Description
Focusing on the role of law in Sino-Western encounters, Chen brings fresh insight to the legal disputes, cultural borrowings, and heated negotiations over imperial interests and sovereignty that profoundly shaped Sino-Western conduct in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This book captures the cultural impact of the ever-shifting balance of economic and political power on the self-imagination of Euroamerican and Chinese actors in their contact zones and beyond.
About the Author
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, 1530s-1950s.
Reviews
Just when we thought no one could offer any new approach to the subject of the Sino-Western encounter during the early modern period, this book pulls us back in. Li Chen sets a new standard for any future study on this topic. -- Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, New York University 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, Dartmouth College Extensively researched and well-written... The aspiration of the author to restore the centrality of legal matters to Sino-Western interactions is clearly achieved. H-Empire
Awards
Winner of Pre-1900 Joseph Levenson Book Prize, Association for Asian Studies 2018. Commended for Peter Gonville Stein Award, American Society for Legal History 2017.
Book Information
ISBN 9780231173742
Author Li Chen
Format Hardback
Page Count 416
Imprint Columbia University Press
Publisher Columbia University Press