The emergence and transformation of international order: international law in China, 1860–1949

Abstract

The interaction between global and local norms is the key issue of sociolegal research on globalization and world society. The global-local interaction of norms generally has two directions: world society theory, which discusses how global normative patterns shape the local legal systems they encompass, and how local actors and their interventions form and influence global legal developments. I argue in this article that both perspectives must be combined if we are to understand processes of global normative change. The global diffusion of normative models triggers local adaptations and reinterpretations that, in turn, have repercussions for the transformation of global normative models. The argument is developed by drawing on historical research on the introduction of European international law in China in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.