Some two centuries after the publication of The Wealth of Nations, it is belatedly self-evident that Adam Smith had it right when he remarked,
The home market of China is, perhaps, in extent, not much inferior to the market of all the different countries of Europe put together. A more extensive foreign trade, however, which to this great home market added the foreign market of all the rest of the world … could scarce fail to increase very much the manufactures of China, and to improve very much the productive powers of its manufacturing industries (Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations [Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952], p. 297]).
In this innovative, painstakingly researched monograph grounded in more than thirty American and European research collections, Paul Van Dyke broadly illuminates hitherto arcane, dimly comprehended domains of the Canton trade that Smith was obliquely...