This chapter sets out a framework to analyse the existence of international law in thirteenth-century Mongol Eurasia. It uses the category of the Universal Mongol Empire and the creation and use of the yasa (Chinggis Khan’s legal code) as the basis of the legal arena of the time. In addition to the Universal Mongol Empire, Inner Eurasia as a unit of history, the Mongol Commonwealth and the Mongol world system are used to identify the making and practice of international law in this period. The Mongol Khans articulated a specific world view that accommodated the disparateness of the Eurasian landscape, be it peoples, civilizations, religions or political ideologies. Governance (political and economic) of this multifarious empire relied on institutions that permeated throughout the empire and gave it coherence. Thus the focus is on conveying the meaning of sovereignty and law which was a product of interpolity relations that had taken place over centuries. Consequently the chapter seeks to broaden the discipline of modern international law by engaging with historic Eurasia, specifically Mongol rule in the thirteenth century.

As the tensions between the Chinese population and the foreign sojourners and settlers of the treaty powers in post-1842 China led to a series of violent riots and deadly conflicts in the second half of the nineteenth century, the foreign powers were desperate to find an effective mechanism to prevent such occurrences. Influenced by a colonial siege mentality and the idea of a state of emergency, the treaty powers created an exception to international law, Western law and Chinese law by subjecting the Chinese government authorities to a regime of strict liability, holding them legally liable for all the ’anti-foreign’ incidents and the resulting damage to foreign interests, regardless of circumstances. This chapter investigates the historical forces and international politics that prompted this regime of strict liability in late Qing China. It calls for more attention to the deep-rooted connections between such practices in the age of empire and the various forms of emergency powers and security regimes that have continued to plague our modern world today.

How did the Sinitic empires of the Qin and Han interact with their neighbours before the adoption of the concept of international law from the West, following the establishment of the nation state with fixed frontiers in the late seventeenth century? The dominant model is the concept of ‘tribute’ first outlined by John K. Fairbank based on the foreign-relations practices of the late imperial Qing empire. This chapter argues that is incorrect. Apart from engaging in military action, the early East Asian empires followed the ways in which states had related to each other for centuries prior to the establishment of the empires, i.e. by accepting hostages, which developed into the giving of pledges (both used the same term, zhi), and in establishing marriage relations. The earlier ritual of ‘covenant making’ was replaced by a new legal instrument, the binding yue ‘agreement,’ a form of contract. Although local and regional authorities gave ‘prestations’ to the central court in imperial times, it is argued that ‘tribute’ (gong) was not significant until the later Han, when, on the basis of the mention of tribute in two canonical texts, it was incorporated into Confucian world view.

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.