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.