| Book Review | The American Historical Review, .

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Book Review

Canada and the United States

John Kuo Wei Tchen. New York before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture 1776–1882. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 1999. Pp. xxiv, 385. $42.50.

This is a work of singular importance. By connecting the history of Chinese settlement in New York City beginning in the early decades of the nineteenth century to American ideas about China and Chinese people during the Revolution and the early republic, John Kuo Wei Tchen opens up a new paradigm for understanding the centrality of the "Orient" to the formation of American culture. 1

Although most studies of racial formation in the nineteenth century that have included Asian Americans (such as Ronald Takaki's Iron Cages: Race and Culture in nineteenth-Century America [1979]) have focused on the relationship of racial formation to production, Tchen brilliantly ties the racial construction of the Oriental not only to labor agitation over the "Chinese question" but also to the question of trade and consumption in the construction of American culture. Tchen shows how multiple discourses of the Oriental shaped class status across American society in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and how notions of the "Orient" permeated every level of society and influenced American culture. . . .

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