ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has been fifteen years in the making. It began as a side project, grew into an article, and then became a book. As such it has accumulated many debts. I am grateful to the many colleagues who read it in whole or in part, and I am especially grateful to colleagues who commented on or discussed it, including David Smith and Mark Hampton at Lingnan University, Kendall Johnson at the University of Hong Kong, Frederic Grant Jr. and my colleagues in the Hong Kong American history reading group. Barbara Clark Smith provided detailed commentary. Mary Beth Norton commented extensively on an earlier draft while finalizing her own book, 1774, and read other bits later on. She entertained queries with a grasp of sources that only a scholar deep into similar material could provide, allowing me to see whether there was “something there” at many points. I am especially grateful to the peer reviewers for extensive and thoughtful commentary.

Major funding for this project was provided by a grant from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (Project No. HKU 17615318). Additional support was provided by the University of Hong Kong, the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello, and Lingnan University.

The editors and staff at Cornell University Press, Sarah Grossman foremost among them, have been especially helpful and understanding, and this book is the beneficiary of many other pairs of hands at Cornell and elsewhere.

I owe a profound debt to myriad archivists for their usual indispensable work but especially to those who, during COVID, transformed themselves into research librarians, looking up and emailing documents I could no longer consult in person and answering queries. This includes Jayne Ptolemy and Terese Murphy at the Clements Library, University of Michigan; Lara Szypszak and others at the Library of Congress; Elizabeth Bouvier and Christopher Carter at the Supreme Court Judicial Archive (Massachusetts Archives); Katie Clark at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; Carley Altenburger at the Winterthur Museum, Gardens & Library; Micah Connor at the Maryland Center for History and Culture; Kenneth Carlson at the Rhode Island State Archives; Edward O’Reilly at the New-York Historical Society; Maurice Klapwald at the New York Public Library; Abby Battis at the Beverly Historical Society; the Harvard University Archives reference staff; Jennifer Keefe at the Massachusetts Historical Society; Amelia Holmes at the Nantucket Historical Association; Mary Ellen Budney at the Beinecke Library, Yale University; Douglas Mayo at the Rockefeller Library, Colonial Williamsburg; the staff at the Albert and Shirley Small Library, University of Virginia; Lindsay Sheldon at the Washington College library; Brian Burford at the New Hampshire State Archives; and Jacob Hopkins at Swem Special Collections, College of William and Mary.

Many others contributed along the way, including Emily Matchar, who copyedited an earlier draft; Jeremy Land and Chris Nierstrasz, who helped interpret a thorny source; and Vanessa Ogle, David Naumec, Donald C. Carleton Jr., and Robert Allison, who helped with research queries.

This work would have been impossible without the labor of research assistants based in Hong Kong, the United States, Britain, and Canada. They combed distant archives and worked on large datasets. These include JP Fetherson, Sophie Hess, Xiao Wenquan, Zachary Dorner, Alexey Kritchal, Katherine Smoak, Tsui Yuen, Christopher Consolino, Neal Polhemus, Enyi Hu, Eric Nichol, Angie Nichol, Daniel Hart, Jordan Smith, Tina Hampson, Virginia Clark, Benjamin Sacks, Jessica Auer, Michelle Farais, and Mark Markov.

I am especially grateful to my family for putting up with me as I worked on this.