------ EH.NET BOOK REVIEW ------
Title: So Great a Proffit: How the East Indies Trade Transformed
Anglo-American Capitalism

Published by EH.Net (January 2012)

James R. Fichter, So Great a Proffit: How the East Indies Trade
Transformed Anglo-American Capitalism. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2010. xi + 384 pp. $35 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-674-05057-0.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Thomas H. Cox, Department of History, Sam
Houston State University.

James R. Fichter’s So Great a Proffit: How the East Indies Trade
Transformed Anglo-American Capitalism sheds new light on America’s
early trade with Asia during the late 1700s and early 1800s. Seeking
to move beyond traditional portrayals of national economic
development, Fichter contends that “American trade to the East Indies
as a whole had repercussions for society, economics, and politics on
both sides of the Atlantic” (p. 4). In particular, competition from
private American merchants undermined British mercantilism and “helped
begin Britain’s nineteenth century free trade empire.” For the young
American republic trade with Asia meant “the accumulation of wealth
and financial capital into the hands of the wealthiest Americans,
creating financiers who would profoundly alter the shape of American
business” (p. 4). Located at the intersection of economic, cultural,
American, and British history, Fichter’s work is necessarily broad
based, painting in broad strokes themes for future historians to
further flesh out.

The publication of So Great a Proffit coincides with an emerging body
of scholarship on the “Pacific World.”  In recent years Katherine
Gulliver and Matt K. Matsuda have pointed to the increase of cultural
contacts between European and American traders and the native peoples
of the Pacific Rim from the late 1700s through the mid-twentieth
century as a formative period in world history. Such activity led to
not merely exchanges of plants, animals, pathogens, and people but
also linguistic, religious and cultural traits. Although slower to
catch on than the concept of the “Atlantic World,” the increasingly
important relationships between the United States and Asian countries
such as China has promoted new scholarly interest in the notion of a
“Pacific World.”

Fichter begins his narrative in colonial British North America.
Drawing from Bernard Bailyn and Pauline Maier, Fichter discusses the
role of anti-monopoly sentiment in the creation of republican
rhetoric. In the post-Revolutionary period lingering distrust of large
mercantile corporations prevented the creation of an American East
India Company. It thus fell to individual American merchants, already
excluded from British markets in the wake of independence, to form
primitive business corporations and seek new business opportunities in
the Pacific.

Following the outbreak of war between Britain and France in the 1790s,
neutral American merchants conducted a bustling trade throughout the
world. Over the next decade American ships carried Spanish silver,
American furs, and Hawaiian sandalwood to the Far East, returning home
with holds full of Sumatran pepper, Indian cloth, and Chinese tea and
porcelain. Many of these goods were subsequently smuggled into
European countries (including, ironically Great Britain) to be sold at
exorbitant rates.

Fichter reveals that profits garnered from the lucrative Pacific trade
helped to create the first class of American millionaires. Traditional
American merchants pursued trade to achieve a “competency” or “enough
money not to need to work, enough to retire on, but not enough to be
rich.” In contrast, younger merchants like Jacob Crowninshield,
Stephen Girard, and Israel Thorndike pursued trade with Asia to
achieve “affluence” characterized by “profuse wealth and a liberality
towards others commensurate with noble station” (pp. 117-18). By
decorating their spacious mansions with Chinese tapestries, silks and
lacquer ware these individuals showcased their refinement and
gentility. By injecting large amounts of silver into the economy
American merchants furthermore helped underwrite the costs of northern
industrialization. T.H. Breen, Richard Bushman, and Daniel Vickers
have traced the gentrification of America’s merchant community in the
early 1800s. Fichter adds to their work by uncovering the previously
unexamined role which trade with the Pacific Rim played in this
process. Conversely, Fichter also relates how the British East India
Company selectively attempted to lease its ships and privatize key
aspects of its overseas operations to stave off competition from
American free traders until its final demise in 1874. Crucial in the
defeat of the unpopular monopoly were the lobbying efforts of British
free traders who argued that it was their rights as British subjects
to carry out trade anywhere within the Empire they chose. Ironically
it was rise of private business partnerships which allowed Great
Britain to remain a dominant economic power well into the twentieth
century.

Fichter wastes no opportunity to depict American free trade as more
effective than British mercantilism. Yet How Great a Proffit does not
blindly celebrate the “virtues” of capitalism. Fichter candidly admits
that “[f]ree trade was, despite Adam Smith’s sentiments, amoral” (p.
205). As late entrants into the Pacific trade and lacking notions of
noblesse oblige shared by many royal and East Indian Company
officials, American traders brutally overharvested seal skins and
sandalwood and intervened in tribal wars throughout the Pacific to
secure lucrative trading agreements with different chieftains. Most
damning, Fichter recounts the vast fortunes British and American
merchants made off the suffering of thousands of Chinese during the
Opium Wars.

Despite the breath of Fichter’s research, many questions about
America’s early trading relations with Asia remain unanswered. How,
specifically, did trade with India and China influence the development
of the modern American business corporation and how substantial was
this impact? How did the lives of American sailors, dockworkers,
clerks, and ordinary consumers change as a result of increased trade
with Asia? Most important, what actions did Pacific Islanders, Native
Americans, and Chinese peasants take to resist economic domination by
British and American merchants? Further research is thus needed before
the complex webs of commerce and culture identified by Fichter can be
brought into clear historical focus. Nevertheless, How Great a Proffit
remains a well written, carefully researched book which points the way
for scholars interested in recapturing America’s early trading
relationships with the diverse cultures of the Pacific World.

Thomas H. Cox is Associate Professor of History at Sam Houston State
University. He is the author of Gibbons v. Ogden: Law and Society in
the Early Republic (Ohio University Press, 2009). In 2009-2010 he
served as Visiting Fulbright Professor at the Institute for American
Studies, Northwest Normal University, Changchun, China.

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Geographic Location: Asia, Australia/New Zealand, incl. Pacific
Islands, Europe, North America
Subject: International and Domestic Trade and Relations
Time: 18th Century, 19th Century