The Nankeen was a cloth with a naturally brownish yellow color that was manufactured in southern China, especially Nanjing. Americans purchased the textile primarily from England during the colonial period, since English consumers had used Nankeens imported from China to make male clothing for both children and adults by the eighteenth century. After the direct U.S.-China trade unfolded in 1784, U.S. merchants dominated the Nankeen trade in China, enabling Americans to make more varieties of clothes at home, such as female dresses and enslaved men’s wear. Meanwhile, nineteenth-century Americans sought to manufacture imitation nankeens domestically by employing dyeing techniques to produce the “Nankeen color.” Moreover, naming the domestic cotton with a yellow color, the “nankeen cotton,” or introducing Gossoypsium religiosum, the species allegedly to manufacture the Chinese Nankeen, Americans attempted to achieve economic independence through growing the plants in the American South and selling the cotton in England to meet Britons’ demand for “Indian Nankeens.” However, while white cotton dominated the international cotton market, the experiments had declined by the mid-nineteenth century. The Chinese imported more cheaper industrial cotton products from England and America than their exported Nankeens. The yellowish nankeen became “colored people’s cotton,” as enslaved people in the United States, who were forbidden from growing white cotton, continued to grow the colored species.
Thus, this case study of the Nankeen cloth, color, and cotton demonstrate how a Chinese object reshaped Americans’ imagination of U.S. fashion and economic independence, on the one hand, and on the other, how the U.S. socio-economic contexts changed the value of a global commodity.
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