Li Chen, "Chinese Law in Imperial Eyes: Sovereignty, Justice, and Transcultural Politics (Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University)," (Columbia University press, 2015)

How did American schoolchildren, French philosophers, Russian Sinologists, Dutch merchants, and British lawyers imagine China and Chinese law? What happened when agents of presumably dominant Western empires had to endure the humiliations and anxieties of maintaining a profitable but precarious relationship with China? In Chinese Law in Imperial Eyes, Li Chen provides a richly textured analysis of these related issues and their intersection with law, culture, and politics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Using a wide array of sources, Chen's study focuses on the power dynamics of Sino-Western relations during the formative century before the First Opium War (1839-1842). He 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, the First Opium War, and foreign extraterritoriality in China. The shifting balance of economic and political power formed and transformed knowledge of China and Chinese law in different contact zones. Chen argues that recovering the variegated and contradictory roles of Chinese law in Western "modernization" helps provincialize the subsequent Euro-Americentric discourse of global modernity.Chen draws attention to important yet underanalyzed sites in which imperial sovereignty, national identity, cultural tradition, or international law and order were defined and restructured. His valuable case studies show how constructed differences between societies were hardened into cultural or racial boundaries and then politicized to rationalize international conflicts and hierarchy. 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. Chinese Law in Imperial Eyes by Li Chen Sino-Western Relations and Chinese Law Comparative Chinese Law in the West Law and Power Dynamics in 18th-19th Century China First Opium War and Foreign Extraterritoriality Western Imagination of China and Chinese Law Imperial Ideology and Chinese Legal History Sino-Western Encounters and Legal Conflicts Chinese Law in Global Modernity Discourse Imperial Sovereignty and National Identity in China Chinese Law and Western Modernization Cultural Boundaries in Sino-Western Relations International Law and Empire in Chinese History Li Chen, University of Toronto Scholar Sino-Western Legal History and Power Balance