Indian history from 500 BC to AD 1000 is characterized by kingdoms and confederacies consolidating and expanding. This political landscape was theorized by ancient scholars as mandala, or ‘circles’ of kingdoms. Two areas brought these polities into contact: diplomacy and war. Indian legal tradition made rules of engagement for these areas. Diplomacy also required rules whereby diplomats were protected as they travelled to different kingdoms as representatives of their rulers. Economic imperatives necessitated long-distance trade not only between Indian polities, but also between India and other regions. Such trade required safe routes and a set of agreed laws governing such trade and traders. Early examples are set forth both in Kauṭilya’s treatise on governance called Arthaśāstra and in Indian treatises of the Dharmaśāstra genre. We set these normative works alongside some literary sources as well as documents preserved in inscriptional form. Beginning with a discussion of Dharmaśāstra as a form of transpolity legal ordering, the chapter proceeds to treat diplomacy, war, and trade as three areas of international law addressed in ancient India.

This chapter examines the complex relationship between international trade law and public health. While trade liberalisation can lower the cost of medical supplies and raise global standards of living, trade rules also constrain national public health measures and can facilitate trade in harmful products. The chapter analyses how the World Trade Organization (WTO) has addressed health-related trade restrictions, including disputes over tobacco, alcohol, and asbestos. It also explores the tension between intellectual property rights and access to essential medicines, as well as the impact of trade on healthcare supply chains, particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic. The chapter concludes by critiquing the WTO’s ‘exceptionalism’ framework for evaluating public health measures and arguing for a more integrated approach that prioritises both health and economic resilience.

‘Pan-Asianism’ came to prominence after the Second World War. Beyond the conventional understanding of the link between pan-Asianism and Japanese imperialism since then, this chapter explains the role of pan-Asianism as an anti-imperial ideology and strategy in the early twentieth century. As an anti-imperial ideology, pan-Asianism advanced a normative argument for the emancipation of Asia from Western imperialism and provided an alternative to Eurocentric discourse on civilisation, a vision premised upon a shared Asian spirituality, heritage, culture and glorious past. As an anti-imperial strategy, pan-Asianism offered Indian nationalist leaders in exile a language to gain support of the Japanese and the Chinese for their nationalist movement against British rule. Although pan-Asianism later came to be used as a justification in Japanese imperialism, it is important to highlight the anti-imperial role that pan-Asianism played in the early twentieth century. This chapter does so by analysing the works of leading Pan-Asianist ideologues and activists of the period and by highlighting the ideological and strategic aspects of their conception of pan-Asianism as anti-imperialism.

This chapter situates sovereignty at the heart of the relationship between international law and empire. I examine the ways in which the concept was defined to exclude non-European peoples while remaining alert to the complexities posed to such exclusionary definitions by the variety of polities that existed during the heyday of European imperialism. Colonial South Asia, with its melange of political units, provides an excellent illustration of this complicated relationship. I explore the diverse articulations of sovereignty in this region along two axes: temporal and categorical. At least three sets of constituents – British officials, rulers and bureaucrats of semi-sovereign entities such as princely states, and anticolonial nationalists in British India – used the language of sovereignty to debate and resolve political problems. I trace their definitions over time. By examining these actors and their legal arguments, we can understand how sovereignty in colonial South Asia transitioned from notions of layered sovereignty to more territorial forms, although pluralist ideas continue to have long afterlives in postcolonial South Asia.

The possession of international legal personality explains how the UN and similar inter-governmental organisations have extensive powers separate from those rights of states. The UN Security Council has the power to impose sanctions on a state or an individual, thereby creating binding duties for all states; no state, no matter how powerful, has that legal right. This chapter addresses the debate about the extent of the doctrine of legal powers through three case studies. The case studies include the legality of peacekeeping undertaken by the UN (including a discussion of the Expenses opinion) and the competence of the WHO and UN in relation to the possession or use of nuclear weapons by states (including a discussion of the Nuclear Weapons opinions). They also include the legislative powers of the Security Council (focusing on its counter-terrorism decision in Resolution 1373 of 2001).

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