The New Middle Kingdom
China and the Early American Romance of Free Trade
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4155559 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Michael D Block (California State University, Channel Islands, Camarillo, California, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2018 |
| Volume | 105 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 146-147 |
| Publication date | 2018-06-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of American History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1093/jahist/jay036 |
| OpenAlex | W2804699389 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
Kendall A. Johnson's The New Middle Kingdom is a work of remarkable ambition and dazzling erudition. Johnson traces what he calls a “quest narrative” of China and free trade through nineteenth-century American print culture, arguing that connections to China shaped U.S. culture (p. 1). Johnson sidesteps the thorny problem of the extent to which his authors used print to romanticize their activities by focusing on the stories they told about themselves. Johnson covers a long period, spanning from the 1780s to the 1860s, with excursions forward to the Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901) and American imperialism in the Philippines. The book's goal is to bridge the fields of American studies and China studies; to that end Johnson has read deeply and widely in the work of other researchers on U.S.-China connections. A section of the introduction called “Bridging American Studies and China Studies” reads like a who's who of recent scholars. Frustratingly, this is ultimately (and unabashedly) a work of literary analysis far more than it is a work of history. Historians seeking a comprehensive historical treatment of American trade with China will be disappointed
Art · Bridge (graph theory · China · Kingdom · Literature · Narrative · Romance · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Chinese history and philosophy · History · Japanese History and Culture
| Unique citing works | 4 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,44 |
| Citation span | 2017 - 2025 (9) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 4 |