“Imagined China” in the Public Consciousness of Colonial North America

Abstract

The article examines the formation of the image of China in the public consciousness of the British colonies in North America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that is, before the establishment of direct U. S. — China contacts. It argues that, despite the absence of immediate communication with China, colonial Americans were much better informed about Chinese goods, technologies, political ideas, and cultural symbols than historiography long assumed. The study focuses on the channels through which information about China reached the colonies via European intermediaries, on the ways Chinese objects and images were reinterpreted in a local context, and on the social and political functions they acquired there. Drawing on modern scholarship, colonial newspapers, published documents, and studies of material culture, the article analyzes the role of porcelain, tea, silk, and Confucian ideas in the making of American identity. It concludes that "imagined China" was not a marginal exotic theme but an important component of colonial discourse, closely connected with notions of consumption, virtue, dependence on the metropolis, and competing models of political order.