Emily Whewell, a Senior Researcher at the
Max Planck Institute for European Legal History, has published Law across imperial borders:
British consuls and colonial connections on China's western frontiers, 1880-1943 (Manchester University Press):
Law across imperial borders offers new perspectives on the complex legal connections between Britain's presence in Western China in the western frontier regions of Yunnan and Xinjiang, and the British colonies of Burma and India. Bringing together a transnational methodology with a social-legal focus, it demonstrates how inter-Asian mobility across frontiers shaped British authority in contested frontier regions of China. It examines the role of a range of actors who helped create, constitute and contest legal practice on the frontier-including consuls, indigenous elites and cultural mediators. The book will be of interest to historians of China, the British Empire in Asia and legal history.
Introduction
Part I: The Burma-China frontier
1 Treaty-making and treaty-breaking: transfrontier salt and opium, 1904-11
2 On the move: people crossing the frontier, 1911-25
3 Consuls and Frontier Meetings, 1909-35
Part II: Through the mountains and across the desert: Xinjiang
4 Isolation and connection: law between semicolonial China and the Raj
5 Administering justice and mediating local custom
6 The British end game in Xinjiang: the decline of consular rights, 1917-39
Conclusion
–Dan Ernst
