamlet of DragleyBeck, painted by John Jackson before 1831

John Barrow was part of this movement. Hisparents had owned a cottage and three or fourcows, and farmed oats and vegetables, in aremote village in Lancashire. Educated at theloca l g rammar schoo l , Bar row wasrecommended to a gentleman for some surveywork, took ship for the South Pole, and thenjoined the Macartney mission as comptroller,librarian, and tutor.2 8 A client of LordMacartney, he struck out on his own and made

a political career, crowned with knighthood.His class (or rank) insecurities show in hiswritings. As Peyrefitte points out, he bothemphasizes Lord Macartney’s dignity and theChinese arrogance that threatened it, andresented his own “temporary banishment” fromthe embassy when he was not taken to see theemperor at Jehol, but was left behind with theembassy’s doctor and “two mechanics.”29 Onthe one hand, he is an Englishman likeMacartney; on the other he was not the lord’ssocial or pol i t ical equal . That he, inFitzgerald’s words, “shared Macartney’sdisdain, in particular, for the personal habitsand the administrative style of China’s imperialofficials – so ‘ill agreeing with the feeling ofEnglishmen’” – was a status claim to partake ofthe gentility, as he partook of the Englishness,of Lord Macartney; and a claim ultimately tothe right to contribute to the government of hisown country. John Barrow’s class anxietiesaround 1800 translated, in a process ofintertwined violence and textuality traced byRuth Rogaski, into Sun’s racial anxieties acentury later: a process that may look differentif one examines and embeds the trail fromAnson to Barrow to the later nineteenth-century thinkers, rather than lumping all of theWest, and its attitudes to cleanliness, together.

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Chamber in the Charlottenburg Palace,Berlin, built about 1710 by Elector ofBrandenburg Frederick III to display

Chinese and Japanese porcelainware andstatuettes

To return to the question: How did middle-classEnglishmen like Barrow make their claim topolitical power? Historians have traced howthe battle was fought on various fronts,including, as mentioned above, new democraticideas and organizations. (It might be worthnoting that Barrow recorded both in Travels inChina and his autobiography the mockery byChinese officials of the British custom ofallowing a mere child, whose merit could in noway be judged, to be a Lord. Did Barrow, notyet Sir John, agree?)30 But another thread ineighteenth-century British and Americanhistory is the story of the new-conqueredwealth of the colonies fueling a well-to-do

lifestyle for merchants, civil servants, and otherprofessionals. Wealth was deployed inimitating patterns of elegant behavior that hadbelonged to the nobility, to create a newformation of “gentility.” Norbert Elias’s classicThe Civilizing Process shows the slowreplacement of a standard of knightly courtesywith one of civility, focussed on personal bodilyhabits and table manners, and notablyfeaturing a concern with cleanliness.31 Pickingup the story, Richard Bushman has argued thatwhat he calls “genteel” behavior had finallyreached the English court under the Stuarts,and after 1660 the English upper middle classbegan to imitate it. From 1690, the newpatterns of behavior spread in the Americancolonies as well, so that by 1776, American“gentlemen” – meaning great merchants andplanters, clergymen and professional men, andcourt and government officers like Barrow –were expected to live in genteel fashion. Bycentury’s end, the middle class – clerks,teachers, small merchants, well-to-do farmers,etc. – were taking up the same habits, in aprocess that ended with gentility redefined asrequired for mere respectability.32 In claiminggentility, social groups also claimed a newpolitical role.

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Proudly displayed on a c. 1640 Kast in aDutch merchant’s home are these

imitation Ming altar vases made in Delft in1710. Defoe called the Dutch the “Carryers

of the World”

Cleanliness was in Bushman’s view part of themovement toward gentility: “Grease on theclothes, an inevitable result of eating withfingers without napkins, became a mark oflower-class rudeness” and manuals on“courtesy” instructed the reader to “Keep yourNails clean and Short, also your Hands andTeeth Clean.”33 In this late eighteenth-centuryBritish and colonial configuration, gentility –including cleanliness – meant political rights;so dirtiness signalled being subject to rule byothers. This historical trajectory explains, Ithink, why Barrow focused, for the first time,on Chinese personal habits, as he strove toassert his own dignity vis-à-vis both LordMacartney and the upper-class Chinese with

whom he dealt. Barrow’s perception thatChinese people were dirty fit with hischaracterization of them as all slaves todespotism. Even the most exalted Chineseofficial, he wrote, was subject to flogging bythe tyrant, so that their good manners, imposedby law rather than coming from within,indicated no sense of honor or good breeding,but were false and superficial.34 Barrow’scharacterizations were reiterated in theliterature transnationally, ultimately makingtheir way, as Fitzgerald has shown, intoChinese concerns about self-government. Butwe should see Barrow’s views in their ownhistorical context, rather than as a “morerealistic” assessment of China or as an eternalEuropean mindset.

The tea ritual, a painting of SusannaTruax, 1730 by Gansevoort Limner (Peter

Vanderlyn?). Sugar in her tay

There is a further twist. In the Americanrevolution, historians have traced how,concurrent with their increasing political

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activity, “the middling sort” of people alsoincreasingly bought the consumer goods theirbetters made fashionable, so that gentility wasbased on ownership: as Rule puts it, “‘leisure’came to be defined fully as much in terms ofconspicuous consumption as in those of idletime.”35 One might work for a living, and stillbe a gentleman with a claim on a political role,so long as one bought the right things, andinteracted with them in the right way.

Tea tasters in a nineteenth century teamanufactury (Harvard Business School

Archives)

And what were those things? There weremany; three highlight the role of cleanlinessand propriety in the formation of gentility. Onewas tea, English consumption of whichincreased fifteen-fold between about 1720 and1800.36 Tea replaced alcoholic beverages in themorning, then in the afternoon, then even afterdinner for ladies, making behavior more sedate,more genteel. One Scot quoted by historian T.H. Breen remembered that around 1700 hewould be offered a shot of whiskey even on amorning visit, while by 1729 “I am now ask’d ifI have yet had my Tea.”37 Tea was important onits own, as the Boston tea party alone shouldremind us, but as Breen points out it also“sustained a huge market in related importedarticles such as china cups and tea pots. It had

become the master symbol of the newconsumer society. By mid-century the teaservice provided a standard of good mannersand cosmopolitan taste.”38

John Singleton Copley, “Portrait of aLady,” 1771, in her silk gown. Los Angeles

County Museum of Art

Tea required porcelain or other fine ceramic tobe properly drunk: at first just a cup or two, butultimately a whole tea-set of porcelain. Suchsets were matters of immense consumer pride;and of distress on the part of those who foundconsumption by commoners troubling, such asa traveling minister upset by the “teaequipage” (stoneware not porcelain) he saw ina humble cabin in 1744.39 But as RichardBushman describes, porcelain went beyond tea-sets to express the new genteel concern withcleanliness. Offering hospitality to anotherdisdainful traveler in British America in 1744, aferryman and his wife scooped fish out of one“dirty, deep, wooden dish;” they had no bowl,

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plate, spoon, fork, napkin or tablecloth. Thiswas a practice once common, but dying out, asthe drive to gentility, “including the wish tokeep food clean, separated from dirt andfingers,” replaced a common vessel withindividual plates of wood, then of pewter, andfinally of smooth, easy-to-wash porcelain.40 Benjamin Franklin recalled his astonishment ashis wife set before him the new china bowl shethought his dignity required.41 Middle classfamilies proudly displayed, as royalty had longdone, collections of porcelain and other fineceramics.

Porcelain was prized not just for its beauty, butfor its cleanliness and smoothness. Smoothnesswas a traditional characteristic of aristocraticdress, too, Bushman explains; so silk was themost genteel fabric, forbidden to the lowerclasses in old sumptuary regulations, eagerlypurchased by the upwardly mobile, andprominent in colonial governors’ reports ofgoods their subjects imported.42 Embroideringin silk was a pastime for British ladies; likeChinese ladies, they could do it because theirhands, unroughened by labor, would not snagthe silk.43 Wearing silk required clean personalhabits, as porcelain made clean eating possibleand forbade slamming dishes about, and tea,over ale or gin, made for clean language andproper deportment.44 All these goods requiredand thus signalled propriety and restraint ofthe kind Norbert Elias discusses.

Detail of silk shawl made in Canton, c.1850 and owned by Queen Victoria

These three clean, decorous goods – tea,porcelain, and silk – share another feature. Allcame from Asia. Desiring Asian goods wasperhaps the oldest European tradition. SirBarry Cunliffe, the Oxford archaeologist, callsthe sixth-century-B.C. importation of silk andchickens along the corridor giving “easy accessfrom the Atlantic Ocean to the Yellow Sea” “ areminder that Europe is merely an excrescenceof Asia.”45 From at least 1500, Asian goods, intrading routes run by Asians and overseen byAsian states, were stuff of a vibrant and wide-ranging trade both within the Asian region andinto Europe.46 As the power balance began totilt in Europe’s favor, tea was not just a socialfact within Britain, but a driving force behind anew empire: the addiction that led to the drugtrade as Britain attempted to even out thebalance of payments by introducing opium inlarge quantities into China.47 Porcelain had alonger history of importation, but in theeighteenth century alone Europe importedsome 60 million pieces of Chinese porcelain,and the development of industrial processes byWedgewood and others was driven by thedesire to supplant imports.48 And so with silk.

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The key to industrialization, the British textileindustry (beyond wool), was predicated onprotective measures against, and perhaps eventhe purposeful destruction of, Indiancompetition in cottons.49 The Spitalfields silkindustry too was protected by the (imperfectlyenforced) barring of Indian and Chinese silkfabrics from 1701, while raw silk and cottonwere still imported.50

Two of 23 illustrations from a manual onporcelain manufacture, 2nd half of 18th c.,held in Saxony. Left, mixing the clay andthrowing bowls. Right, chopping firewood

and checking the kiln temperature. Wedgewood also studied such manuals.

These facts are well known. But scholarship onthe new British and American consumer cultureand its political implications frequently ignoresthem. In McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb’sBirth of a Consumer Society, China appears intwo ways. First, it appears as a counterpoint toprogressive England: a place where fashionsnever change; where sumptuary laws, such asthe unique right of the “Sons of Heaven” towear yellow, are easily enforced; where eventhe invention of printing brought no socialchange, no possibility of spare-time self-improvement to commoners.51 None of these“facts” is true.52 Second, China appears as aconsumer and admirer of Wedgewood’sproducts, but only once as a producer ofceramics: an export ware with a radicalpolitical cartoon on it.53 Imports from China

are invisible.

In 1752, the Dutch ship Geldermalsen sankon the way from Canton to Amsterdam,

carrying some 150,000 pieces of blue-and-white.

A newer work, T. H. Breen’s The Marketplaceof Revolution , shows that as free-bornEnglishmen made themselves into Americans,rejecting the colonial yoke of the motherland,revolutionary sentiment was mobilized througha boycott of goods bought from Britain (as therevolutionary 1925 May Thirtieth movement inChina would focus on boycotts of foreigngoods). Tea, tea-sets and other “china”ceramics, and silk all loom large, although theywere not the only goods at issue. Breen,following his patriotic sources promotingboycott, calls them all “Baubles of Britain” (theterm occurs at least six times in the book)irrespective of their actual origin, even whenhis sources more generally (outside of theboycott context) speak of “East India Goods”and the like.54 “Most of them,” he reports,were “products of the new and ambitiouspotteries of the English Midlands.”55 But insome cases Breen has only lists of items, notthe things themselves; it may well be, forexample, that the “2 China bowls” of a certaininventory were not Wedgewood’s, but fromChina.56 The silks may all have come fromSpitalfields, but Benjamin Franklin referred to“India Silks.”57 Defoe, whom Breen quotes as“a shrewd observer of the great circulation of

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goods,” has Robinson Crusoe’s partner declarethat “if he could vest [his capital] in China silks,wrought and raw, such as might be worth thecarriage, he would be content to go toEngland… .”58 Comparative literature scholarLydia Liu has treated Robinson Crusoe’s firingof an earthenware pot as “a poetics of colonialdisavowal,” and a claim that it could perfectlywell have been a Briton working alone whoinvented porcelain, not generations of Chineseartisans.59 But colonial apologist Defoe, in thiscomment on China silks and presumably in hisattacks on chinoiserie mentioned by Liu, isperfectly straightforward.60 It is the late-twentieth-century historian Breen who does notacknowledge Asia’s role at all, let alone itsmanufacturing virtuosity.61

The Qing empress holds a ritual to honorsilk production by plucking mulberry

leaves. This complements the emperor’sritual plowing, imitated by Louis XV.

But perhaps, since all these goods were comingin on British shipping, their ultimate origin didnot matter in the revolutionary dynamic. Didgoods from farther afield have the sameemotional and status associations as those fromBritain itself? With respect to rugs, at least,Breen writes that “colonists had acquired adiscerning eye for regional patterns.”62 Further, the colonists’ anxieties aboutoverspending on luxuries had a precedent inBritish anxieties (dramatized for instance inprints by Hogarth) about overspending on

Chinese goods and chinoiserie, as David Porterhas explored.63 And the colonists themselveswere fully aware of the worldwide nature of thetrade that brought their “Baubles of Britain,” asa sermon on advocacy of “the Eastern Trade”and an advertisement of “A Fine Assortment ofEnglish and India Goods” suggest.64 If “East-India Tea” was so important, might it not havemattered where it came from, and how thecolonists understood themselves as consumerswithin the larger British empire?65 Did thisreally never enter the discussion at the time? The speech by revolutionary David Ramsaywith which Breen closes suggests that freetrade with Asia was one of the colonists’desires; the rhetorical identification of allluxury goods as “British Baubles” thereforeseems as likely to have been a political move aswas the selection of non-importation “as thepreferred strategy of protest in an empire ofgoods” itself.66

Toddy jug made in Canton for AmericanMarket, with portrait of George

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Washington, 1800-1820. 10” high.Metropolitan Museum of Art

In fact, five years before Breen’s book cameout, another scholar had addressed relatedquestions directly. Beginning with an anecdoteabout General Washington simultaneouslyarranging for the defense of New York andordering porcelain tea service for hisheadquarters there, John Kuo Wei Tchen’s NewYork Before Chinatown argues that the Chineseand Chinese-style goods Americans desired, aswell as ideas about China, were “integral to theformulation of a new American individual andnation” and that American “modernity wasborn… phoenixlike from the ashes of ‘old’despotic civilizations.”67 Tchen may overstatethe Chineseness of imported ceramics, and theimportance of Chinese provenance in thedesirability of Chinese goods; but Breen’ssilence is more disturbing, when everygeneration has had its scholars who tell howdeeply China and the West have been linked.

Left, Qing porcelain tea-bowl painted inHolland in Japanese Kakiemon style, 18th

c. Right, French soft-paste porcelaincream boat, Chantilly factory, c. 1735.

Yunte Huang finds that demeaning images ofChina appeared in American popular culture(Charlie Chan, for instance) at the samemoment as American modern poets (Eliot andPound, for instance) were studying and

drawing on Chinese poetry.68 William Leachpoints out that “in the very years when the U.S.government was restricting the immigration ofChinese and Japanese people into this country,American cities were creating Japanesegardens in botanical parks….”69 Similarly, thescholarship on middle-class gentility,consumerism, and political empowermentoccludes the place of origins of the goods onwhich these developments centered: a placewhose people, at just the same moment inhistory (c. 1800), the same British middle-classfolk began to configure as dirty, backward, anddespicably subject to despotism. Now, whenAmericans have bought so many Chinese goodsthat the Chinese government holds reserves ofa trillion dollars of (largely) American debt, weget Breen’s study of the foundations ofAmerican patriotism in a boycott of importedconsumer goods. Fitzgerald confusespresentation with reality by failing tocontextualize Sir John Barrow in Englishsociety. Breen confuses presentation withreality by failing to contextualize “the Baublesof Britain” in a wider trade with Asia, side-stepping their Chineseness as neatly asBrazilian choreographer Deborah Coler’sdancers negotiate the rows of porcelain vasessuspended above them in her piece “Vasos.”70 Western ideas and goods played a role in theChinese revolutions of the twentieth century,and Chinese ideas and goods played a role inthe democratization of Britain and in theAmerican revolution. A dose of trans-nationalism would improve both Chinese andAmerican historiography.

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“Los Vasos,” by the Deborah Colker DanceCompany.

Sarah Schneewind, who formerly taught atSouthern Methodist University, is AssociateProfessor of History at the University ofCalifornia, San Diego. She has writtenCommunity Schools and the State in MingC h i n a(http://www.amazon.com/dp/0804751749/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20), a study of the impact ofMing autocracy on local institutions (StanfordUniversity Press, 2006). She had even morefun writing A Tale of Two Melons: Emperor andS u b j e c t i n M i n g C h i n a(http://www.amazon.com/dp/0872208249/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20), a study of the meaning,background, and changing presentations upinto the 21st century of one odd little incidentin the early Ming period, intended forundergraduates and the general public(Hackett, 2006). She wrote this article for TheAsia-Pacific Journal. See her website, the MingHistory Engl ish Translat ion Project(http://chinesestudies.ucsd.edu/mingstudies/index.htm).

Recommended citation: Sarah Schneewind,"Clean Politics: Race and Class, Imperialismand Nationalism, Etiquette and Consumption inthe Chinese and American Revolutions," TheAsia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 45-3-09, November 9,

2009.

Notes

1 Clive James, Cultural Amnesia: NecessaryMemories from History and the Arts (NewYork: W.W. Norton, 2007), 456, on the repeatedforgetting of Mao Zedong’s “evil” side. I wouldlike to thank Edward Countryman, PrasenjitDuara, Charles W. Hayford, Mark Selden, andBruce Tindall. 2 To give just three examples from differentdecades, Arnold Rowbotham, “The Impact ofConfucianism on the European Thought of theEighteenth Century,” Far Eastern Quarterly 4(1945): 224-42, cited in Porter (see below);Michael Edwardes, East-West Passage: TheTravel of Ideas, Arts and Inventions betweenAsia and the Western World (London:Taplinger, 1971); David Porter, Ideographica:The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). The most comprehensive work is Donald Lach’smulti-volume Asia in the Making of Europe(Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1965-1993). For a clear and polemical singlevolume, dense with facts, see John M. Hobson,The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2004). A short treatment appropriate forundergraduates is D. E. Mungello, The GreatEncounter of China and the West, 1500-1800(Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999).3 Edwardes, East-West Passage, 107. JonathanSpence, The Chan’s Great Continent: China inWestern Minds (New York: W.W. Norton,1998), 42. Alain Peyrefitte, The ImmobileEmpire, trans. Jon Rothschild (New York:Knopf, 1992), 490, treats the increasinglynegative evaluations of China in successive19th-century reports on the Macartney missionas an increasing willingness to risk Chinesedispleasure by telling the truth.4 Daniel Defoe, The Farther Adventures ofRobinson Crusoe: Being the Second and LastPart of His Life, Written by Himself (London:W. Taylor, 1719; reprint London: Constable,

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1925), 266. John Fitzgerald, Awakening China:Politics, Culture, and Class in the NationalistRevolution (Stanford: Stanford UniversityPress, 1996), 114. The textual conservatism ofEuropean writing about China is deep: Defoeasks about the Great Wall whether Britishsoldiers or engineers would not “batter it downin ten days” (Farther Adventures, 281): anexpression echoed in the CommunistManifesto .5 Louis [Lewis] Le Comte, Memoirs andremarks…made in above ten years travelsthrough the empire of China… (orig. Frenchpub., 1696; English trans. pub. London: J.Hughes for O. Payne, 1737), 73.6 Pascoe Thomas’s 1745 account of the Ansonvoyage “uses Le Comte for many pages,”according to Percy G. Adams’s introduction toRichard Walter’s official Anson’s Voyage Roundthe World in the Years 1740-44 (reprint: Dover,1974), xiii. For Anson’s instructions from theking, see Sir John Barrow, The Life of George,Lord Anson: admiral of the fleet, vice-admiral ofGreat Britain, and first lord commissioner ofthe admiralty, previous to, and during, theseven years' war (London: J. Murray, 1839),29-35.7 Walter, Anson’s Voyage, 390, 381-3. See alsoPeyrefitte, Immobile Empire, 51.8 Fitzgerald, Awakening China, 113.9 Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray,“Between ‘Crockery-dom’ and Barnum:Boston’s Chinese Museum, 1845-47,” AmericanQuarterly 56.2 (2004): 271-307, 275, 276.10 Fitzgerald, Awakening China, 47. Readersmay find useful John R. Watt, “TeacherIntroduction and Study Guide to ‘QianglongMeets Macartney: Collision of Two WorldViews,’” Education About Asia 5.3 (2000): 1-18.11 Fitzgerald, Awakening China, 47.12 Barrow, Life of George, Lord Anson, iv.13 John Barrow, Travels in China containingdescriptions, observations, and comparisons,made and collected in the course of a shortresidence at the imperial palace of Yuen-min-yuen, and on a subsequent journey through thecountry from Pekin to Canton (London: A.

Strahan for T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1804),186, 108, 59, 617-8. Sir John Barrow, An auto-biographical memoir of Sir John Barrow, bart.,late of the Admiralty; including reflections,observations, and reminiscences, at home andabroad, from early life to advanced age(London: J. Murray, 1847), 75ff, 133. 14 Barrow, Life of George, Lord Anson, 77.15 Fitzgerald, Awakening China, 11-1216 Ruth Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity: Meaningsof Health and Disease in Treaty-port China(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004),168 for quotation. It is curious that Rogaskiexplicitly places her work in relation toFitzgerald’s (2), yet mentions neither hisdiscussion of personal cleanliness nor SunYatsen, unless my eye has missed thereferences.17 Galeote Pereira, trans. C.R. Boxer, “Certainreports of China …” in Boxer, South China inthe Sixteenth Century: Being the Narratives ofGaleote Pereira, Fr. Gaspar da Cruz, O.P., Fr.Martin de Rada, O.E.S.A. (1550-1575) (Pereiraorig. pub. c. 1560; London: Hakluyt Society,1953), 14.18 Gaspar da Cruz, trans. C.R. Boxer, “Treatisein which the things of China are related ...” inBoxer, South China in the Sixteenth Century(da Cruz orig. pub. c. 1570; London: HakluytSociety, 1953), 142.19 Defoe, Farther Adventures, 271.20 Pereira, “Certain reports of China…,” 8-9.21 da Cruz, “Treatise in which the things ofChina are related,” 120-21.22 Barrow, Travels in China, 98-9, 527. Rogaskipoints to a change in perceptions of Tianjin inparticular: from the admiration of Sir GeorgeStaunton on the polite but vain Amherstmission, 1816 (Staunton had been a precociouslanguage expert on the McCartney Mission), tothe disgust of the triumphant Lord Elgin in1858. Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity, 54-5.23 Barrow, Travels in China, table of contents.24 Barrow, Travels in China, 76, 349. Forquotation and a discussion of this passage seePorter, Ideographia, 214.25 Fitzgerald, Awakening China, 11.

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26 John Rule, Albion’s People: English Society,1714-1815 (London & New York: Longman,1992), 32-33, 40-41.27 Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H.Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: TheCommercialization of Eighteenth-CenturyEngland (Bloomington: Indiana UniversityPress, 1982), 197-201.28 Barrow, Auto-biographical Memoir, 1, 5, 7,17, 42.29 Peyrefitte, Immobile Empire, 20, 140. Barrow, Travels in China, 105, 117-8. Thequestion of whether Macartney should kowtowto the Qianlong emperor was resolved byMacartney’s going down on one knee. In hisAuto-biographical Memoir (84), Barrow notes,after describing how he and the others followedsuit, “I told Lord Macartney what we had done,and he said it was perfectly correct.” Barrowalso advised the later Lord Amherst mission onhow to manage the problem (Auto-biographicalMemoir, 116-7). This incident is often used toshow the Chinese obsession with ritual; itshows the British obsession just as clearly. Both were still societies centered on rank.30 Barrow, Travels in China, 115. Barrow, Auto-biographical Memoir, 80. In Peyrefitte,Immobile Empire, 148-931 Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: TheHistory of Manners (1939), translated byEdmund Jephcott (Oxford: BlackwellPublishers, 1982; reprint 1994), esp. part II,“Civilization as a Specific Transformation ofHuman Behavior.”32 Richard Bushman, The Refinement ofAmerica: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York:Vintage, 1992), xii-xiii. Thanks to AlexisMcCrossen for this book. Parenthetically,Bushman notes a mid-19th century Americanobsession with tiny feet (p. 295). Does thisaccount for American missionaries’ obsessionwith Chinese women’s bound feet? 33 Bushman, Refinement of America, 42.34 Barrow, Travels in China, 178-80.35 Rule, Albion’s People, 41; McKendrick,Brewer and Plumb, Birth of a ConsumerSociety, 197-201.

36 McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb, Birth of aConsumer Society, 29.37 T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution:How Consumer Politics Shaped AmericanIndependence (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 2004), 22. On tea replacing taverns, seeBushman, Refinement of America, 184-5, andJohn Kuo Wei Tchen, New York BeforeChinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping ofAmerican Culture, 1776-1882 (Baltimore: TheJohns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 11. 38 Breen, Marketplace of Revolution, 304. TheVictoria and Albert museum’s website has af u n n y c o m i c - s t r i p v i d e o(http://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/british_galls/video/taking_tea), consulted March 17, 2007. For just one later but vivid example of what teacould signify, see Wilkie Collins, Basil, (1852,1862; reprint New York: Dover, 1980), 120-21,where a mysterious clerk becomes even moremysterious in his epicurean finickyness abouthis tea, “while other tradesmen’s clerks… weredrinking their gin-and-water jovially, at homeor in a tavern.” According to Americanhistorian George Brown Tindall, the tea at theBoston Tea Party was more likely Chinese thanIndia tea (personal communication, 1997).39 Breen, Marketplace of Revolution, 34-5.40 Bushman, Refinement of America, 76.41 Breen, Marketplace of Revolution, 154. Bushman, Refinement of America, 184.42 Bushman, Refinement of America, 71. Breen,Marketplace of Revolution, 38-9. For silk andporcelain see Lach, Asia in the Making ofEurope, vol II, book 1, pp. 95-109 (with othertextiles and ceramics); and vol. III, book 4, pp.1602ff.43 Susan Mann, Precious Records: Women inChina’s Long Eighteenth Century (Stanford:Stanford University Press, 1997), 265.Francesca Bray, Technology and Gender:Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997),266-7. For a Western picture of a Chinesewoman embroidering, see Shelagh Vainker,Chinese Silk: A Cultural History (NewBrunswick: British Museum and Rutgers

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University, 2004), 193.44 For special soap to clean silk, see Breen,Marketplace of Revolution, 63.45 Barry Cunliffe, Europe Between the Oceans:Themes and Variations, 9000 BC – AD 1000(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 43.46 Giovanni Arrighi, Takeshi Hamashita, andMark Selden, “Introduction,” in their editedvolume The Resurgence of East Asia: 500, 150and 50 year perspectives (London: Routledge,2003).47 Robert Marks, The Origins of the ModernWorld: A Global and Ecological Narrative(Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002),112-117.48 Julie Emerson, Jennifer Chen, and MimiGardner Gates, Porcelain Stories: From Chinato Europe (Seattle: Seattle Art Museum andUniversity of Washington Press, 2000), 252. Moreover, Wedgewood’s innovative division oflabor was derived from his reading of Pere F. X.d’ Entrecolles’ (1664-1741) reports on theprocess of mass production of porcelain inChina; see Lothar Ledderose, Ten ThousandThings: Module and Mass Production inChinese Art (Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 2000), 100-101.49 Marks, Origins of the Modern World, 99,108. Kenneth Pomeranz, The GreatDivergence: China, Europe, and the Making ofthe Modern World Economy (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 2000), 294-5. Seealso Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: ElNiño Famines and the Making of the ThirdWorld (New York: Verso, 2001), 312-7.50 G. Hertz, “The English Silk Industry in theEighteenth Century,” The English HistoricalReview 24.96 (1909): 710-727, p. 711.51 McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb, Birth of aConsumer Society, 36, 37, 266.52 For the use of yellow, see for instanceVainker, Chinese Silk, 138-140. Even thevaunted “modern” practice of brandingproducts to appeal to a mass market ofconsumers had appeared in Ming China: seeGary G. Hamilton and Wei-An Cheng, “Theimportance of commerce in the organization of

China’s late imperial economy,” in TheResurgence of East Asia: 500, 150 and 50 yearperspectives, edited by Giovanni Arrighi,Takeshi Hamashita, and Mark Selden (London:Routledge, 2003), 190ff. For a discussion ofthe trope in Western scholarship of fashionlessChina, and a consideration of the place ofmaterial goods in claiming high social status inlate Ming China, see Craig Clunas, SuperfluousThings: Material Culture and Social Status inEarly Modern China (Urbana, Ill.: University ofIllinois Press, 1991), 169ff. McKendrick et al.cite Braudel, on whom see Mark Elvin,“Braudel and China,” in John A. Marino, ed.,Early Modern History and the Social Sciences:Testing the Limits of Braudel’s Mediterranean(Kirksville: Truman State University Press,2002): 225-254. On printing, see for instanceEvelyn Sakakida Rawski, Education andPopular Literacy in Ch’ing China (Ann Arbor:University of Michigan Press, 1979), 109-115.53 McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb, Birth of aConsumer Society, 103, 127, 129-30, 139; 239.54 Breen, Marketplace of Revolution: “Baubles”20, 62, 81, 199, 200, 329, tea: 26, “East IndiaGoods” 39.55 Breen, Marketplace of Revolution, 45.56 Breen, Marketplace of Revolution, 51.57 Breen, Marketplace of Revolution: 80 onSpitalfields; 337, note 1, for Franklin.58 Breen, Marketplace of Revolution, 84. Defoe,Farther Adventures, 275.59 Lydia Liu, “Robinson Crusoe’s EarthenwarePot,” Critical Inquiry 25.4 (1999): 728-757. See733 for the quoted phrase, 738. I am grateful toreviewer Prasenjit Duara for this and otherreferences.60 Liu, “Robinson Crusoe’s Earthenware Pot,”731.61 For additional discussion of McKendrick andrelated scholarship, see Gary G. Hamilton andWei-An Cheng, “The importance of commercein the organization of China’s late imperialeconomy,” in The Resurgence of East Asia: 500,150 and 50 year perspectives, edited byGiovanni Arrighi, Takeshi Hamashita, and MarkSelden (London: Routledge, 2003), 187ff.

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62 Breen, Marketplace of Revolution, 57.63 Porter, Ideographia, 186-192. See Porter fora series of representations of the Chineseemperor showing clearly the change inEuropean thinking about China.64 Breen, Marketplace of Revolution, 111, 136. Historian Prasanaan Parthasarathi writes:“Although the ‘India factor’ in Europeanindustrialization has largely eluded the gaze ofthe modern historian, eighteenth-centuryEuropeans were keenly aware of it.” See his“Rethinking Wages and Competitiveness in theEighteenth Century: Britain and South India,”Past and Present 58 (1998): 79-109, 108.65 Breen, Marketplace of Revolution, 329,305-17.

66 Breen, Marketplace of Revolution, 330, 231.67 Tchen, New York Before Chinatown, 3-4, 24.68 Yunte Huang, Transpacific Displacement:Ethnography, Translation, and IntertextualTravel in Twentieth-Century AmericanLiterature (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 2002), 115.69 William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants,Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture(New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 104. Thanksto Alexis McCrossen for this source.7 0 L a r r y R o h t e r , “ F o r a B r a z i l i a nChoreographer, Dance as an Obstacle Course,”The New York Times, Thursday, October 22,2009, C5.

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