Chinese Law in Imperial Eyes - Sovereignty, Justice, and Transcultural Politics (Paperback)

How did American schoolchildren, French philosophers, Russian Sinologists, Dutch merchants, and British lawyers imagine China and Chinese law? What happened when agents of presumably dominant Western empires had to endure the humiliations and anxieties of maintaining a profitable but precarious relationship with China? In Chinese Law in Imperial Eyes, Li Chen provides a richly textured analysis of these related issues and their intersection with law, culture, and politics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Using a wide array of sources, Chen's study focuses on the power dynamics of Sino-Western relations during the formative century before the First Opium War (1839-1842). He highlights the centrality of law to modern imperial ideology and politics and brings new insight to the origins of comparative Chinese law in the West, the First Opium War, and foreign extraterritoriality in China. The shifting balance of economic and political power formed and transformed knowledge of China and Chinese law in different contact zones. Chen argues that recovering the variegated and contradictory roles of Chinese law in Western "modernization" helps provincialize the subsequent Euro-Americentric discourse of global modernity. Chen draws attention to important yet underanalyzed sites in which imperial sovereignty, national identity, cultural tradition, or international law and order were defined and restructured. His valuable case studies show how constructed differences between societies were hardened into cultural or racial boundaries and then politicized to rationalize international conflicts and hierarchy.

General

Imprint:	Columbia University Press
Country of origin:	United States
Series:	Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University
Release date:	April 2018
Authors:	Li Chen
Dimensions:	229 x 152 x 26mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback - Trade
Pages:	416
ISBN-13:	978-0-231-17375-9
Categories:	Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > General Books > Law > Laws of other jurisdictions & general law > General Books > Humanities > History > Asian / Middle Eastern history > General Books > History > Asian / Middle Eastern history > General
LSN:	0-231-17375-X
Barcode:	9780231173759

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