Participant Info

First Name
Elizabeth
Last Name
Ingleson
Affiliation
London School of Economics and Political Science
Website URL
https://www.elizabethingleson.com
Keywords
United States, China, Trade, Labour, Capitalism, Diplomacy, Race, Politics
Additional Contact Information

Personal Info

Photo
About Me

Elizabeth Ingleson specialises in the histories of US foreign relations, US-China relations, capitalism, and labor. She is the author of Made in China: When US-China Interests Converged to Transform Global Trade (Harvard University Press). Ingleson has published several articles and chapters on US-China relations and US capitalism and is currently writing a book under contract with Bloomsbury Academic, China and the United States since 1949: An International History.

Ingleson serves on the editorial board of the Cold War History journal and the Conference Committee of Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR). She is co-organiser of two seminars: the North American History Seminar run by the Institute of Historical Research and the LSE-Tufts Seminar in Contemporary International History. Ingleson is Academic Director of the LSE-NUS double degree MA in Asian and International History and a Centre Affiliate at the Phelan US Centre.

Prior to her appointment, Ingleson held fellowships at Yale University, Southern Methodist University’s Center for Presidential History, and the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. She earnt her PhD in history from the University of Sydney.

Recent Publications

Made in China: When US-China Interests Converged to Transform Global Capitalism

For centuries, the vastness of the Chinese market tempted foreign companies in search of customers. But in the 1970s, when the United States and China ended two decades of Cold War isolation, China’s trade relations veered in a very different direction. Elizabeth Ingleson shows how the interests of US business and the Chinese state aligned to reframe the China market: the old dream of plentiful customers gave way to a new vision of low-cost workers by the hundreds of millions. In the process, the world’s largest communist state became an indispensable component of global capitalism.

Drawing on Chinese- and English-language sources, including previously unexplored corporate papers, Ingleson traces this transformation to the actions of Chinese policymakers, US diplomats, maverick entrepreneurs, Chinese American traders, and executives from major US corporations including Boeing, Westinghouse, J. C. Penney, and Chase Manhattan Bank. Long before Walmart and Apple came to China, businesspeople such as Veronica Yhap, Han Fanyu, Suzanne Reynolds, and David Rockefeller instigated a trade revolution with lasting consequences. And while China’s economic reorganization was essential to these connections, Ingleson also highlights an underappreciated but crucial element of the convergence: the US corporate push for deindustrialization and its embrace by politicians.

Reexamining two of the most significant transformations of the 1970s—US-China rapprochement and deindustrialization in the United States—Made in China takes bilateral trade back to its faltering, uncertain beginnings, identifying the tectonic shifts in diplomacy, labor, business, and politics in both countries that laid the foundations of today’s globalized economy.

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674251830

Media Coverage
https://www.spectator.co.uk/podcast/was-chinas-economic-boom-made-in-america/
Country Focus
United States and China
Expertise by Geography
Asia, China, North America
Expertise by Chronology
Modern, 20th century, 21st century
Expertise by Topic
Capitalism, Diplomacy, Economic History, Gender, Politics, Race