Law and Empire

period to the modern edition. I have every intention of making this chapter prescribed reading for my students. This then brings me to the second aim; namely, whether the translation will be " useful. " Utility is a slippery concept, but I have no doubt that this translation will be used widely and for a long time. It is clear and dynamic without coming across as overly technical or dense. There is a great sense of " dynamic equivalence, " and the retention of technical legal terms in Latin in brackets makes for a very enjoyable read. The text and translation appear on facing pages, and the font is clear and legible. The inclusion of a list of technical Roman-law terms at the end of the third volume also adds another dimension of utility to the translation. I was particularly impressed by the decisions concerning the apparatus criticus and the notes occurring in the original Blume translation. They add a nice touch to the project without leaving the reader with a sense of despair. Regarding my final point; namely, whether the translation will have an impact on various academic fields, I have no doubt that this translation will open up a new world to those not yet familiar with the Codex. It is a vivid text full of life and can be used across many disciplines to show, for example, how Imperial law operated and what the concerns of the Imperial administration were across a span of a number of centuries when the fortunes of the Empire waxed and waned. Of course, no work is above criticism, and, therefore, I offer one small point of critique: the price. Although the volumes are substantial, the price tag places the set out of the price range of most readers. One would hope that the press will invest in a more affordable paperback or online version. This translation certainly deserves to be read as widely as possible. To all three questions posed at the start of this review, the answer is a resounding yes. Bruce Frier and his team of translators (familiar names for anyone working on Roman law in the Anglophone world) are to be thoroughly congratulated for their excellent efforts. My prediction is that this translation will become even more celebrated than the Watson translation of the Digest. Now, if only they would turn their translation efforts next to the Basilika.. .

ABSTRACT: This Note addresses a fundamental ambiguity in the U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015 (“CSLCA”). It is unclear whether the statute authorizes U.S. citizens to extract natural resources from asteroids and other celestial bodies, as is commonly assumed. Alternatively, the statute can be read to merely entitle citizens to resources that have already been obtained, where the regime for actually obtaining such resources remains undetermined. The Note resolves this issue in favor of the interpretation that best aligns with international law and policy. It first shows that the relevant elements of international law—the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 (“OST”) and customary international law (“CIL”)—do not resolve the issue. The Note then adopts a broader approach by considering the OST’s anti-imperial policy. By engaging scholarship on law, colonialism, and empire, this approach centers Global South States in space law discourse. This approach reveals two ways in which the more commonly accepted interpretation of the CSLCA cuts against the anti-imperial policy of the OST, related to the distinction between private and State extraction and to State conferral of property rights. To avoid contradicting these policy concerns, the CSLCA should be read narrowly, such that it leaves open future determination of the space resources regime. Finally, the Note offers guidance for such a regime. It argues that CIL development based on subsequent legislation or mining would let Global North States asymmetrically shape international law, which would contradict the OST’s anti-imperial policy. Instead, the Note recommends multilateral agreements that employ organizationally diverse models, which mix collective and private ownership. The Note ends by reflecting on lingering questions in the context of development and the Global South.

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2018 Salzburg Global Seminar in Washington, DC as part of the Salzburg Cutler Fellowship.

Large-scale population transfers are immensely disruptive. Interestingly, though, their legal status has shifted considerably over time. In this book, Umut Özsu situates population transfer within the broader history of international law by examining its emergence as a legally formalized mechanism of nation-building in the early twentieth century. The book's principal focus is the 1922-34 compulsory exchange of minorities between Greece and Turkey, a crucially important endeavour whose legal dimensions remain under-scrutinized. Drawing upon historical sociology and economic history in addition to positive international law, the book interrogates received assumptions about international law's history by exploring the "semi-peripheral" context within which legally formalized population transfers came to arise.

Supported by the League of Nations, the 1922-34 population exchange reconfigured the demographic composition of Greece and Turkey with the aim of stabilizing a region that was regarded neither as European nor as non-European. The scope and ambition of the undertaking was staggering: over one million were expelled from Turkey, and over a quarter of a million were expelled from Greece. The book begins by assessing minority protection's development into an instrument of intra-European governance during the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It then shows how population transfer emerged in the 1910s and 1920s as a radical alternative to minority protection in Anatolia and the Balkans, focusing in particular on the 1922-3 Conference of Lausanne, at which a peace settlement formalizing the compulsory Greek-Turkish exchange was concluded. Finally, it analyses the Permanent Court of International Justice's 1925 advisory opinion in Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations, contextualizing it in the wide-ranging debates concerning humanitarianism and internationalism that pervaded much of the exchange process.

“Jewish Women in Venetian Candia: Negotiating Intercommunal Contact in a Premodern Colonial City, 1300-1500.” In Religious Cohabitation in European Towns (10th-15th Centuries), eds. John Tolan and Stéphane Boissellier, 293-309. Turnhout: Brepols, 2015.

Assistant Professor Weiting Guo of the Department of History is among the recipients of the 2019 Research Grant for Foreign Scholars in Chinese Studies. The awards were created in 1989 by the Center for Chinese Studies in Taiwan and are given in recognition of outstanding research on Taiwanese or Chinese studies.
Dr. Guo joined the Department of History at SFU in 2015, teaching a wide range of courses in Chinese, Taiwanese, and East Asian history. His research concerns the social and legal history of late imperial China and nineteenth-century Taiwan, especially the dynamic relationship between law and disorder. His current book manuscript, Justice for the Empire: Summary Execution and the Legal Culture in Qing China, examines the dialectical process of legal formation of empire, with a focus on the tension between judicial expediency and the cost of political decentralization in the Qing Empire (1636–1912). He is a participant in a collaborative project called Bodies and Structures: Deep-Mapping the Spaces of Modern East Asian History, coordinated by University of California Santa Barbara and North Carolina State University. He is a co-editor of the Routledge Companion to Chinese Legal History (Routledge, forthcoming).

This paper studies the implication of law in the Roman imperial project. It uses the creation of the legal framework for how Romans could acquire landholdings in the provinces of the Greek East in the second and first centuries BC as a case study in order to propose an alternative to the top-down/bottom-up dichotomy that characterizes prevailing approaches. By tracing the different legal arenas in which this framework was developed--Roman jurisprudence, provincial edicts, the senate in Rome--and the different social groups that participated in developing this framework in these arenas--Romans in the provinces, the members of Greek cities there, and Rome’s political elite--this study reveals law in the empire as a site of political debate, not between ruler and ruled, but between several competing groups that used law to shape and contest what the empire should mean for them.

The Council of Trent established the requirements that a marriage be celebrated by the parish priest and two or more witnesses be present at the marriage (1563), but neglected to specify who the parish priest was. The decrees provoked confusion among both laymen and churchmen. Traces thereof can be found in the hitherto essentially unexplored documentation of The Congregation of the Council. This institution was founded in 1564 specifically to resolve the questions that arose all over the catholic world by the application of the decrees promulgated at Trent. The related records are held in the Vatican Secret Archive. Through an examination of this documentation, complemented by files of the Holy Office the author analyzes how the new rules were understood, experienced, used, circumvented, and manipulated both by laymen and churchmen in order to end an unwanted marriage, to facilitate a union that was socially transgressive, opposed by family, or even heterodox, and to respond to pastoral concerns.

The development of the law of riparian rights in the Anglo-American world in the nineteenth century has been analyzed from several points of view, including economic property theory and Marxian legal history. Transnational aspects of the subject have not been neglected, as some have highlighted the transatlantic framework in which this body of doctrine developed, and others have examined the use of Continental, civil law sources by some of the American jurists responsible for that development. Yet the inter-imperial aspect of this story, in particular the meeting of the laws of the British and French Empires, has gone unremarked.

This paper examines the crossed histories of English common law, French civil law, and American law in the jurisprudence of water rights in Lower Canada/Canada East/Quebec in the mid-nineteenth century, and the influence of this jurisprudence on the developing water law of the British Empire.

Abstract:
Western extraterritoriality in China (1842-1943) exerted an enormous impact on Sino-Western relations and on modern Chinese national identity and historical consciousness. The Lady Hughes dispute in Canton [Guangdong] in 1784 has been the most powerful and often the sole piece of “evidence” for numerous Western commentators and historians over the past two centuries to argue that imperial Chinese law and judicial practices were too arbitrary and sanguinary to govern “civilized” Westerners in China. This discourse has dominated our understanding of not only this critical stage of modern Sino-Western relations but also late imperial China’s law, politics, and diplomacy. Utilizing both original English and Chinese records, this paper provides a comprehensive, critical reexamination of this landmark international dispute and its far-reaching historiographic impact. It argues that the “colonial archives” of such early Sino-British legal disputes should be “read against the grain” to recover the histories that have been suppressed or almost erased by the unequal relations of power between the actors involved. Furthermore, as a micro-history, this case study also sheds new light on the complex process of accommodation and contestation between two empires and their respective agents in South China, with conflicting claims to imperial power and prestige. That the central administrators and the local agents on both sides had different priorities complicated the situation even further. The conventional wisdom on late imperial China’s law and international relations that has relied upon the traditional, over-simplistic representations of this and similar legal disputes should be reevaluated.

内容摘要：
在1840年前一百多年间的中英贸易史中,英方(在1834年前由东印度公司所代表)只有在1784年的修斯夫人号船员[Lady Hughes]枪杀案中,才将英国凶手交给清朝政府审判法办。本案件的最终结果是乾隆皇帝下旨, 着广东巡抚将英国凶手当众绞死。可能当事人谁也没料到这一普通的凶杀案件, 会成为中外近代关系史上影响最为久远的事件。它不仅成为英国派出第一个访华外交使团的重要原因,并被英国政府和国会援引, 作为在华建立英国法庭以及在鸦片战争后要求获得治外法权的重要理由。在随后两个世纪中, 众多历史学家和国际法学家也用这一案件来为西方延续了一个世纪的治外法权辩护,并进而演绎出一种影响深远的史学理论,认为落后的中国传统法律政治制度和外交政策与西方现代文明制度间的差异是近代中西冲突的根源。但很少有学者认真研究过这件案子的原始档案,更罕有学者认真对照中国和英国在1784 年(而不是1840年、1884年、或者是1984年)的法律来探讨该案件的处理过程和结果。本文利用英国东印度公司关于本案件和其它相关案件的原始档案和现存的中文资料, 重新考察这一重要的国际争端。
不同于此前的主流史学论述,本文的主要发现简单归纳如下: (1)根据1784年后英国及近代西方学者的通行说法,在修斯夫人号案件中表现出来的中国法律和执法的严酷、野蛮和腐败,是西方抵制中国管辖权,甚至纵容杀人放火和鸦片走私的原因。但本文认为这不过是英国为其早在1670年就开始谋求在华治外法权的做法而构建的一个似是而非的理由; (2)过去两个多世纪中对这一案件的解读存在重大的史实错误或偏差, 其主要原因是忽略了英文官方档案乃“殖民者档案,”没有对其进行批判性研究和对比性审读,而是近乎全盘接受其观点和“事实”表述。作者认为,在英方官方档案中,中方代表和当事人如同英国殖民者档案中的被殖民者,没有自己的声音和主体性,被英国当事人的预设立场和叙述模式所笼罩。我们可以借鉴后殖民研究学者的方法,对这些档案进行“逆文理”式处理(read against the grain), 利用这些殖民档案来(部分)再现历史事件本相; (3) 但本文不仅仅是为了驳斥长期以来关于该案件以及由此衍生的关于中西近代关系和中国法律传统的史学观点, 而是力图重现被垄断性史学论述(master narrative)所掩盖的历史事件复杂性, 并进而揭示历史“真相”的构建过程。史学界流行以文化或文明冲突论来解释近代中国和西方之间的矛盾。但本文认为这种传统观点不仅经常缺乏充足的事实根据,也阻碍了我们重型认识国际间政治和文化霸权的深远历史影响。本文通过资料分析和对比, 认为修斯夫人号事件更多地反映出中英作为两个实力此消彼长的帝国为了维护自己的政治及经济利益、主权、帝国尊严、和统治秩序而展开的交锋, 而并非所谓的落后野蛮的中国(东方)法律文化制度与先进文明的西方法律文化制度间的不可避免的争端。本文再现了在广东的中英双方地方官员之间的紧张角力和谈判，以及他们如何在各自的政治和法律框架下谋求自己的利益最大化。本文是作者博士论文中所涉及的一个案例研究, 希望从微观史和从批判性文化史的角度, 来重新考察法律、文化帝国主义与近代中西关系三者的关系: 以及知识、权力和历史“真相”三者如何影响了文化主体性以及现代性的形成。

In this ambitious study, Li Chen excavates the early formation of European characterizations of China as the " quintessential oriental despotism " over the roughly 150 years preceding the First Opium War. By then, the stereotype of Chinese law as irredeemably brutal and unjust had emerged as a dominant narrative with sufficient strength to underwrite western demands for extraterritorial privilege. While a growing number of scholars have of late begun to deconstruct this orientalist discourse, Chen's contribution begins with a disarmingly simple question the answer to which is usually merely assumed: precisely how did this particular discursive formation acquire such normative and epistemic authority as to eclipse alternative historical narratives and continue to shape western views of China for the next two centuries? Chen's answer to this question is an empirically as well as theoretically masterful study that revisits divergent and often competing discursive formations beginning with the first publication of Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws in 1748 to the Opium War. Chen begins with a critique of the once paradigmatic narrative that Sino-western conflict grew inevitably from a clash of incommensurable cultures. By itself, this is not particularly new or insightful. What sets Chen apart is his challenge to revisionist historians, including Edward Said, who presume a pre-existing internal coherence and " totalizing hegemony " of colonial power and discourse. With an abundance of archival documentation , Chen demonstrates that from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, the position of western nations vis-à-vis the Qing Empire was manifestly not marked by strength or hegemony but, rather, by precarious vulnerability and anxiety. The discursive structures of Euro-American dominance did not spring full-blown into existence but were instead very much constructed in a process of cultural, racial, and national boundary-making within the " contact zones " of empires. Throughout his study, Chen uncovers the multiple voices, competing interests and internal contradictions at the emergence of universalizing discourses of liberalism, humanitarianism, international law and, indeed, modern civilization. Chen sets forth his arguments over the course of five roughly chronological case studies, each of which can be read alone but which nonetheless build upon each other to form a satisfying whole. He begins with a reexamination of the Lady Hughes case of 1784, wherein a gunner aboard a British ship anchored near Guangzhou fired in salute to a departing Dutch ship, hitting a Chinese vessel and killing one of its crew. Several days later, the gunner was turned over to Chinese authorities, tried and executed.

By examining some of the injury claims of state actors in the recent history of Sino-foreign relations and other international contexts, Li Chen shows that claiming injury or victimhood has been unusually popular not just among the dominated nations but also among the most dominant empires over the last few centuries. He argues that the claim of injury or victimization provides a unique source of legal and moral legitimacy for states, especially those states that are struggling to justify their efforts to maintain power at home or achieve imperial ambitions abroad. His analysis draws critical attention to the power politics and discourses that have served to make certain injuries worth more recognition and retaliation than others. This constructed hierarchy of injuries and rights to reparation and revenge has significantly contributed to the inequities and rampant violence that characterize the structure of modern international relations. Rethinking the under-analyzed victim politics may help us find more effective ways to end the vicious cycle of responding to injury and violence with more injury and violence.

In the essay,  he first sketches out the moral and legal implications of injury claims or victimhood in international relations. Then, he draws examples from the history of Sino-Western relations to demonstrate why and how dominant empires frequently made claims of injury against a militarily weaker state. The third section analyzes the victim politics that has conditioned the differential representation and treatment of injury claims. The essay concludes with a brief discussion of the victimhood claimed by postwar Japan and more recently the United States as (former) dominant powers to offer some reflections on why it is time to stop justifying the infliction of new violence and injury on the grounds of one’s own suffering.

The main sources for my article are the files concerning dispensations for mixed marriages held in the Archive of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (the Holy Office). My article analyses the tension between two Roman Catholic attitudes toward Catholic women in mixed marriages: the hope that they would serve a missionary role, on the one hand, and the fear that they would succumb to heresy, on the other. Debates within the Holy Office over granting these dispensations show that both conceptions had ancient roots, the first going back to the Roman era, the second to the twelfth century, and then particularly emphasised after the Council of Trent. Studies of mixed marriages in Protestant end Orthodox regions suggest many similarities to the Catholic policies examined here, both regarding the woman’s missionary function and especially regarding the risk of the woman’s apostasy and the meth-ods developed to avoid this.

A personal appreciation of Wes Pue, a leading light of Canadian legal history who is best known for his richly detailed, ground-breaking research which unravelled the ways in which lawyers and legal education shaped culture, cultural authority, identity, politics and the British empire in England and its Empire from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century.

From: _Critical Analysis of Law_ 3 (2016): 114-132. For the whole volume of excellent articles, see: http://cal.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/cal/index.
ABSTRACT: Although medieval rabbinic law generally forbade Jews from suing their co-religionists in state courts, this practice was widely accepted among some Mediterranean Jewish communities. This study focuses on one such community, the Jews of Venetian Crete's capital city of Candia, during the century following the Black Death (ca. 1350-1450). Court records indicate that Candiote Jews quite often sued each other in Venice's colonial courts. Unlike many other medieval Jewish communities, the rabbinical leadership of Candia took this intra-Jewish litigation as a given. Moreover, these leaders themselves ac-cessed Venetian justice to sue fellow Jews. Among the factors that motivated Jewish use of the Venetian court was a special accommodation given to Cretan Jews: when litigation in the colonial court dealt with Jews' marriages or divorces, judges were obligated to ad-judicate according to Jewish law. Many Candiote Jews utilized this personal law privilege, and the Venetian court actively implemented it. The Catholic judges of the colonial court in Crete learned about Jewish law mostly from the litigants themselves, and not from a panel of rabbinic experts, giving these Jewish litigants significant agency in shaping not only the outcome of their marriage and divorce cases but also the government's understanding of Jewish law.

This chapter explores the interpretations given by various late medieval authors of the universal census which, according to the Gospel of Luke (2:1–2), was ordered by Augustus at the time of Jesus’s birth. After some remarks on the juridical institution of the census in ancient Rome, and on the theological translation of this institution developed by Christian thinkers such as Ambrose and Orosius, the use of this translation in certain medieval political and juridical texts to discuss the legitimacy and universality of imperial authority is examined. A number of sources, including the Quaestiones de iuris subtilitatibus, Ptolemy of Lucca’s De regimine principum, Dante’s De Monarchia, Bartolus of Saxoferratus’ comment on the lex ‘Hostes’, Ockham’s Breviloquium de principatu tyrannico, and the Somnium Viridarii, are considered. The aim of the chapter is twofold. It argues that the political value of Luke’s pericope should be reassessed, which requires that the passage be considered alongside other, nowadays better-known biblical references – such as Matthew 22:21, Rom 13:1–7, 1Pet 2:13–14, John 19:11 – that were so importantly used in discussions of both the extent of political submission and the relationship between spiritual and temporal authority from Christian perspectives. It also demonstrates that the census, and the invocation of a universal authority implicit to it, provides an excellent example of the overlapping and intertwining of theological, political, and juridical conceptualisations and practices in Western thought. On this ground, the historical understanding of the conceptualisation of ‘universal authority’, ‘empire’ and ‘emperor’ in the Western tradition can then be deepened.
* This chapter is part of a project that has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 665958.

Lawyers' Empire is a pioneering volume of richly detailed essays about history, law and the legal profession that together present a significant contribution to common law understandings of law's travels across times and places and colonial regimes. Adopting simultaneously a local and transnational lens, Lawyers' Empire reveals the role of the legal profession in the formation of national identities and cultural practices woven through with legal myths, competing narratives and contradictory claims to authority. This is a groundbreaking volume, underscoring the colonial residues in all histories of the common law legal profession. Lawyers' Empire is animated by a comparative frame of reference embracing Canada, England, France, Nigeria and the United States. It is sustained by substantial empirical research, nuanced insightful analysis, an ability to connect details in order to illuminate the role of law in society and an exceptionally wide range of theoretical and multi-disciplinary perspectives. It traverses a broad range of topics and advances the subject areas of English, Canadian and colonial legal history (notably, the histories of legal professions and legal education); comparative legal professions and comparative legal history; legal professionalism and legal education; colonialism and empire building; and socio-legal and law and society approaches to law, lawyers and society. On all of these topics Lawyers' Empire makes a significant contribution to the legal, historical, political, social, cultural and imperial dimensions of law in society. Added to this there is clarity of exposition, a critical questioning, and a distinctive penchant for irony and humor, particularly when confronted by "unfounded prejudices, assumed histories, clichés and stock responses" (Pue, 2016, p. 5) that renders this book a work of striking breadth and exceptional quality. Hence Harry Arthurs' observation in this collection that: Lawyers' Empire is more than an outstanding collection of essays on the social and cultural history of lawyers. It is an intellectual provocation to anyone interested in their contemporary role in the legal system. Specifically, Lawyers' Empire enlarges cultural approaches to law, legal education and lawyers and our understanding of their cultural and political significance. Its location of lawyers in the context of colonialization and empire building is rare and insightful, as is the comparative and transnational treatment of its subject-matter.

This is the reading list I created for my Undergraduate Year 3 'Special Subject' 'Law, Politics and Society across the British Empire.' This consists of two twinned modules - on historical sources and historiography - which are taught simultaneously. I am looking to develop this into a textbook, so I am looking for suggestions, thanks!

This article situates the category of the personal law in late colonial India in the nineteenth-century genealogy of the idea of family law. In doing so, it also looks at a case between Indian Muslim spouses before the famed judge and Islamic modernist Syed Mahmood. Involving the doctrine of the restitution of conjugal rights, the case was conducted in the shadow of a question about whether marriage was a status or contract that had a much wider resonance in the late nineteenth century Anglo-common law world. The overall goal of the article is to critically reconsider a common view about legal modernization in the long nineteenth century Afro-Asian arena as a process of domesticating native juridical tradition to the sphere of family affairs and personal status. Working along a distinct path from other new scholarship on law and empire that is moving past this thesis in the specific context of the nineteenth century Islamicate world, I suggest that the domestication of the sharīʿa should instead be seen as part of what some have called the globalization of classical legal thought after 1850. Because the era of supposed domestication was still undoubtedly an important point of reference for later exponents of political Islam, the article also argues that seeing the categories of personal law and family law genealogically has important implications for the problem of translation that complicates any equivalence between “Islamic law” and “sharīʿa” (and between “modern law” and Afro-Asian juridical tradition more generally). This is because even though the translation problem is acknowledged in theory, it has been all too easy to forget in scholarly practice. In the context of contemporary territorial-bureaucratic states in the Muslim world more specifically, therefore, the article argues that seeing personal law and family law genealogically ultimately sharpens the translation problem in a way that must undermine any ideal of a sharīʿa-based rule of Islamic law.

This volume critically evaluates the latest legal reform of China, covering major areas such as trade and securities law, online privacy law, criminal law, human rights and international law. It represents a bold departure from the most recent works on Chinese legal reform by engaging the ideas of experts in contemporary Chinese law with the archival scholarship of Chinese legal historians. This unique interdisciplinary feature affords readers a more nuanced view of the complexities and specificities of how China has problematised legal reforms in various historical contexts when building a progressive yet sustainable legal system. This volume appraises the most current reform in Chinese law by considering China's engagement with globalisation, increasingly complicated domestic situation and historical legal transplantation experiences. It will be of huge interest to students, researchers and practitioners interested in Chinese law and policy, China and Asian studies and Chinese legal history.

Provides a critical evaluation of the latest reform in Chinese law and China's global interactions in law, politics and international relations
Explores ideas of contemporary Chinese law with historical perspectives that provides a unique insight into the developments of its legal system
Presents different perspectives to help readers gain a better understanding of the ongoing Chinese legal reform and a fuller picture of the developing Chinese legal system

Read more at http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/law/comparative-law/chinese-legal-reform-and-global-legal-order-adoption-and-adaptation#T5SDXcYUkQstzxif.99

In this nuanced and convincing study, Li Chen not only probes why and how oversimplified, reduc-tive culturalist interpretations of Sino-Western legal collisions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries became dominant, but also pushes past the discourses of Euro-Americentric hegemonic creep typically found in revisionist scholarship. Eschewing tidy theory-based narratives, Chen instead embraces Chakrabarty's characterization of transcultural and/or transimperial encounters as " contradictory , plural, and heterogeneous struggles whose outcomes are never predictable, even retrospectively " (p. 250). Often revisited and deconstructed are conflations of perceived moral corruption and despotism in the Qing Dynasty with the actual integrity and sophistication of Chinese law. Chen argues in five coherent chapters that normative assumptions of cultural hierarchy, combined with the parochial looking glass of Western legal thought, severely complicated the task of viewing the Chinese legal regime on its objective merits. Nonetheless the Western racialization of international law that came to enable its arbitrary application evolved via uneven, sporadic responses to historical episodes, rather than in inevitable hegemonic fashion. Indeed, as Chen notes, British legal reforms well into the early nineteenth century stressed a scale of proportionate punishment attributed to the Qing Code—evincing some respect for a Chinese legal system that would be cast and recast in different trappings of legitimacy by the West (a practice which continues into the present day). However, while transnational legal influences could be incorporated into domestic law, the process was selective and had little bearing on the matter of the opium trade, specifically bilateral failures to reach a compromise over it. Chen observes that Qing efforts to stall the flow of opium employed legal arguments that appeared to make some headway, but ultimately suffered collaterally from persistent British demands that compensation be paid for opium destroyed by a Qing special commissioner. Where—and what—was international law in the midst of this struggle of comparative legal interpretation? The author is excellent in tracing how the fragile concept of comity then as now bent beneath shifting national economic interests, subject to political winds. Chen also proves persuasive in his coverage of " emotional communities, " marked by convergent reactions en masse in the face of Chinese legal and social practices, capable of spanning national or international communities. He examines " the ways in which emotions and sentiment were disciplined , standardized, and mobilized to serve particular cultural and political agendas, " (p. 164) a non-linear process that did not develop overnight. Repeated reconstructions of and fixations with Chinese judicial violence reinforced over time a sense of the West's superiority, cultural and legal, prompting (re)action. Crucially, according to the author, the Western empires rarely predicated their China policies on political or military domination, instead equating their interventions with the protection of life, property, treaty rights, and/or national feeling—further obfuscating the gray area of legal and moral norms in which they operated. It did not help that the Chinese periodically fanned the flames by themselves publishing on the hardships of " others " in their courts, an Journal of East Asian Studies (2017), page 1 of 2

From the Orient, light; from the Occident, law: such has been the immemorial Western image of east-west transcultural exchange. This fascinating new study in transnational legal history challenges this notion, even as it provides a wealth of new information about Sino-Western cultural interaction in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Like a skilled surgeon, Li Chen peels away the layers of cant, misunderstanding, and linguistic confusion to reveal the reality of law along the China coast during this period. Western traders in China in the early nineteenth century claimed that they needed extraterritoriality to protect them from the barbarity of Chinese law. But as Chen shows in his discussion of the Lady Hughes case of 1784, Chinese law and British law were in fact quite similar, and decreed the same sanction for the gunner who was accused of killing two Chinese as he fired a salute to a departing ship. Westerners needed extraterritoriality not because of the primitive quality of Chinese law, but because of their own insecurity in a world whose language and customs were incomprehensible to them. Chen's work also provides the first substantial account of the life and work of Sir George Thomas Staunton (1781–1859), who was a page boy for George Macartney, Britain's first envoy to Beijing. Staunton was also the first translator of the Qing code, and a prominent advocate of a British military response in the Opium War (1839–1842). Evidence may be thinner for the influence of Chinese law on the formation of European modernity, the subject of Chen's third chapter, but the discussion of the conceptual differences between Chinese and Western legal orders, public and private, codified and non-codified law is so fascinating and fundamental that it stands as one of the signal contributions of the volume. Chapter 4 shows how the spectacle of Chinese executions wonderfully focused the mind of Western observers on Chinese cruelty. Westerners in China agitated for mitigation of the cruelty they perceived; however, they could not restrain themselves from visiting execution grounds. Chen's last chapter addresses the role of law in the opium crisis of 1839–1840. The British conversion of support for tawdry drug dealers into a defense of legal principle has long been a staple of Opium War narratives. But the story has never been told in the detail that is here, which includes discussion of the nineteenth-century argument that barbarian states like China should be excluded from the provisions of international law, and a more thorough treatment of the activities of Charles Elliot. Elliot, who is often treated as a somewhat passive figure, emerges in Chen's account as the central actor in the opium drama. By collecting opium from merchants and surrendering it to China on behalf of the British Crown, he set the conflict up as one requiring a British military response to secure reparations for the opium surrendered.

Early modern literature played a key role in the formation of the legal justification for imperialism. As the English colonial enterprise developed, the existing legal tradition of common law no longer solved the moral dilemmas of the new world order, in which England had become, instead of a victim of Catholic enemies, an aggressive force with its own overseas territories. Writers of romance fiction employed narrative strategies in order to resolve this difficulty and, in the process, provided a legal basis for English imperialism. Brian Lockey analyses works by such authors as Shakespeare, Spenser and Sidney in the light of these legal discourses, and uncovers new contexts for the genre of romance. Scholars of early modern literature, as well as those interested in the history of law as the British Empire emerged, will learn much from this insightful and ambitious study.