This dissertation examines the social and economic contours of everyday life and grassroots relations between Chinese, Europeans, and Americans on the South China Coast in the decades before the first Opium War (1839-1842). Most scholarship has painted a bleak portrait of this era’s interactions between China and the West, with stories of cross-cultural misunderstanding, legal disputes, and opium smuggling taking the fore in a conflict-centered narrative of the period preceding the Opium War. This dissertation, however, shows that conflict and misunderstanding were far from representative. Through a bottom-up reassessment of the daily lives and incentives of a multitude of actors on the South China Coast—merchants, sailors, interpreters, coolies, cooks, laundrywomen, prostitutes, pirates—it argues that active transnational problem solving and cooperation, not conflict, were in fact the norm. Driven by shared economic incentives, most Chinese individuals worked flexibly with their foreign counterparts to resolve problems on the ground level, long before they wended their way upward. By highlighting these processes of negotiation and relationship building, this research offers not only a substantial revision to how scholars understand the global history of late imperial China but also a more sensitive understanding of how people from different parts of the world, holding different worldviews, could make sense of and engage with one another in their daily lives.