J400: Sable, Silk, and Smokes: International Business in China during the 19th Century
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Welcome! This page contains search tips and useful resources for your research projects.
If you'd like help with your research, feel free to get in touch with the librarian for History, Celestina Savonius-Wroth (cewroth@indiana.edu), the Government Documents librarians (libgpd@indiana.edu) or the East Asian Studies librarian, Wen-Ling Liu, (wliu@indiana.edu).
On this page: Search tips - Secondary sources - Government documents - 19thc newspapers and magazines - Digitized books - Subject-specific collections
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Illustration: Rich Merchants Dining With Singing Girls, Pekin, China [c1901] Benjamin W. Kilburn (Library of Congress, image restored by a Flickr user)
Search tips
Use IUCAT (IU Libraries online catalog) and WorldCat (giant superdatabase of US library holdings) to find both primary and secondary sources. Both databases depend on Library of Congress subject headings; try some of the following:
china history 19th century
china commerce 19th century
china commerce great britain
opium trade 19th century
tea trade 19th century
china description and travel
Use the language option to limit your results to sources in English.
The Library of Congress subject headings for your time period are: 19th century, Qing (although this includes the whole period of the dynasty) and 1861-1912.
The keywords sources, correspondence, personal narratives, documents and chronicles may help you find primary sources.
Don't forget that you can often find primary source simply by limiting by date of publication (leave out the subject word "19th century" in this case).
For a more precise search, use a general subject heading PLUS specific keywords, such as names of geographic locations. (Remember that primary sources will use older spellings/transliterations.)
To get a quick idea of what might be available on a topic, and to find book reviews, try OneSearch (cross-searches books, journal articles, etc--to weed out non-scholarly secondary sources, limit to scholarly (peer reviewed) journals).
JSTOR may be helpful for primary sources as well as secondary sources (it includes many journals that began publication in the 19th century).
Secondary sources
Bibliography of Asian Studies - online bibliography of scholarly research on Asia, in western languages.
Historical Abstracts - best database to use to find scholarly journal articles on world history (for a topic with a US focus, try America: History & Life.)
Government documents
House of Commons Parliamentary Papers - searchable digital archive of the British House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, 1688-present. (also available: a useful book about the China-related materials in the Papers; and through interlibrary loan, a 42-volume print compilation of all the China-related materials)
Proquest Congressional - searchable digital archive of publications of and for the US Congress, 1789-present
HeinOnline - huge collection of law-related documents, including treaties made between the US and other countries from 1776 to the 20th century.
19th-century newspapers, magazines and journals
19th Century British Library Newspapers and Times Digital Archive (The Times, London) - digital archives of British newspapers
ProQuest Historical Newspapers, 19th Century Historical United States Newspapers and America's Historical Newspapers - digital archives of US newspapers
19th Century UK Periodicals and British Periodicals - digital archives of general interest British publications. Also available: Economist Historical Archive 1843-2003.
American Periodicals Series Online - digital archive of general interest American magazines and journals, colonial period to 1900.
Periodicals Index Online - similar to JSTOR, but includes many more journals (not all fulltext)
Collections of digitized books
HathiTrust Digital Library - digitized books from major US libraries. Most pre-1923 titles are fully available; in-copyright materials are search-only (this is a more user-friendly version of the content in Google Books, plus additional content from research libraries).
Making of the Modern World - digitized books from a major research collection on economic history (use for primary sources).
Nineteenth Century Collections Online (also Eighteenth Century Collections Online) - digitized primary source materials for 19th-century studies (many/most not included in Google/Hathi). See Asia and the West sub-collection.
Subject-specific collections
"Treaties" from China Foreign Relations website
China: Trade, Politics and Culture, 1793-1980 - original source material detailing China's interaction with the West from 1793 to the Nixon visits to China in 1972-74
China Through Western Eyes - massive microfilm collection of primary sources in Western languages relating to China. [Find at IUB; online guides (scroll down to find listings for this collection)]
last updated February 26, 2013
