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.
A few blurbs:
"Li Chen makes a gift of his expertise in legal history to readers of
every level. He not only reinterprets monumental historical episodes in
the relations between China and Europe but also builds on this platform a
cultural history of European perceptions of punishment, justice, and
state prerogative in China. Anybody considering legal history an arcane
or marginal element of late Qing history and its international relations
will have to reconsider." — Pamela Kyle Crossley
"Chinese Law in Imperial Eyes
is a landmark contribution to the emerging field of Chinese law and
cultural studies. Li Chen's sophisticated analyses and wide-ranging
archive illuminate the complex and fascinating encounter between Chinese
and European legal traditions in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries." — Teemu Ruskola
More information, including an excerpt, is available
here.
