[We have the following announcement from the Asian Legal History Seminar Series. DRE]
Property, Religion, and State Formation: The Meiji Constitution in the Context of East Asian History
Speaker: Professor Kentaro Matsubara (University of Tokyo)
Respondent: Professor Kevin YL Tan (National University of Singapore)
This presentation discusses some wider significances of the Japanese Constitution of 1889, by looking into its implications in the social changes of the time, both domestically and internationally. It begins by focusing on the relationships between the protection of property and the formation of the state in Tokugawa Japan and Qing China, highlighting the differences in the roles of what we might call religious beliefs. The protection of the private property is seen as a basic function of the modern sovereign state. However, before Japan was reformulated into modern a sovereign state through such processes as the promulgation of the Meiji Constitution, the relationships between state bureaucracy and property regimes functioning at the level of local communities was far more complex than envisaged in such a modern state. Moreover, it greatly differed from the state of affairs in traditional Chinese society. This paper looks into these differences, the different relationships between state bureaucracy and local communities, and the different formations of local communities, in turn tightly connected to roles of religious beliefs and religious power. In conclusion, it will be discussed how the differences in traditional social formation would influence the ways in which China and Japan would integrate themselves into the Westphalian system of sovereign states in the 19th century.
Date: Friday 14th January 2022. Time: 3:00 – 4:30pm (HK TIME) Via Zoom. All are welcome, but registration is required, via this link.]
Conveners
Dr. Michael Ng (HKU Faculty of Law)
Dr. Alastair McClure (HKU Department of Histor
