“To the Farthest Ports of the Rich East” Lecture

Join James Fichter as he discusses profit and peril in the new trade to Asia

With independence from Britain secured, in the 1780s American began trading to Asia for themselves. They bought tea in China. They sailed to the East India Company-administered India for cloth, to Yemen and Dutch Java for coffee, to Sumatra for pepper, and to many other ports in between. The trade to Asia accelerated as the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793-1815) kept European traders out of Asian waters, creating a tussle between between British and American crews to supply French-occupied Europe with Asian goods. This process created a new class of American investor-capitalists and the first American millionaires. Yet such wealth came at a cost, as the ever growing and increasingly wealthy American trading fleet was a tempting target for foreign states and pirates—from Britain and France to Barbary and Yemen—against which the U.S. Navy was not always a match.