Dr. Caroline Frank学术报告会——Rebellion, Sovereignty, and An East Indies Trade for the United States of America
日期： 2016-10-10
报告题目：Rebellion, Sovereignty, and An East Indies Trade for the United States of America
报 告 人：Dr. Caroline Frank, Brown University
报告日期：2016年10月25日星期二下午4:00-5:30
报告地点：明德商学楼0202教室
Abstract:
The Boston Tea Party has legendary status in U.S. history as one of the initial acts of a “free-born” people resisting tyrannical rulers and oppression. But why did the importation of Chinese tea provoke such a radical response—political, martial, and rhetorical—when colonists had tolerated and excused over a century of antagonistic British mercantilist legislation? Even before the ink was dry on the peace agreement with Great Britain in 1783, U.S. merchants were fitting out ships to sail to China as an act of survival. This talk, based on my 2011 book Objectifying China, Imagining America: Chinese Commodities in Early America, reexamines the global context of the American Revolution and the early U.S. China trade, asking why Americans were so quick to develop their own “East Indies trade.” In the late 18th century, an age of rampant Western slavery, asserting where the power of one body stopped and another started was an unrelenting contest.
A Brief Bio:
Frank works across the disciplines of History and Visual/Material Culture Studies focusing on global interaction of the Americas from the 16th through 19th centuries. She runs two transpacific research initiatives "Nexus Taiwan" and “Asia-Pacific in the Making of the Americas.” Her publications include Objectifying China, Imagining America: Chinese Commodities in Early America (University of Chicago Press, 2011); Global Trade and Visual Arts in Federal New England (UPNE, 2014); and The Asia Pacific in the Making of the Americas (http://scalar.usc.edu/works/apma/index, 2016). In overseeing the MA program in American Studies, she seeks to promote a transnational group of engaged scholars. She is a Chicago native with a BA and MA in Anthropology from the University of Chicago, and an MA in Museum Studies and a PhD in American Civilization from Brown.
