Imperial Stewards: Chinese Art and the Making of America's Pacific Century

From the Gilded Age to World War II, elite collectors and museums in the United States transformed from owning a smattering of Chinese porcelain as curios to possessing some of the world's largest and most sophisticated collections of Chinese art. Imperial Stewards argues that, beyond aesthetic taste and economics, geopolitics were critical to this transformation. Collecting and studying Chinese art and antiquities honed Americans' belief that they should dominate Asia and the Pacific Ocean...