Legal Orientalism : China, the United States, and Modern Law / Teemu Ruskola.
Ruskola, Teemu, author.
2013
K237 .R87 2013eb
Available Online

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Title Legal Orientalism : China, the United States, and Modern Law / Teemu Ruskola.
Author Ruskola, Teemu, author.
ISBN 9780674075764
DOI https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674075764
Published Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, [2013]
Copyright ©2013
Language English
Language Note In English.
Description 1 online resource (338 p.) : 4 halftones
Other Standard Identifiers 10.4159/harvard.9780674075764 doi
Call Number K237 .R87 2013eb
Dewey Decimal Classification 340/.11
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.
Access Note Access limited to authorized users.
System Details Note Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
Digital File Characteristics text file PDF
Source of Description Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 30. Aug 2021)
In Asian Studies Backlist (2000-2014) eBook Package
E-BOOK GESAMTPAKET / COMPLETE PACKAGE 2013
E-BOOK PACKAGE LAW 2013
E-BOOK PAKET RECHTSWISSENSCHAFTEN 2013
HUP eBook-Package Backlist 2000-2013 (Canada)
Harvard University Press eBook Package Backlist 2000-2013
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Frontmatter
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

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