Chinese law in imperial eyes : sovereignty, justice, and transcultural politics /

Chinese law in imperial eyes : sovereignty, justice, and transcultural politics /

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Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:	Chen, Li (Professor of History and Sociolegal Studies), author.
Imprint:	New York : Columbia University Press, [2016] ©2016
Description:	1 online resource (xii, 400 pages) : illustrations
Language:	English
Series:	Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University.
Subject:	Da Qing lü. Da Qing lü. Law -- China -- History. Sociological jurisprudence -- China -- History. Exterritoriality. Sovereignty. Criminal law -- China -- History. Justice, Administration of -- China. Criminal law. Exterritoriality. Justice, Administration of. Law. Sociological jurisprudence. Sovereignty. China. History.
Format:	E-Resource Book
URL for this record:	http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/11405456

Hidden Bibliographic Details
ISBN:	9780231540216 0231540213 9780231173742 0231173741
Digital file characteristics:	text file PDF
Notes:	Includes bibliographical references and index. In English. Print version record.
Summary:	"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."--Publisher's description.
Other form:	Print version: Chen, Li (Professor of History and Sociolegal Studies). Chinese law in imperial eyes. New York : Columbia University Press, [2016] 9780231173742
Standard no.:	10.7312/chen17374

Table of Contents:

Imperial archives and historiography of western extraterritoriality in China
Translation of the Qing code and colonial origins of comparative Chinese law
Chinese law and society in the formation of European modernity
Sentimental imperialism and the global spectacle of Chinese punishments
Law and empire in the making of the first Opium War.