Narratives of free trade : the commercial cultures of early US-China relations / edited by Kendall Johnson.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction. Revising first impressions : American stereotypes of China and the national romance of free trade / Kendall Johnson -- Bookkeeping as a window into efficiencies of early modern trade : Europeans, Americans and others in China compared, 1700-1842 / Paul A. Van Dyke -- A question of character : the romance of early Sino-American commerce in The journals of Major Samuel Shaw, the first American Consul at Canton (1847) / Kendall Johnson -- China of the American imagination : the influence of trade on US portrayals of China, 1820 to 1850 / John R. Haddad -- Russell and Company and the imperialism of Anglo-American free trade / Sibing He -- Chopsticks or cutlery? How Canton Hong merchants entertained foreign guests in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries / May-bo Ching -- Representing Macao in 1837 : the unpublished peripatetic diary of Caroline Hyde Butler (Laing) / Rogério Miguel Puga -- The face of diplomacy in nineteenth-century China : Qiying's portrait gifts / Yeewan Koon -- To make a way : telling a story of US-China union through the letters of Henry Adams and John Hay / Paul A. Bové -- The flow of the traders' goddess : Tianhou in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America / Khun Eng Kuah-Pearce and Yedan Huang.