ABSTRACT
California was bound by trade to the Pacific Rim. Already in the first half of the nineteenth century, California’s products, such as hides, tallow, furs, horses, and lumber, reached markets in the Pacific ports of Latin America, Mexico, Hawaii, and China, and goods from or transshipped through those ports found a market in California. Reflecting its importance, trade is a recurring theme in this volume. Trade across the Pacific predated California’s active participation in it (Chapter 2). The French presence in California was tied in part to trade (Chapter 7), and almost as soon as the New Almaden mine was recognized as a source for quicksilver it became an important item in trade (Chapter 13). An open question, however, is how this trade was organized.
