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Abstract
Employing a commodity chain analysis, this dissertation traces the production, transaction, transportation, and consumption of tea in China and the U.S. from 1784 to the early twentieth century. More specifically, it challenges two myths in Chinese and American history: the silverized Chinese economy and the declining tea consumption in the United States after the destruction of tea at Boston harbor. Unlike the cumbersome hard-money system portrayed by previous historians, this research shows that credit economybuttressed by account sales and financial instrumentshad been essential to Chinese foreign commerce. Chinese merchants used promissory notes to extend commercial credits to American businessmen and facilitate their de facto transactions in the tea trade. In the 1830s, the thriving tea, opium, and cotton trade with China expanded Anglo-Indian merchants demand for cheap means of remittance and produced a market of bills of exchange in China. American merchants brought cheap English billsgenerated in Anglo-American cotton tradeand decreased their shipments of specie to Canton. American China traders mobilized this new line of credit from China for their textile, railroad, and shipbuilding industries in the U.S., thus facilitating the transition from commercial to industrial capitalism in the latter nineteenth century. This research also reconsiders American tea consumption after the American Revolution. Americans drank more cups of tea than coffee up until the late nineteenth century, when the Industrial Revolution changed American foodways and marginalized tea consumption at home. Against the backdrop of the Boston Tea Party Centennial, Americans traced the decline of tea back to the Revolutionary period and reinforced the American identity during the industrial age by re-politicizing tea. Moreover, this research also elaborates how Asian artistic traditions, especially those of China and Japan, influenced the design of tea wares and tea gowns in the U.S. and how teas from India, Ceylon, and Japan changed Americans taste in this beverage in the late nineteenth century.