This chapter explores how considerations of private international law affected marriage and gender relations during the Mongol occupation of China, in the Yuan dynasty (1260–1368). I first address matters of jurisdiction and choice of law that arose in Yuan China and border areas when lawsuits involved non-Chinese. It demonstrates the willingness of Mongol Yuan officials to consider non-Chinese law in adjudication and how this process could be complicated by facts on the ground. The section reveals under Mongol rule a form of ‘transnational everyday life’, as other scholars have termed it, and the disadvantages that often accrued to women in these circumstances. Then I demonstrate how the Chinese encounter with Mongol rule and the resulting ‘foreign’ elements introduced into legal practice brought about changes in traditional, codified, Chinese marriage law. Finally, I address the Mongol use of strategic marriages in their interpolity relations both during the united world empire and in the Yuan dynasty. These interpolity marriage relations were crucial to Mongol successes during their conquests and in their efforts to maintain sovereignty over conquered peoples.

From the late seventeenth century to the early nineteenth, the Qing dynasty was the dominant power in East Asia. It waged numerous wars with its neighbours, both within the orbit of its tributary system and without. Coming from Manchuria and with their past tribal war tradition, the Manchus did not have an inherent expansion agenda when they conquered China. Use of force by the Qing dynasty in dealing with frontier crises was often case-specific. The Qing state constantly adjusted and revised its underpinning in justifying its decision to wage war or keep peace on or beyond its borders. In chronological order, this chapter delineates the evolution of Qing China’s normative system. It starts with the Manchus’ formative era in Manchuria, then focuses on the Qing dynasty’s empire-building endeavours and subsequent retreat from frontier activism in the early nineteenth century, and ends with a brief discussion of its last decades, during which the Qing dynasty’s doctrine and practice in managing its international affairs changed radically owing to intensified interactions with Western countries and the introduction of the Western international law.

This chapter analyses how trade law conceptualises data and AI. It shows that trade law applies long-established concepts to these novel phenomena while experimenting with new categories in preferential agreements. For data, these categories include data as a good, as a service, as a digital product, intellectual property, electronic transmissions, and as a regulatory object. For AI, the chapter distinguishes between the trade regulation of AI components, AI products, and AI governance. It concludes by suggesting that trade law can be understood as a form of AI/data law, which may help in recognising and addressing the challenges that the digital economy poses for trade law.

As the French empire expanded throughout northern and western Africa and from Pondicherry in India east to Royal Vietnam, a new secular mission came into being, one married to the contradictions of aggressive imperialism, a revolutionary past, and democratic governance. Civilisation was elevated to the rarefied realms of imperial law. French colonial administrators and jurists equipped with the prejudices of the metropole carried with them a powerful vision of republican empire to the Mekong, the great river system that lies at the proverbial heart of mainland South East Asia. Yet republican colonialism was undermined by below. In Indo-China, young radicals, jurists, politicians, journalists and scholars engaged in bitter fighting with the creation of a panoptic model of state surveillance, economic exploitation, political repression, racism and the ambiguities of French republicanism. From the creation of the Indo-Chinese Union in 1887 to its demise in 1954, the multiple transformations of legal boundaries in Indo-China reflected the evolving international relations and anti-colonial agitations in Asia. They formed a crucial conjecture in the history of international law.

The facts that the UN and other similar inter-governmental organisations (IGOs) are operational and that their decisions affect the lives of millions, have led to greater demands for accountability of IGOs and access to justice for victims when they have caused. This chapter looks at how the primary and secondary rules of international law are upheld in different forms and mechanisms of accountability, including courts. The inadequacies of the International Court of Justice as a constitutional court have led to victims seeking justice before regional and national courts. The chapter explores the practicalities of accountability both at an institutional level and at a more local level. It concludes with an examination as to how far the UN has evolved in terms of accountability for wrongs committed by those working for it by considering sexual abuse committed by peacekeepers in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The jiao (brokerage cartel) was a merchant organisation constituted by sea merchants who spoke Fujianese dialects or other related vernaculars. In the middle of the eighteenth century, it was first established in Taiwan Fucheng (Tainan), and then its activities gradually expanded: north to Japan and south to Siam (Thailand) and Myanmar.1 The members of a jiao were called jiao merchants. Most of them ran businesses in important port cities. The small ones opened ‘ninety-eight firms’ (jiuba hang 九八行); this type of firm accepted commissioned sales and took a 2 per cent commission. The large ones owned ships and became ‘bow firms’ (chuantou hang 船頭行). They were mainly engaged in import and export trade.2

How does Asia feature in the history of international law? Very sparingly, according to multiple reviews of the Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law.1 Published in 2012, the Oxford Handbook was set up as a project to break new ground by ‘departing from the “well-worn paths” of how the history of international law has been written so far’.2 The aims included challenging the Eurocentricism of international legal history, and bringing within the frame things generally excluded from it – such as the ‘many other experiences and forms of legal relations between autonomous [extra-European] communities developed in the course of history’, including those ‘which were discontinued as a result of domination and colonization by European Powers’.3 Proceeding from this promising beginning, the Handbook included specific chapters on ‘China’, ‘Japan’ and ‘India’, as well as chapters on the ‘encounters’ with Europe of each.4 Without doubt, these proved to be interesting and revealing outings. Not least, they underlined how much remained to be studied and written of the very polities that European scholars from Mill to Hegel had declared to have ‘no history’ (to the productive irritation of generations of historians from these polities).5 Yet, as the reviews that followed publication of the Handbook perceptively noted, having had the run of six chapters in the sixty-six-chapter volume (about a dozen chapters across all non-European regions), these polities did not infiltrate other parts of the volume. That is, they did not leave the ‘regional’ section of the volume. Barring exceptions, the Handbook chapters on key international legal actors and themes did not draw upon non-European engagements, debates, concepts, practices or sources.6 Of ‘the 21 individuals presented in portrait, 19 [were] white European men’ (and one a white European woman).7 While Christianity was ‘all over’ the chapters, Islamic international law had ‘only a compartmentalized, isolated role … presented as largely ahistorical and static’.8 Encounters were had with Europe, but Asian polities did not meet each other, nor other non-European polities.9 The footnotes, tables of treaties and cases, and bibliographies also told a largely European story.10 And all this was perhaps unavoidable, explained one reviewer, given that volume had not opened up the logically prior question of what to look at, in identifying the history of international law.11 It had not distanced itself from the ‘discipline’s orthodox approach to sources’, which ‘direct[ed] scholars of “pre-modern” international law towards the writings of the “fathers of international law” [all European men], and … scholars of international law’s “modern” history to state consent’.12 These sources were European: they represented particular European innovations, responding to particular European experiences. Yet they were cast into universal categories into which non-Europeans did not fit – or rarely fit. Seen through the prism of these sources, non-Europeans, having few representatives either in the pantheon of fathers or in the club of possible consent givers, did not qualify as contributors to the history of international law. Clearly, then, some recalibration of what it meant to do the history of international law was needed. Only by engaging the question of ‘the history of what’, as Anne Orford has put it,13 could we begin to build a history of international law that engages with ‘extra-European experiences and forms’, as the Handbook had set out to do.

This chapter explores the legacies of indenture for international law in Asia through a survey of the existing scholarship and points to new directions for research. Focusing on indentured labor from India, which comprised the majority of labourers recruited under this system in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, it shows how indenture shifted definitions of emigrants and foreigners, shaped discourses on welfare in migration, and left its mark on international relations as they emerged in the aftermath of the two world wars. The chapter also discusses how questions of nationality and citizenship in the postcolonial period often overlooked the plight of the descendents of indenture in Asia, and concludes with speculations on what the new form of indenture is and the limits of drawing these historical analogies.

Chapter 7 explores how the human rights and humanitarian professionals employed by NGOs and IGOs conduct day-to-day diplomacy in the field. This includes providing immediate protection, conducting interviews, negotiating humanitarian access, monitoring detention facilities, and creating humanitarian space.

This chapter discusses the relationship between WTO law and other public international law (PIL), focusing on the interpretation of WTO law through the lens of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT). It examines how WTO dispute settlement bodies have approached non-WTO law, particularly in the context of treaty interpretation and potential conflicts between legal regimes. The chapter argues that while the VCLT provides a framework for interpretation, it has limitations in addressing conflicts between different agreements, as illustrated by the interaction between the Paris Agreement and the WTO. The authors contend that legislative solutions within the WTO are necessary to address these conflicts and ensure the WTO’s continued relevance in the face of global challenges like climate change.

Chapter 5 delves into the international civil service to show how IGO officials such as secretaries-general and high commissioners (and independent experts such as special rapporteurs) bargain and negotiate for human rights and humanitarian principles. It also explains the diplomatic functions of treaty monitoring bodies and courts in advancing respect for international human rights and humanitarian principles.