Recentering the World recovers a richly contextual, detailed history of Western-imposed legal structures in China, as well as engagements with international law by Chinese officials, jurists, and citizens. Beginning in the Late Qing era, it shows how international law functioned as a channel for power relations, techniques of economic domination, as well as novel forms of resistance. The book also radically diversifies traditionally Eurocentric accounts of modern international law's origins, demonstrating how, by the mid-twentieth century, Chinese jurists had made major contributions to international organizations and the UN system, the international judiciary, the laws of armed conflict, and more. Drawing on extensive archival research, this book is a valuable guide to China's often conflicted role in international law, its reception and contention of concepts of sovereignty, property, obligation, and autonomy, and its gradual move from the 'periphery' to a shared spot at the 'center' of global legal order.

‘China’s engagement with Western international law, Ryan Martínez Mitchell shows in this field-defining study, is neither recent nor rejectionist. Instead, starting in the 19th century, Chinese actors interacted with once foreign concepts and terms in light of local imaginaries, and Chinese engagement reshaped international law in turn. The results are a tour de force of research and reconceptualization of how the legal order of the contemporary world came about, and where alternative global internationalisms might one day lead.’

Samuel Moyn - Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History, Yale University

‘Recentering the World is a wonderful book that should re-center how we think about not only China but international law itself. Running from the late Qing through WTO accession, Ryan Mitchell's singular blend of deep historical research in Chinese, Japanese and western archival materials, deft legal analysis, and love of ideas is an exemplar of superb cross-disciplinary scholarship.’

William P. Alford - Jerome A. and Joan L. Cohen Professor of East Asian Legal Studies, Harvard Law School

‘An excellent conceptual history of how China engaged with Western-made international law in the late 19th and 20th centuries. Mitchell moves fluidly between domestic and transnational spheres of thought, and between different layers of conceptual meaning as they are constantly reconstructed during this era.’

Taisu Zhang - Professor of Law, Yale Law School and author of The Ideological Foundations of Qing Taxation (2022)