Chinese Law in Imperial Eyes: Sovereignty, Justice, and Transcultural Politics

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.

Focusing on the power dynamics of Sino-Western relations during the century before the First Opium War, Li Chen 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 and foreign extraterritoriality in China.