‘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.

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.

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 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.

The New Cambridge History of the English Language is aimed at providing a contemporary and comprehensive overiew of English, tracing its roots in Germanic and investigating the contact scenarios in which the language has been an active participant. It dis

This chapter looks at English in Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan – at first sight countries at the periphery of World Englishes research and theory, given the size of their populations, their economic weight, and the impact their varieties and uses of English have had on others. It traces the histories and the present-day sociolinguistic situation of English in the five countries, of which only South Sudan and Uganda share a colonial past of British control. The current chapter also provides an outline of the similarities across and differences between their Englishes and discusses how continuing regional migration and influence from exogenous varieties of English have contributed to their shape and whether Uganda and Ugandan English play an epicentral role in the region.

British colonial invasion of the Australian continent has had a substantial and often devastating impact on the lives and livelihoods of the original inhabitants. The story of survival is therefore partly one of linguistic adaptation and innovation. For as invasion, displacement and forced relocation rolled across the continent, the language ecologies were also invaded, disturbed and displaced. English has been inserted into the linguistic landscape and contact with its speakers has seeded many new varieties. This chapter surveys the literature that captures this spectacular proliferation of English-influenced varieties; their linguistic structures and the sociolinguistic contexts that make them unique. The chapter ends by focusing on one of the key issues in the study of contact Englishes in Australia: the relationship between individual and community multilingualism.

This chapter begins by describing the pre-history of southern China and the origins of colonial Hong Kong. It then proceeds to a discussion of English in the late nineteenth century and the formation of an English-speaking Chinese elite in colonial Hong Kong. Since the resumption of Chinese sovereignty in 1997, the government has promoted a policy of “trilingualism” (Cantonese, English, and Putonghua) and “biliteracy” (written Chinese and English). Recently, the national government has moved to assert tighter control over the territory, and there has been increasing importance placed on the learning and use of the national language, Putonghua. At present, English continues to be widely used in key domains of Hong Kong society, including government, law and many areas of employment. This is likely to continue in the future, despite Hong Kong’s increasing integration economically, politically, socially, and linguistically into mainland China.

This chapter first discusses the label ‘English as a second and foreign language’ and then gives a brief selective account of how English arrived in Africa and Asia and how it was initially taught and to whom. The work of three influential language teachers who worked in Asia – Palmer in Japan, Faucett in China and West in Bengal - is reviewed. The chapter then illustrates how local varieties of English have developed in postcolonial settings and how the use of English as a lingua franca has increased in countries that were not colonies of Britain or the United States. The current relevance of the terms English as a second or as a foreign language is questioned as it is argued that English now comprises a multitude of new varieties and plays a major role as the international lingua franca.

This chapter provides an overview of the evolution of English in Ghana. The absence of a sizable number of settlers, different language and education policies and sociodemographic developments have shaped the variety considerably. Real-time analyses of sociolinguistic and structural developments in the nativisation phase have become possible with the Historical Corpus of English in Ghana (HiCE Ghana), a 600,000-word corpus of Ghanaian English from the early stages of the nativisation phase. The Ghanaian component of the International Corpus of English (ICE) represents the late stages. Many lexical innovations were already deeply entrenched in the older data and Ghanaian English noun phrases have become more complex in line with predictions made by the Dynamic Model. The paper is rounded off with an outline of new diachronic approaches to Ghanaian English based on a corpus of material from the archives of the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation and an idea for a diachronic corpus of African newspapers.

This chapter traces the historical development of English in South Korea, which despite its long isolation and late contact with the language has turned into a fervent adopter of English as linguistic, symbolic, and economic capital. Particular focus lies on the history of English in the South Korean education system and the outcomes of the contact between Korean and English (i.e., Englishized Korean and Korean(ized) English). The United States Army Military Government in Korea (1945–1948) set the foundation for the compelling status of English in South Korea and the current chapter presents a case study of the language ideologies represented in three Korean English textbooks published during this period. While rudimentary notions of the ideologies of necessitation and externalization can already be found in the examined textbooks from the 1940s, all of the material was firmly grounded in the Korean context and clearly reflected the pro-American sentiments of the era.