From the ninth to the fourteenth centuries, Japan purposely eschewed concluding diplomatic relations with the countries on its periphery. The international environment that made this fundamental policy possible first formed in the ninth century in the East China Sea with the appearance of maritime merchants. Japan was able to obtain foreign goods through trade ships without having to follow troublesome diplomatic procedures. In addition, no strong hegemonic power could threaten Japan militarily after the ninth century. Assuming this environment, Japan did not engage with any other country beyond temporary communications. Japan’s environment changed with the appearance of the Mongols as a hegemonic nation in thirteenth century. But even under military pressure, Japan refused to conclude diplomatic relations with the Mongols. At the beginning of the fourteenth century, the Mongols approved trade with Japan without the conclusion of formal diplomatic relations. In the latter half of the fourteenth century, the Ming’s making trade inseparable from the paying of tribute forced Japan to honour the Ming demand. This caused a radical change to Japan’s foreign diplomatic relations.

The discovery of the Arthasastra of Kautilya in 1905, with its subsequent full publication and translation, triggered a re-evaluation by Indians of the political sophistication of their past, which involved a nationalist reclamation. Importantly, that included ancient Indian interpolity law. This chapter engages two periods of Indian historiography of the Indian interpolity past. After the First World War Indian writers addressed the advances of Indian interpolity law, with emphasis on Kautilya, the Mahabharata and the Code of Manu. Writers focusing primarily on international law saw the Indian past as particularly advanced by comparison to the failures of the West. A second wave after 1947 made similar moves but from the perspective of an India consciously taking its place on the world stage, and after Partition. The chapter identifies the tendency towards Indian interpolity past by writers focusing on international law, while those engaged in broader historical writing filled in a broader spectrum, such as realist depictions particularly of Kautilya but also of or other Indian writers or practice.

A primary purpose of this chapter is not to give a comprehensive overview on a process of accepting modern Western international law in Japan from the middle of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century, but to add fresh perspectives to analyse the process. The central focus here is on a vigorously debated issue at that time among the officials of the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Japanese politicians and Western envoys stationed in Japan: the issue of the territorial sea and the inland sea of Japan, especially the breadth of the territorial sea. Two main cases, the Proclamations of Neutrality at the time of the 1870 Franco-German (Prussian) War and a collision case between the Chishima, a Japanese warship, and the Ravenna, a British post boat, in the Inland Sea of Japan in 1892 , are analysed in detail from this perspective.

I examine the complexities of maritime connections between China and South Asia created by the entry of multiple states and non-state actors in the Indian Ocean between the thirteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. Divided into three chronological sections, the chapter first focuses on private traders, shippers, coastal polities, and European colonial enterprises in shaping and regulating commercial activity, diplomatic encounters, and their involvement in cross-regional interaction, exchange and conflict. The networks of traders that criss-crossed the ocean is highlighted. The next section analyses the impact of the seven voyages of Zheng He in the early fifteenth century on restructuring maritime interactions between China and South Asia. The final section centres on two entrepreneurs, one Chinese and one Indian, who utilised British colonial networks to advance their ventures and contributed to the expansion of maritime exchange. The chapter provides new insights into the nature of interactions between China and South Asia when there were no norms or regulations beyond specific coastal polities and regions.

This chapter recasts empire and its constitution and evolution to recover the most expansive of premodern interpolity systems and its charter. It outlines the evolution of the Mongol system, and provides a view of the empire and its dynastic imperium. It re-establishes the framework of the four Chinggisid Uluses as the main interstate system of the pre-modern world. While the Chinggisid törö governed inter-ruler relations, the Chinggisid jasaq formed the most potent laws that ensured the durability, uniformity and consistency of Chinggisid institutions and practices across the imperium. The 1640 Great Code presents an interpolity system, akin to and surpassing Westphalia and its charter, created within the Chinggisid political tradition and törö. Finally, the chapter uncovers one of the most consequential legacies of Chinggisid statecraft that formed the foundation of the modern state system and modern international order – the Chinggisid concept of ejen – the archetype of the concept that Bodin developed as sovereignty.

A typical narrative of the Tang–Song transition depicts a dire process by which the cosmopolitan and expansionist (and thus strong) Tang dynasty (618–907) gave way to the inward-looking (and thus weak) Song. Despite decades of scholarly refutation, this common perception is still very much alive in the popular imagination. This chapter seeks to exploit the progress in recent scholarship that has helped advance our understanding of the new world order after the collapse of the Tang. I examine how a group of scholars and thinkers who represented the new intellectual trend called Daoxue (Learning of the Way) Neo-Confucianism made sense of the new reality. By situating and analysing their writings within the historical contexts that these texts were written and circulated in, the chapter aims to show how the new world order propelled learned individuals to devise new conceptual frameworks for persuading their compatriots that their ideas about foreigners should be adopted to ensure the survival of the Song state. It also considers Daoxue’s lasting influence in terms of providing a philosophical framework for conceptualising foreign relations during subsequent regimes.

Contributing to non-Eurocentric histories of international law beyond modern public international law and its doctrinal antecedents, this chapter sets Southeast Asian maritime law in relation to the history of regional coastal polities. Anchored in the long-term development of regional maritime networks and political centers, early modern Southeast Asian maritime laws incorporated the practices of Southeast Asian mariners. They reflect both the complex Southeast Asian societies and the transnational political economy of their times. In discussing these laws and their historical context, the chapter offers alternative origins for lex maritima and lex mercatoria.

This chapter explores China’s engagement with international law from the nineteenth century to the 1940s. It examines China’s transition from its traditional world view to acceptance of and participation in international law. Despite the encounter with Western powers in the nineteenth century, China maintained its traditional world view. After the Sino-Japanese War of 1894 China began to change its stance, culminating in the establishment of the Republic of China, which embraced international law. Using Confucianism and the concept of tianxia, the chapter examines how Chinese civilization influenced China’s engagement with international law. It also explores how Chinese civilisation contributed to a more inclusive international legal order in the early twentieth century. Ultimately, the chapter aims to demonstrate the continuing relevance of Chinese civilisation in shaping China’s international legal practice and the international legal order as a whole in the twenty-first century.

Based on an in-depth analysis of a few selected cases of commercial dispute and litigation, this chapter illuminates the functioning of the complex and competing legal systems and the mechanisms of dispute resolution among merchants in Surat in western India and Zanzibar in East Africa during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It explores the dynamics of this legal space, the endurance of legal plurality and qualitative changes in it over the period under review. It critically examines the perceived binary between the legal plurality of the pre-colonial period and the legal uniformity and centralization of the colonial period. The chapter argues that merchants usually sought to resolve their commercial disputes through informal negotiations, petitions, arbitration and legal proceedings in courts of law. The analysis of commercial disputes show that despite the emergence of the European (English) colonial legal system across the Indian Ocean arena in the nineteenth century and the colonial state’s push to make the law uniform and implement a single legal system, the normative and customary mechanisms of adjudicating commercial disputes endured in the colonial period.

The revisionist school has asserted that pre-colonial indigenous polities were fluid shadow entities and that pre-British South Asian regimes had no law. This line of argument claims that unique conditions of India prevented the emergence of states with well-defined contiguous territories possessing centralised governments. Ironically this view is reminiscent of colonial British scholars’ argument about pre-colonial India. The argument that pre-British India had no laws and that the ruler’s will was the ultimate authority is incorrect. Rulers of pre-British indigenous polities did not operate in a vacuum, but had to take into account long-established practices, existing procedures and the presence of local powerbrokers. Arabic discourse for the Delhi Sultanate and Turko-Mongol conventions for the Mughals, along with local custom, shaped the legal history of medieval India’s militaries. Overall, the political theorists of the Delhi Sultanate, the Mughal Empire and the ‘Hindu’ dynasties accepted the pivotal role of the monarchy and the army in shaping the structure of interpolity relationships.

This chapter offers a survey of the jus gentium in South East Aasia between the fifteenth and the late eighteenth centuries. It starts by providing an overview of the region and elucidating the challenges inherent in its study. Subsequently, the examination follows three lines of enquiry: first, it explores basic values and principles governing inter-ruler and interpolity relations on the eve of European colonialism around 1450–1500 by discussing and problematising tributary relations. Second, it examines the uniqueness of these relations when juxtaposed with Europe, highlighting key facets such as hierarchy, the prioritisation of people over land, and the forging of alliances with communities of the sea and land. Finally, the chapter plots the transformative impact of European colonial policies and practices, such as the militarisation of maritime spaces, the use of sea passes and the introduction of written agreements and commercial treaties.

Interstate diplomacy in early modern Asia involved a framework of a common set of practices shared among Islamic, South East Asian and East Asian polities. This chapter outlines this common framework and then explores the unique articulations of it to be found in the Manchu Qing imperial formation. Qing diplomatic ritual drew from the rich tradition of imperial China, the practices of the Mongol Muslim and Buddhist Chinggisid khanates, the Buddhist notion of chakravartin kingship, and the diplomatic practices of the dominant sects of Tibetan Buddhism. Ritual diplomacy not only presented claims of supremacy among a multitude of Asian rulers, but negotiated military and marriage alliances, established the rules and practices of commercial exchange, moved the unique human and animal products of one kingdom to another, and addressed competing declarations over territory and resources.

This chapter examines the concept of territory. While administrative space was no novelty in East Asia, notions related to space transformed in seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Treaty of Nerchinsk marked the borderlines between the the Qing and Russian empires. Similar treaties in the early eighteenth century solidified them. Kangxi initiated a geographical survey spanning the country. This significantly impacted Korea, which made efforts to secure its border, altering perceptions of the state. Russian expansion along the Pacific coast raised concerns in Japan. From the late eighteenth century, Japanese intellectuals explored the Ezo region – areas that had held little interest. These developments introduced fresh concepts like territory, borders, and exclusive ownership (often considered European inventions) into traditional notions of imperial land. The new ideas didn’t supplant existing understandings, or engender a new interpolity system in East Asia.

Studies of imperial Chinese and Byzantine diplomacy conventionally assume that their diplomatic norms had indigenous origins that became models for neighbouring polities. This chapter questions this assumption by comparing the diplomatic traditions of empires of Sui and Tang China (581–907), Byzantium (395–1453), Sasanian Iran (224–651), Turkic polities, and smaller Eurasian states. Eurasia shared diplomatic protocols incorporating pageantry, status ranking, displays of obeisance to the ruler, gift exchange, and feasting. Visiting envoys enjoyed rights to safe passage that sometimes were violated during periods of interpolity tension. Peaceful relations were normally signalled when a greater power invested a lesser one as a vassal, and sometimes when two great powers negotiated and ratified written treaties. Diplomatic agreements were reinforced via marriage or fictive kinship relations between rulers, trade accords, and/or direct payments from one polity to another. This customary diplomatic tradition provided rulers with shared standards to negotiate agreements that protected their perceived strategic, political, economic and symbolic interests.

Thes chapter argues that both Britons and South Asians made use of instruments such as treaties and a broader world of diplomatic paperwork to construct a framework for interstate legality in the eighteenth century. South Asian efforts to make and remake arrangements with British traders and government agencies constituted a source of inter-imperial legal forms. Inter-imperial treaties were not blunt instruments of European imperialism, but legal documents co-produced by South Asian bureaucrats. By emphasising the activism and political thought of South Asian actors in their pursuit of a new inter-imperial order, this chapter rethinks the focus on European actors as the architects of international law. Of course, multilingual and multipolar claim making did not impose a stable legal order in South Asia. Treaties were regularly abrogated and renegotiated. Nevertheless, such efforts to negotiate relationships among states and enshrine them punctuated and shaped the upheavals of the eighteenth century as well as the explosion of new projects of state building. Inter-imperial lawmaking emerged as a vital site for politics in the eighteenth century.

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.