Globalization of the United States, 1789-1861

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Scott, William A. Trade and Letters: Their Journeyings Round the World. New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1856.

William A. Scott. Trade and Letters: Their Journeyings Round the World. New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1856. Title page.

From the vantage of San Francisco mushrooming on the Pacific coast, Scott celebrated the “commercial spirit of the age” as a liberalizing force on the verge of transforming Asia.

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Another Result Of The Expansion Of Commerce Is A Liberalizing Of Our Views. — Just in the proportion that we are well acquainted with other nations, will our prejudices and dogged notions be removed. “Every body and his wife” now travels and trades, and in the hard jostling of the dusty thoroughfare many of the sharp corners of humanity are rubbed off. The inhabitants of such countries, as of China and Japan, that are the most closely shut up against intercourse with other countries, are the most bigoted and narrow-minded, and filled with the idea of their superiority to other nations. But as “the John’s” and “John Bulls” and “Jonathan’s” and the F.F’s of the “Old Dominion” travel abroad, and see the world, they become more and more tolerant and kindly disposed, and at last begin to feel that there may be, after all, some other country beside their own on the globe. As there are many beautiful objects in nature that we do not admire, because we do not see them, we are ignorant of them, so there are good and great people in all nations that we do not love, because we are not acquainted with them. Intercourse with mankind must, therefore, liberalize our views and remove many of our prejudices. In this point of view, the Congress of Nations at the World’s Fair, where the various improvements in the modes of agriculture, methods of education, and uses of the mechanical arts were exhibited, did much good. And as the knowledge of different nations is mutually extended, so may they be bound together in bonds of mutual respect, affection and interest. Every ship that plows her way from this port to the seas of the Flowery Kingdom, is a chain that draws the two continents nearer and nearer to one another. Every new trail of the hunter over the mountains; every new path blazed through the forest by the buckskinned pioneer to his log cabin on the hill side, and every sod that is turned up by the spade or the plow, and every stream that is harnessed and put to work at the mill, and every railroad and telegraph wire that is stretched across this great continent, is a band of iron binding the different races and portions thereof more firmly together.