Dr. Otis Edwards specializes in global economic history, with particular focus on the historical intersections of capital, commerce, and elite social structures between China and the United States. With over three decades of professional experience in China’s manufacturing export sector, Otis brings a unique perspective to his academic work, drawing on firsthand knowledge of transnational business networks and cross-cultural exchange. His research investigates the dynamic relationships among capital flows, credit systems, and elite privilege in the context of nineteenth-century global trade. Otis’s doctoral work explores the interconnections between London capital markets, U.S. monetary policy, and global commodity flows, and how they shaped Sino-American trade in the early 1800s. He also investigates the personal narratives of American men and women abroad during this period pertaining to observed performances of reputation management and of wealth preservation within elite social groups in service of fiscal obligation and privilege.

RESEARCH

Research Interests

• Theories and History of Capital
• 19C Global Capitalism and Commodities
• Merchant Banking and Credit
• Gender, Wealth and Privilege

PUBLICATIONS

SELECTED CONFERENCE PAPERS

Enterprise and Economy in Modern China Conference at HKU, 23 August 2025.
Paper title: “Reconfiguring Trade: London Finance, Lintin Island, and the Transformation of the Opium Economy in Early Nineteenth-Century Canton.”

Graduate Conference, Resistance in History: From Transgression to Transformation, Northwestern University, 20 April 2018.
Paper title: “Walk This Way: Americans Refashioning the Etiquette of Walking in Canton and Macao.”

KEYNOTE LECTURES

Pickering House Museum Salem Massachusetts, 27 Feb 2022.
Paper title: “John Pickering Study of Native Languages: Contesting Accepted Notions of Inferiority.”

Hamilton Hall, Salem, Massachusetts, 17 June 2022.
Paper title: “The Remond Family: The Labor of Catering to Salem’s Mercantile Aristocracy on Chestnut Street.”

Forbes House Museum, Milton, Massachusetts, 15 Sept. 2022.
Paper title: “Opium and Corporate Smuggling: Robert Bennet Forbes and the Barque Lintin, 1830 – 1842.”

Pickering House Museum Salem Massachusetts, 12 Feb 2023.
Paper title: “Farm to Market: Timothy Pickering and the Essex Agricultural Society.”

Hamilton Hall, Salem, Massachusetts, 13 April 2025.
Paper title: “More Than a Dancefloor: The Political and Social Constructions of Dancing in the Federalist Era.”

TEACHING AND COURSES TAUGHT

• HIST2154 American Capitalism in the Long Nineteenth Century