Chinese Law in Imperial Eyes

Sovereignty, Justice, and Transcultural Politics
Erscheinungsjahr 2015
ISBN: 978-0-231-17374-2
Verlag: Columbia University Press

Buch, Englisch, 416 Seiten, Format (B × H): 162 mm x 239 mm, Gewicht: 742 g

Reihe: Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University

Before the First Opium War (1839;1842), China had control over the terms of its relationship with Western powers, refusing to grant foreigners extraterritorial privileges or sign international treaties fully recognizing their political status. This dynamic has been largely overlooked in prior studies that emphasize China's semicolonial vulnerability after the First Opium War, but it has important implications for the attitudes and policies that have dominated Sino-Western relations over the past three centuries.

Li Chen draws a richly textured portrait of Sino-Western relations during the century before 1843. Focusing on the role of law in Sino-Western encounters, Chen brings fresh insight to the legal disputes, cultural borrowings, and heated negotiations over imperial interests and sovereignty that profoundly shaped Sino-Western conduct in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Western empires endured numerous contradictions, humiliations, and anxieties while maintaining a profitable relationship with the Chinese. This book captures the cultural impact of the ever-shifting balance of economic and political power on the self-imagination of Euroamerican and Chinese actors in their contact zones and beyond. In a narrative populated with Manchu governors, Dutch merchants, American missionaries, Russian Sinologists, French philosophers, Portuguese settlers, and British politicians, Chen investigates the forces that created, contested, and normalized imperial ideology, national sovereignty, cultural tradition, and international order in a critical era. His findings contribute to recent debates on liberalism, humanism, sentimental imperialism, Orientalism, international law, and identity politics.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Chen, Li

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Asiatische Geschichte
• Rechtswissenschaften Recht, Rechtswissenschaft Allgemein Rechtsgeschichte, Recht der Antike
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Internationale Beziehungen
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politikwissenschaft Allgemein Politische Geschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kolonialgeschichte, Geschichte des Imperialismus

Inhaltsverzeichnis

AcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. Imperial Archives and Historiography of Western Extraterritoriality in China2. Translation of the Qing Code and Colonial Origins of Comparative Chinese Law3. Chinese Law in the Formation of European Modernity4. Sentimental Imperialism and the Global Spectacle of Chinese Punishments5. Law and Empire in the Making of the First Opium WarConclusionList of AbbreviationsNotesGlossaryBibliographyIndex

Über Autor(innen)

Li Chen is assistant professor at the University of Toronto and founding president of the International Society for Chinese Law and History. He has published on late imperial and modern Chinese law and society, Sino-Western encounters, and international law and empire, including a volume coedited with Madeleine Zelin called Chinese Law: Knowledge, Practice and Transformation, 1530s;1950s.