Dolin's book featured in WSJ and China Daily
From Wall Street Journal:
With Beijing only 14 hours by air from New York, it's hard to imagine today just how far away China was in the age of sail. A round-trip voyage could easily take 18 months, and many ships simply vanished, lost at sea. But China was the world's foremost industrial power in the 17th and 18th centuries, the source of porcelain and silk as well as increasingly popular tea. There were huge profits to be made in the China trade.
As Eric Jay Dolin points out in his entertaining, informative and highly readable book "When America First Met China: An Exotic History of Tea, Drugs, and Money in the Age of Sail," the 13 colonies took no part in this business. The British East India Co. had a monopoly on trade with China, and only in February 1784, the year after a peace treaty with Britain established American independence, did direct links between the United States and China begin.
From China Daily:
After the colonists of New Netherland introduced tea to what would eventually become New York, the import spread quickly through the American colonies.
By the 1770s, Americans were estimated to have been drinking up to 1.3 billion cups a year.
A burgeoning trade relationship with China helped feed that demand, which — along with a Chinese desire for sea otter pelts and sandalwood — fueled further exploration and trade between the two cultures.
In When America First Met China, author Eric Jay Dolin traces the history of that relationship, which began when the Empress of China set sail on Feb 22, 1784, with a crew of 42 men under captain John Green. In the century that followed, trade with China was vital to US economic growth, Dolin argues.
