Legal Orientalism: China, The United States, and Modern Law, by Teemu Ruskola

Abstract

Legal Orientalism: China, United States, and Modern Law, by Teemu Ruskola. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2013. 338 pp. $35.00 (cloth). Teemu Ruskola's Legal Orientalism focuses attention on extraterritorial laws and Chinese sovereignty in the last half of the nineteenth and first third of the twentieth centuries. It accepts Turan Kayoglu's Legal Imperialism: Sovereignty and Extraterritoriality in Japan, the Ottoman Empire, and China (London and New York, 2010) and the concept of to argue that extraterritoriality indexed sovereignty, the nation-state was the sine qua non of modernity, so in effect legal imperialism created It contends Par Kristoffer Cassel's claim in Grounds of Judgment: Extraterritoriality and Imperial Power in Nineteenth-Century China and Japan (Oxford, 2012), that China tolerated extraterritoriality and the Unequal Treaty system because old regimes valued commercial, legal, and military modernization projects and played an active, not passive role adapting to change. Each book reinforces modernization arguments while raising new questions about and legitimation. Legal Orientalism sees unequal treaties and the Treaty Port system in relation to Empire Studies. A lawyer and professor of law, Ruskola asks China scholars to take seriously. Extraterritorial claims were not fictional. Since the imperialists applied doctrines of extraterritoriality all over the world, moreover Chinese culture is not the issue. precedent is that treaties and claims to extraterritorial rights in forwarded what became law. A legal scholar, Ruskola shows how previous historiography has conflated comparative (the academic study of other legal systems) with (universally acknowledged modern axioms that regulate states' rights and individual rights). His distinction mitigates confusion, and shows how authorized itself in colonization practices. If Ruskola is correct that China's consolidation as a nation state came under tutelage then splitting hairs over modifiers like accidental empire, informal empire, colonial modernity and without colonies, means only that the category colonialism accommodates variety and extraterritorial law-making created an Empire. In fact, Ruskola reperiodizes the onset of the empire to 1844 when the United States signed the so-called Treaty of Wanghia and not with the invasion of Manila in 1898 or Perry's arrival in Tokyo Bay in 1854. Ruskola is specific. Caleb Cushing, missionary diplomat Peter Parker and the Reverend Elijah Coleman Bridgeman convinced the State Department that extraterritoriality legitimated expansionism on and off the China mainland. Thus, in Ruskola's argument, Commodore Perry arrived in Tokyo Bay with a copy of the Wanghia Treaty in his pocket and used it as his model for subordinating Japan. rise of racial science and its role in imperialism (what Ruskola calls American racial Anglo-Saxonism) in Asia accompanied, in other words, a established juridical platform that gave the United States power to authorize a foundationally racialized international (p. 149). most exuberant chapter in the book is The District of China is Not the District of Columbia, where Ruskola launches his conclusions reductio ad absurdum. I am a connoisseur of this kind of argument, so love it. established a U.S. Court for the District of China. But the law that the Court for the District of China would be enforcing had to be written since there was no precedent in the United States Constitution for declaring jurisdiction over another country. …