Legal orientalism : China, the United States, and modern law / Teemu Ruskola.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ruskola, Teemu.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Law--China--Philosophy--History.

Law.

Rule of law--China--History.

Rule of law.

Law--United States--Philosophy--History.

Rule of law--United States--History.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (352 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge ; London : Harvard University Press, 2013.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Since the Cold War ended, China has become a global symbol of disregard for human rights, while the United States has positioned itself as the world's chief exporter of the rule of law. How did lawlessness become an axiom about Chineseness rather than a fact needing to be verified empirically, and how did the United States assume the mantle of law's universal appeal? In a series of wide-ranging inquiries, Teemu Ruskola investigates the history of "legal Orientalism": a set of globally circulating narratives about what law is and who has it. For example, why is China said not to have a history of corporate law, as a way of explaining its "failure" to develop capitalism on its own? Ruskola shows how a European tradition of philosophical prejudices about Chinese law developed into a distinctively American ideology of empire, influential to this day. The first Sino-U.S. treaty in 1844 authorized the extraterritorial application of American law in a putatively lawless China. A kind of legal imperialism, this practice long predated U.S. territorial colonialism after the Spanish-American War in 1898, and found its fullest expression in an American district court's jurisdiction over the "District of China." With urgent contemporary implications, legal Orientalism lives on in the enduring damage wrought on the U.S. Constitution by late nineteenth-century anti-Chinese immigration laws, and in the self-Orientalizing reforms of Chinese law today. In the global politics of trade and human rights, legal Orientalism continues to shape modern subjectivities, institutions, and geopolitics in powerful and unacknowledged ways.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

CHAPTER ONE: Introduction: Legal Orientalism

CHAPTER TWO: Making Legal and Unlegal Subjects in History

CHAPTER THREE: Telling Stories about Corporations and Kinship

CHAPTER FOUR: Canton Is Not Boston

CHAPTER FIVE: The District of China Is Not the District of Columbia

CHAPTER SIX: Epilogue: Colonialism without Colonizers

Notes

Comment on Chinese Sources

Acknowledgments

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780674075788

0674075781

9780674075764

0674075765

OCLC:

843881805