Dan Du

Research Interests

Business History; Material Culture Studies; Chinese History; Nineteenth-Century U.S. History

Education

Ph.D., History, University of Georgia, 2017
M.A., History, Nankai University, 2009
B.A., History and B.S., Economics, Nankai University, 2006

Current Projects

Exploring the U.S.-China tea trade from 1784 to 1911, my manuscript is the first book-length examination of Americans’ tea trade with China after the American Revolution. Contrary to the popular myth that the United States emerged out of the Revolutionary War as a coffee nation, America was the second largest importer of tea from China in the nineteenth century.  Moreover, U.S. tea consumers shifted away from black to green tea, cultivated a peculiar taste for Oolong tea, and invented the term, “English Breakfast Tea,” to name high-rank Chinese black tea. The power structure of American, British, and Chinese tea merchants in the credit economy of the tea trade (re)shaped the consumption pattern. Such credit instruments as promissory notes, bills of exchange, and checks financed the transactions between Chinese and U.S. tea merchants and crystallized their changing power dynamics in the global economy. The circulation of the credit instruments, conventionally considered the technique of capitalism, also challenged the conventional understanding of China’s economy as a primitive hard-money system.

Growing out of the research on the tea trade, my other projects respectively examine tea consumption in the post-Revolutionary United States, Chinese tea corporations, and the law of credit instruments in late imperial and Republican China.

Selected Publications

“‘Flying Cash’: Credit Instruments on the Silk Roads (Link to Academia),” in Jefferey Lerner and Yaohua Shi ed., The Silk Roads: From Local Realities to Global Narratives (Oxford, U.K.: Oxbow Books, 2020), 237-264.

“Green Gold and Paper Gold: Seeking Independence through the Chinese-American Tea Trade, 1784-1815 (Link to Academia),” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 16, no. 1 (2018): 151-191. (Reprinted in Chinese in Nankai shixue, vol. 27, no.1 (2019): 265-306.)

Courses Taught

HIST1502/LBST2102 Chinese Food

HIST 4002/5002 Capitalism in China?

HIST3002 Made in China: Modern Chinese History in Objects (Students’ Online Exhibits)

HIST2600 U.S.-China Trade in the 19th Century

HIST2201 Modern East Asia

LBST2301 History of the Silk Road

Selected Awards and Fellowships

External Research Awards and Fellowships

2024 Alvin Achenbaum Travel Grant, Hartman Center, Duke University David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library

2023 Research Travel Grant, William & Mary Special Collections Research Center

2021 NEH-MHS Long Term Fellowship, National Endowment for the Humanities & Massachusetts Historical Society

2020 Franklin Research Grant, American Philosophical Society

2018  Outstanding Overseas Students Award, China Scholarship Council

2017  Short-Term Fellowship, Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library

2016 Gilder Lehrman Fellowship, Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History

2016 Smithsonian Institution Predoctoral Fellowship, National Museum of American History

2016 Program in Early American Economy and Society (PEARS) Short-Term Fellowship, Library Company of Philadelphia

2015  Peabody Essex Museum Phillips Library Research Fellowship, Peabody Essex Museum

2014  New England Regional Fellowship, New England Regional Fellowship Consortium

Internal Awards and Fellowships

2023 Honors Course Planning Grant, UNC Charlotte

2022 Capitalism Studies Course Development Grant, UNC Charlotte

2021 Frances Lumsden Gwynn Award, UNC Charlotte

2021 Junior Faculty Development Award, UNC Charlotte

2018 Faculty Research Grant, UNC Charlotte

2018 Excellence-in-Research Award, University of Georgia