Chinese Law in Imperial Eyes

Chinese Law in Imperial Eyes
内容简介:

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.


Li Chen is associate 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, 1...

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  • Nausicaa
    02-24
    目前对中西早期法律冲突的最全面的讨论,史料丰富,对案例、法律思想史、媒体形象进行了系统梳理,截至鸦片战争。作者另有一些新作探讨19世纪下半叶的中西法律交流和清末修律问题。比较重要的概念有sentimental imperialism / affective sovereignty
  • dow
    01-26
    非常精美的后殖民主义中国近代史研究,但是这种范式在此也就到头了
  • 周方怡
    01-01
    "Chinese law played a significant but rarely acknowledged role(negative foil) in shaping the Western discourse and imagination of modernity in different ways: it was frequently cited as a peculiar, paradigmatic, and at times indispensable example to establish the values and concepts that have since come to define modernity in the West..."
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