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4 - Legal encounters and the origins of global law

from Part One - Migrations and Encounters

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2015

By
Lauren Benton  and
Adam Clulow
Edited by
Jerry H. Bentley ,
Sanjay Subrahmanyam  and
Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks
Jerry H. Bentley
Affiliation:
University of Hawaii, Manoa
Sanjay Subrahmanyam
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
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Summary

In 1636, the Dutch East India Company official, Joost Schouten sat down to pen an account of the kingdom of Ayutthaya, or Siam. He described what he saw as an exotic and utterly unfamiliar legal system, characterized by despotic excesses and unfathomable customs. This chapter outlines an approach on Alexandrowicz's insights about the emergence of a comprehensive law of nations and that recognizes the importance of empires to the international order without defining non-European law and sovereignty as problems that Western jurists and international lawyers had to solve. As with protocol and jurisdiction, the long nineteenth century brought important shifts in the way protection functioned internationally. A quality of imprecision in such basic understandings could provide valuable flexibility and prevent conflict. It sometimes also sharpened conflict by introducing new jurisdictional tensions, creating opportunities for flawed performances of protocol, or exposing the fictions embedded within offers of protection.
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge World History , pp. 80 - 100
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2015

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References

Further Reading

Alexandrowicz, C. H., An Introduction to the History of the Law of Nations in the East Indies (Oxford University Press, 1967).Google Scholar
Anand, R. P., Confrontation or Cooperation? International Law and the Developing Countries (New Delhi: Banyan Publications, 1984).Google Scholar
Anghie, Antony, Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law (Cambridge University Press, 2007).Google Scholar
Banner, Stuart, Possessing the Pacific: Land, Settlers, and Indigenous People from Australia to Alaska (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).Google Scholar
Belmessous, Saliha (ed.), Native Claims: Indigenous Law against Empire, 1500–1920 (Oxford University Press, 2011).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Benton, Lauren, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge University Press, 2010).Google Scholar
Benton, Lauren Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge University Press, 2002).Google Scholar
Benton, Lauren and Ross, Richard (eds.), Legal Pluralism and Empires, 1500–1850 (New York University Press, 2013).Google Scholar
Borschberg, Peter, Hugo Grotius, the Portuguese and Free Trade in the East Indies (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2011).Google Scholar
Cassel, Pär, Grounds of Judgment: Extraterritoriality and Imperial Power in Nineteenth-Century China and Japan (Oxford University Press, 2012).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clulow, Adam, The Company and the Shogun: The Dutch Encounter with Tokugawa Japan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).Google Scholar
Fassbender, Bardo and Peters, Anne, The Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law (Oxford University Press, 2012).Google Scholar
Ford, Lisa, Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia, 1788–1836 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ghachem, Malick, The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2012).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hair, P. E. H., Africa Encountered: European Contacts and Evidence, 1450–1700 (Farnham, UK: Variorum, 1997).Google Scholar
Hulsebosch, Daniel, Constituting Empire: New York and the Transformation of Constitutionalism in the Atlantic World, 1664–1830 (Studies in Legal History) (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).Google Scholar
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Stern, Philip, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (Oxford University Press, 2011).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, Courtly Encounters: Translating Courtliness and Violence in Early Modern Eurasia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Suzuki, Shogo, Zhang, Yongjin, and Quirk, Joel, International Orders in the Early Modern World: Before the Rise of the West (New York: Routledge, 2014).Google Scholar
Tomlins, Christopher and Mann, Bruce (eds.), The Many Legalities of Early America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).Google Scholar
Travers, Robert, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India: The British in Bengal (Cambridge University Press, 2007).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Van Ittersum, Martine, Profit and Principle: Hugo Grotius, Natural Rights Theories and the Rise of Dutch Power in the East Indies, 1595–1615 (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2006).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ward, Kerry, Networks of Empire: Forced Migration in the Dutch East India Company (Cambridge University Press, 2008).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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