Negotiating Sovereignties
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Negotiating Sovereignties
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Inequality and its Afterlives: China’s “New Treaties”, 1921-1946

Throughout the interwar period, China’s efforts to revise its so-called “unequal treaties” reflected a dilemma shared by many (post-)colonial states: how to reconcile legal equality with economic self-determination. While treaty revisions promised the recovery of sovereign rights, they often preserved substantive inequalities – albeit under the guise of formal reciprocity. The “new treaties” (xinyue 新約) concluded by consecutive Chinese governments from the 1920s to the 1940s revealed how international law could reproduce imperial hierarchies in a new form. They also sparked intense debates within China itself: What did “self-determination” actually mean in treaty terms? Could equal terms on paper obscure unequal outcomes in practice? And how could sovereignty be reclaimed without surrendering economic autonomy? To illustrate these dilemmas, it is helpful to consider a concrete example.

The Sino-Belgian Treaty Dispute of 1926

On 6 November 1926, after months of fruitless negotiations with Brussels, the beleaguered Beijing government unilaterally terminated its 1865 Treaty of Commerce with Belgium. A landmark case in the interwar campaign to revise the 19th century “unequal treaties”, the Sino-Belgian treaty dispute captivated the international law community. While Beijing enlisted the expertise of prominent third-party jurists like Nicolas Politis, Robert Lansing, and Walther Schücking, Brussels referred the case to the Permanent Court of International Justice at The Hague for adjudication.

The legality of Beijing’s action was – and remains – hotly contested. In the eyes of the American minister, John MacMurray, it constituted “a palpable perversion” of treaty clauses and proof that the Chinese regarded their international obligations as mere “scraps of paper”.1 For others, like Schücking, it demonstrated that “[t]he Chinese nation demands its right to self-determination with elemental force”.2

Schücking’s letter to the Chinese legation in Berlin, dated 24 March 1927, in which he assured the Chinese that he supported their country out of the “sincere conviction that your nation is undoubtedly in the moral right in this case”. Reproduced with kind permission of Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Münster, Nachlass Schücking [Signatur Bsp. 5,001].

From Inequality to Conditionality

Before the World Court could rule on the matter, another treaty had been concluded between Brussels and the newly established National Government in Nanjing. Though nominally characterized by “parfaite égalité”, the new agreement made the relinquishment of Belgian extraterritorial rights conditional upon the gradual opening of China’s inland market to foreign nationals and capital.3 As would soon become clear, these new terms proved no less controversial than the ones they replaced.

Similar suspensory clauses were inserted into many other agreements concluded by both rival Chinese governments during the first half of the 20th century. The story of these “new treaties” stretches from the Sino-German agreement of 1921 – the first formally equal treaty the Chinese Republic ever concluded with a European great power – to the Sino-American trade agreement of 1946, signed but a few years before the collapse of Chiang Kai-shek’s government as a result of the Chinese Civil War.

Economic Conditionality as Informal Empire

My research revisits the fierce debate about these “new treaties” among Chinese political and diplomatic elites. In doing so, it also proposes a change of perspective: while scholarship has long focused on the modes of treaty revision, including uses of the rebus sic stantibus clause, much less attention has been paid to other issues – such as what made a treaty “unequal” in the first place, or what exactly replaced these “unequal treaties”.

Centering on conditionality clauses as an instrument of “informal empire”, my research finds that – for states like republican China no less than for Siam or the Ottoman Empire – formal equality often came at the price of an explicitly pro-free trade agenda.4 In other words, the recovery of sovereign rights like tariff autonomy and territorial jurisdiction was frequently bought by concessions in the economic realm.

A Trojan horse for an “alien invasion”

While the National Government and liberal reformers defended this trade-off as a necessary evil, it sparked fierce debate on both the left and the right. Radical jurists like Zhou Gengsheng denounced formal reciprocity as little more than a legal veil for neocolonial oppression.5 In their view, China had to resist demands for national treatment and protect its native industry from the destructive pressure of international capital. Meanwhile, the ultranationalist right portrayed the opening of China’s hinterland to foreigners as a Trojan horse for an “alien invasion” or even a “population exchange” – a view in turn criticized as myopic xenophobia by liberal reformers and foreign diplomats alike.6

Zhou Gengsheng [S.R. Chow 周鲠生], an influential Chinese jurist and academic, was one of the fiercest critics of China’s “new treaties”. Source: Unknown; scanned by Internet Archive (https://archive.org/), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Revisiting the Interwar History of Legal Imperialism

The populist language used in these debates sounds surprisingly familiar in the contemporary context of deglobalization, as concerns over “economic dependency” and “illegal migration” are gradually supplanting the previous enthusiasm for ever more open markets. This is no coincidence – after all, the controversy over China’s “new treaties” highlights recurring dilemmas faced by national elites: Does political independence necessarily entail a degree of economic autarky? At what point do legitimate concerns over foreign influence turn into blind xenophobia? Rather than offering simple answers to these questions, my research highlights the inherent – and, arguably, irresolvable – tension between legal equality and economic self-determination.

In addition to these conceptual questions, it suggests that the interwar decades more generally ought to be revisited within the historiography of legal imperialism. Rereading the interwar history of treaty revision through the lens of informal empire not only helps recover forgotten transnational entanglements linking states like China, Iran, Soviet Russia, or Weimar Germany. It also casts new light on the enduring legal and economic asymmetries that have shaped the postcolonial world.

  1. The Minister in China (MacMurray) to the Secretary of State, Peking, 19 August 1926, in: Foreign Relations of the United States, 1926, Vol. I, document 761; The Minister in China (MacMurray) to the Secretary of State, Peking, 12 November 1926, in: ibid, document 770. ↩︎
  2. Walther Schücking, “Die Frage der Kündigung des belgisch-chinesischen Handelsvertrages von 1865,” in: Die Reichsgerichtspraxis im deutschen Rechtsleben, Band 1: Öffentliches Recht, ed. Otto Schreiber (De Gruyter, 1929), 72-121, at 119-120. ↩︎
  3. Treaty of Friendship and Commerce with Belgium and Luxemburg [比卢友好通商條約], with two accompanying notes and four declarations, done at Nanjing, 22 November 1928, in: 中外舊約章彙編 [Compilation of China’s Old Treaties], Vol. 3, 1919-1949, ed. Wang Tieya [王鐵崖] (1962), at 642-5. ↩︎
  4. For the concept of informal empire, see Jürgen Osterhammel, “Semi-Colonialism and Informal Empire in Twentieth-Century China: Towards a Framework of Analysis,” in: Imperialism and After: Continuities and Discontinuities, eds. Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Jürgen Osterhammel (German Historical Institute, 1986), 290-314. ↩︎
  5. Zhou Gengsheng [周骾生], “對於中比中義兩約之商榷 [The discussion about the Sino-Belgian and Sino-Italian treaties],” in: Modern Review [現代評論], Vol. 9, Issue 209 (1928), 2-6. ↩︎
  6. See generally Zeng Youhao [曾友豪], “從國際法學的觀點批評中外新約 [A critique of China’s new treaties from the viewpoint of international law],” in: Eastern Miscellany [東方雜志], Vol. 26, Issue 14 (1929), 13-22. ↩︎
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Lucas Brang, "Inequality and its Afterlives: China’s “New Treaties”, 1921-1946," ant.e, July 2026, https://ante-blog.univie.ac.at/article/inequality-and-its-afterlives-chinas-new-treaties-1921-1946/
Negotiating Sovereignties
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Negotiating Sovereignties
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Comment: Sovereignty and Legal Transformation – Beyond the Binary

Modern international law has often approached sovereignty through binary distinctions: sovereign or non-sovereign, independent or colonized, equal or unequal. The formally independent but externally constrained polities of the late 19th and early 20th centuries complicate these categories. The examples discussed in this colloquy, Qing and interwar China alongside 19th century Morocco, reveal forms of sovereignty increasingly measured against ideals of territorial exclusivity and sovereign equality, yet continually qualified by extraterritorial privileges, foreign intervention, and unequal international obligations. Rather than chronicling a linear expansion of sovereign equality, these cases show how jurisdictional plurality and asymmetrical power relations were reconfigured within an international order formally based on equality.

Intermediary Governance

One of the clearest common features across these contexts of constrained sovereignties seems to be the growing importance of intermediaries. In China, as Li Cao shows in “Legal Order from Disorder”, the Chinese Maritime Customs Service (CMCS) emerged from the fractured legal and political environment of the treaty ports as an institution that was formally Chinese yet largely administered by foreigners. It functioned simultaneously as customs administration, diplomatic advisor, translator of international law, and mediator between Qing authorities and foreign powers. Neither fully foreign nor fully national, the CMCS occupied an in-between position that destabilized the idea that sovereignty requires exclusive and unitary state authority. It further illustrates a broader tradition of non-state entities vested with public authority in international affairs, as exemplified earlier by the Dutch East India Company.

This tension between formal sovereignty and dispersed authority appeared elsewhere in regions subject to imperial pressure. In “Negotiating the Sultan’s Sovereignty under European Imperialism in Morocco”, Antoine Perrier notes that in Morocco, European powers fragmented the sultan’s authority without formally abolishing it, by progressively expanding systems of consular protection that placed Moroccan protégés under foreign jurisdiction. Further east in the Ottoman Empire, capitulations and mixed courts similarly institutionalized overlapping jurisdictions and shared legal authority between imperial and foreign actors.1 In all these cases, intermediary institutions mediated rather than displaced sovereignty, a possibility facilitated by longstanding traditions of legal pluralism.2 What later legal doctrine would characterize as fragmentation3 was, in practice, a durable form of political ordering.

The Territorialisation of Sovereignty

Next to the proliferation of intermediary institutions, one of the most significant consequences of the legal transformations of the long nineteenth century was the growing tendency to define sovereignty through territorial administration, fiscal extraction, and centralized governance. Across a range of settings, from the Meiji land tax reforms in Japan4 to the tartīb in Morocco, fiscal reorganization became closely associated with the consolidation of territorial state authority.

In Morocco, authority had long rested on relational forms of allegiance grounded in Islamic law and the contractual logic of bayʿa rather than exclusive and territorially uniform control. Under rising imperial pressure, however, claims to sovereignty were increasingly measured by a state’s capacity to administer territory, collect revenue, and exercise effective jurisdiction. Fiscal reforms such as the tartīb reflected this shift, linking political authority to administrative reach even as consular protections and foreign jurisdictions limited the sultan’s authority.

Modern territorial statehood emerged through institutions that expanded state capacity while simultaneously embedding it within unequal international arrangements.

A comparable dynamic unfolded in China. Despite longstanding forms of differentiated authority, sovereign claims gradually came to be based on territorial jurisdiction, administrative capacity, and centralized state power. The treaty port system and institutions such as the CMCS contributed to this reorientation by extending Qing administrative reach and fiscal capacity, even though they remained embedded in internationalized structures of authority. By the interwar period, as Lucas Brang’s analysis in “Inequality and its Afterlives” demonstrates, efforts to revise the unequal treaties and recover tariff autonomy reflected this emerging conception of sovereignty. Yet the realization of these sovereign claims remained mediated by international agreements and enduring asymmetries of power.

These cases suggest that rather than displacing layered authority, modern territorial statehood emerged through institutions that expanded state capacity while simultaneously embedding it within unequal international arrangements whose effects would outlast the formal achievement of sovereign equality.

The Stickiness of Inequality

The interwar Chinese debates surrounding the “new treaties” illustrate this dynamic with particular clarity. Histories of unequal treaties often present treaty revision as recovery of sovereign equality. However, the replacement of formally unequal treaties by “equal” agreements did not eliminate asymmetry. Instead, inequality reappeared in new legal vocabularies of reciprocity, reform, and economic openness, as the relinquishment of extraterritorial privileges was made conditional upon the opening of Chinese markets to foreign trade and residence. Formal equality thus coexisted with new forms of external economic discipline.

The Moroccan experience points to the same underlying dynamic. The Algeciras Conference of 1906 formally recognized the “sovereignty of His Majesty the Sultan” but also expanded European supervision over Moroccan finances and administration. Likewise, further east, institutions such as the Ottoman Public Debt Administration subjected key areas of fiscal governance to international oversight while leaving the formal structures of sovereignty intact.5 In each case, recognition and constraint advanced together rather than sequentially.

“A dwarf is as much a man as a giant is; a small Republic is no less sovereign State than the most powerful Kingdom.” Emer de Vattel, Le droit des gens, 1758, English translation: The Law of Nations, 1797. Image source: Joaquín Torres-García, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

These examples challenge teleological accounts claiming that imperial inequality gave way to sovereign equality. They reveal the “stickiness” of inequality: asymmetrical relations persisted through adaptation to new legal forms. Rather than disappearing, hierarchy was recast through doctrines of reciprocity, reform, international supervision, and juridical recognition. Sovereignty was not simply restricted from without; it was reconfigured through practices that redistributed authority and rendered external oversight compatible with formal independence.

This tension outlived the imperial formations in which it first emerged. Although decolonization and the universalization of sovereign equality transformed the juridical landscape, disputes over economic dependency, natural resources, and the New International Economic Order continued to expose the gap between formal equality and substantive power. The persistence of these inequalities suggests that the problem was never the absence of sovereignty, but the unequal conditions under which sovereign authority was exercised.

Conclusion: Negotiating Sovereignty under Asymmetry

The Chinese, Moroccan, and other polities often described as “semi-colonial” cast doubt on narratives of an international order founded on the progressive realization of sovereign equality. Positioned between formal independence and colonial subordination, they confounded these ideals and categories in practice.

Their significance lies not just in challenging the binary categories through which global history has often been written, but in revealing sovereignty itself as a historically contingent and continually reconfigured form of political authority. Far from being a stable, territorial, or indivisible possession, sovereign authority was exercised through layered jurisdictions, intermediary institutions, and differentiated governmental competences. What distinguished these polities was not that sovereignty was negotiated or shared, as it often was in European political history, but the conditions under which it was negotiated: within an international order that universalized the language of sovereign equality while reproducing enduring asymmetries of power.

These polities continually reimagined sovereignty in diverse institutional forms, seeking to preserve and expand autonomous political authority to the fullest extent that imperial encroachment allowed. However, rather than overturning hierarchy, their efforts reconfigured it through new institutional arrangements and legal vocabularies that reconciled sovereign authority with persistent external constraints. They therefore illuminate a constitutive tension of modern international law: the universal promise of sovereign equality has long coexisted with unequal conditions for the exercise of sovereign authority

  1. Zülâl Muslu, “Ottoman Mixed Commercial Courts,” in Max Planck Encyclopedia of International Procedural Law (Oxford University Press, 2023). ↩︎
  2. For discussions of how pre-existing regimes of legal pluralism facilitated overlapping jurisdictions like consular courts, see e.g. Pär Kristoffer Cassel, Grounds of Judgment: Extraterritoriality and Imperial Power in Nineteenth-Century China and Japan (Oxford University Press, 2012). ↩︎
  3. International Law Commission, Fragmentation of International Law: Difficulties Arising from the Diversification and Expansion of International Law, Report of the Study Group of the International Law Commission, finalized by Martti Koskenniemi, UN Doc. A/CN.4/L.682 (2006). ↩︎
  4. See Marius B. Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan (Harvard University Press, 2000). ↩︎
  5. See e.g. Murat Birdal, The Political Economy of Ottoman Public Debt: Insolvency and European Financial Control in the Late Nineteenth Century (I.B. Tauris, 2010). ↩︎

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Zülâl Muslu, "Comment: Sovereignty and Legal Transformation - Beyond the Binary," ant.e, July 2026, https://ante-blog.univie.ac.at/article/https://ante-blog.univie.ac.at/article/comment-sovereignty-and-legal-transformation-beyond-the-binary/
Forced and Forged Bridges of International Law
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Forced and Forged Bridges of International Law
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Western International Law in 19th Century Chosŏn: Forced or on Initiative?

On February 12, 1876, a Japanese plenipotentiary demanded that Chosŏn (Korea) open its ports for trade. This demand, a calculated move from a modernizing Japan, was couched in the language of Western international law, a concept still unfamiliar to Chosŏn. The Japanese representative attributed recent bilateral conflicts to ambiguities in existing treaties and invoked the “public law of all nations” (萬國公法) as the ultimate source of new bilateral agreements.

Overwhelmed by this unprecedented pressure, Chosŏn’s diplomatic reception officer, Shin Heon, responded by humbly stating, “This ongoing discussion on opening ports and trades is a matter which our country has never experienced.” In spite of this plea for an 1extended period for consideration, Chosŏn was coerced within weeks into signing the Chosŏn-Japan Treaty on February 27, its first treaty concluded under the principles of so-called modern international law.

» Theoretical principles often failed to translate into practical protections for small states «

This event symbolizes Chosŏn’s forcible entry into the emerging global order under the banner of the “public law of all nations”. It raises a significant question: Should Chosŏn’s entry into the international order be understood primarily as a result of external pressure, or as part of its own efforts to navigate the transitional changes from Sino-centric norms to the new system based on sovereignty and equality among states?

International Law and the “Era of Treaties” in East Asia

China’s initial encounter with Western international law began with the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842, which concluded the First Opium War. This treaty ushered in what historians call the “Era of Treaties,” where unequal agreements became a standard feature of Qing relations with Western powers. Despite the humiliation, the Qing government quickly learned to employ international law as a tool to safeguard its remaining privileges and to navigate its relationships with neighbors.

From 1842 to 1864, the Qing court signed numerous treaties, formalizing its diplomatic engagements with traditional allies and new Western interlocutors. Recognizing the strategic importance of international law, the Qing court invested in translating key Western legal texts. A partial translation of Emer de Vattel’s Le droit des gens by Lin Zexu (林則徐, 1785-1850) in 1847 and William A. P. Martin’s 1864 translation of Henry Wheaton’s Elements of International Law into Chinese (萬國公法, Public Law of All Nations) served as foundational resources for Qing officials. These works introduced concepts largely absent from the Sino-centric worldview, like sovereignty and equality between states, though the Qing court wanted to continue its traditional Sino-centric relationships with its neighbors.

A key text wielded as a tool by the Qing court: Chinese translation of Henry Wheaton’s
Elements of International Law (tr. 1864). Image source: Northeast Asian History Network.

Japan’s adoption of international law followed a different trajectory. After the arrival of American Commodore Matthew Perry in 1853, Japan rapidly absorbed Western knowledge to modernize and protect itself from colonization. Wheaton’s Elements was published as early as the late 1860s, and it quickly became influential in shaping Japan’s understanding of diplomacy and international relations throughout the late 19th century. The Meiji government, however, approached international law pragmatically, using it to bolster its regional ambitions, while selectively ignoring its egalitarian ideals. In effect, Japan’s emphasis on sovereignty and territorial integrity contrasted sharply with its imperialist actions toward Chosŏn and other East-Asian countries, as well as its revisionist interpretation of international law.

Late and Uneasy Engagement with International Law

Unlike China and Japan, Chosŏn’s engagement with international law was relatively delayed and reactive. For centuries, Chosŏn’s foreign relations had been defined overall by the Sino-centric tributary system, which emphasized hierarchical relationships rather than equality between states. The forced opening of Chosŏn’s ports in 1876 thus marked a dramatic rupture in this traditional order.

Wheaton’s Elements of International Law reached Chosŏn in 1880, via the Qing edition. This text became a reference for Chosŏn’s officials navigating the complexities of Western diplomacy. Recognizing the need for deeper expertise, Chosŏn’s Department of Education in 1896 published a translation of Das moderne Völkerrecht der civilisirten Staten: als Rechtsbuch dargestellt (1868) written by Swiss jurist Johann Kaspar Bluntschli (1808-1881), better known by its translation title, Institutes of Public Law (公法會通). Alongside Introduction to the Study of International Law (公法便覽) by Theodore Dwight Woolsey (1801-1889), these texts became essential resources for Chosŏn’s diplomatic engagements.

A voice for sovereignty and equality among nations that resonated with Chosŏn’s officials: Johann Caspar Bluntschli ca. 1870. G. Pauli & Cie, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Among all authors, Bluntschli’s work stood out for promoting an international legal order that extended, in principle, to non-European and small nations. It resonated with Chosŏn’s officials seeking to assert their autonomy in an era of imperialist encroachment. Bluntschli’s Völkerrecht highlighted sovereignty and equality among nations, offering a framework more suited to Chosŏn’s precarious situation as a small state. However, the timing of this effort – coming just before Chosŏn’s annexation by Japan in 1910 – would underscore the limits of legal tools in resisting imperialist pressures.

Chosŏn’s Struggle in a Changing World Order

Chosŏn’s encounter with Western international law was shaped by a complex interplay of external pressures and internal adaptations. The forced port opening in 1876 symbolizes Chosŏn’s reluctant entry into the modern international order, while the reception of texts like Wheaton’s Elements and Bluntschli’s Völkerrecht reflected its efforts to navigate this new landscape. However, as Japan’s annexation of Chosŏn demonstrated, theoretical principles often failed to translate into practical protections for small states.

Chosŏn’s belated and fraught engagement with Western international law illustrates the transformative and uneven impact of this legal framework on 19th century East Asia. In particular, engagement with works by Wheaton, Woolsey, and Bluntschli in Chosŏn reveals the diverse ways international law was understood, adapted, and contested within the country. This case underscores the challenges faced by small nations in asserting their sovereignty amid imperial pressures and shifting global norms. At the same time, it sheds light on the complex legacy of this period: from Chosŏn’s evolving diplomatic posture toward neighboring states to its cautious but lasting engagement with Western legal concepts, the encounter with international law left a mark that would continue to shape Korea’s legal and political modernity well into the 20th century.

  1. Ingyo Deunglok [Records of Neighborly Relations] (1876), “Reception Banquet,” Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies, Seoul National University (隣交謄錄 丙子 [1876] 正月 十八日宴享). ↩︎
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Ki-Won Hong, “Western International Law in 19th Century Chosŏn: Forced or on Initiative?”, ant.e, January 2026, https://ante-blog.univie.ac.at/article/western-international-law-in-19th-century-choson-forced-or-on-initiative/
Forced and Forged Bridges of International Law
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Forced and Forged Bridges of International Law
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The Tehran School and International Law in Early 20th Century Iran

On 19 December 1899, the Tehran School of Political Science (Madrasa-ye ʿolum-e siāsi) opened its doors to the first cohort of students. Mostly of nobility backgrounds, these students were enrolled in a three-year program equivalent to an undergraduate degree. The program included various courses on history, geography, economics, foreign languages, and international law, among others.

The founder and first director of the school was Hassan Moshir-al-Molk Pirnia (1871-1935), the son of the minister of foreign affairs of Persia and a law graduate from Moscow. For him, the creation of a specialized school was aimed at training a skillful diplomatic corps for the ministry of foreign affairs. On the eve of the Constitutional Revolution (1906-11), the need to modernize and keep pace with a Eurocentric global order had augmented domestic demand for legal expertise, placing legalist projects at the center of intra-elite struggles.

The founder and first director of the Tehran School of Political Science, Hassan Pirnia. Source: Morgan Shuster, The Strangling of Persia, New York 1912, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

In Persia, as in other peripheral states, importing European legal standards and expertise was seen as essential to maintaining political independence and gaining access to the family of nations. International law was pivotal to the School’s European-style curriculum and pedagogy. Not only did the teaching of international law precede the teaching of other branches of law but also some of the earliest works published by the School’s lecturers focused on international law.

The Rise of Modernist Lawyer-Politicians

The School of Political Science was the third-oldest institution of modern education in Iran, preceded only by Dār al-fonun (polytechnic college) and Madrasa-ye nezāmi (military college) founded, respectively, in 1851 and 1885. Compared to European-style institutions of legal education in Egypt and the Ottoman Empire, this school was rather a latecomer in the Middle East. Its creation had transpired as a historical product of decades-long social class and power reconfigurations in the highest echelons of governance in Iran. Over the 19th century, gradual expansion of European-style bureaucracy resulted in the rise of a stratum of intelligentsia. Unlike traditional nobility, members of this social stratum derived their social distinction from the mixture of their patrician backgrounds with European credentials.

Coming from this stratum of intelligentsia, many leading Iranian lawyer-politicians of the early 20th century, such as Pirnia, Mohammad Mossadegh (1882-1967) and Ahmad Matine-Daftary (1897-1971) studied and taught at the School of Political Science and the School of Law (Madrasa-ye hoquq) created in 1919. With most disciplines of social sciences still in their embryonic stages of development in Iran, law had notably grown in importance within the reformist and modernist aura of post-revolutionary Persia. Echoing this legalist spirit, Mohammad-Ali Foroughi (1877-1942), one of the school’s lecturers, asserted that law was the “science of the polis” and the “most indispensable of all sciences and techniques”.1

» It was in the pedagogical fabric of this institution that Iranian jurists began to reimagine international law as an object of scholarly reflection, and as an element of the institution-building and state modernization projects they undertook in the next decades. «

For most of the 19th century, the flow of cultural imports from the Ottoman and Russian empires played a vital role in shaping Iranian perceptions of modernity. By the turn of the century, with increasing direct contact between Iran and Europe, this influence had gradually dwindled. With France and French-speaking cantons of Switzerland as their study destinations, most Iranian lawyer-politicians were inspired by Francophone legal cultures, which they believed counterbalanced decades-long Russo-British supremacy in Persia. This French influence expanded over time. By the 1920s, the School of Political Science and the School of Law had developed into Francophone institutions in their structure, curriculum, and pedagogy.

Earliest Scholarly Works of International Law

By the end of the 19th century, Persia, relegated to a “semi-civilized” status and largely excluded from the European-dominated community of states, began to increasingly participate in major multilateral diplomatic conferences. Only a few months before the School was founded, the Persian government had sent a delegation to the Hague Peace Conference of 1899. Against this backdrop, Pirnia dedicated the first seminar of the nascent institution to public international law. His lectures were compiled and published as the first academic textbook of international law in Iran.2 The content and structure of this book matched Friedrich Martens’ Traité de droit international (published in 1882-83),3 suggesting that Pirnia’s previous education in Russia had informed his choice of relevant sources.

The first academic textbook of international law in Iran: cover page of Pirnia’s Hoquq-e beyn-al-melal (1901).

Despite its Russian lineage, Pirnia’s textbook was replete with references to French terms and sources, reflecting the vital position of French-language scholarship for Pirnia’s institution-building project. This growing move towards French legal scholarship was exemplified by another Persian-language textbook of international law published a decade later by Mohammad Mazaher (known as Sadiq Hazrat).4 A lecturer of history and international law courses, he had completed his secondary education in Istanbul, followed by a law degree in Paris. The book, which appears to be a translation of a French handbook for students of the diplomatic service,5 was published in various editions over the next decades.

Besides these textbooks, this period saw the publication of other scholarly works on international law. In 1908, Hossein Motamen-al-Molk Pirnia (1875-1948), Hassan Pirnia’s younger brother and a law graduate from Paris, published the first Persian-language treaty collection.6 A lecturer of economics, he compiled the texts of treaties concluded between Persia and (non-)European states between the 17th and early 20th centuries, offering a uniform terminology for Persian equivalents of foreign terms.

In 1914, Mohammad Mossadegh, a lecturer of procedural law who had obtained his doctorate in law from Neuchâtel, published a treatise on the status of capitulations in Persia.7 Building on the end of extraterritoriality in Japan (1899) and the Ottoman Empire (1914), he argued that “a state which fails to make foreign nationals subject to its domestic jurisdiction […] may not deserve to rule over its own nationals.”8 In the quest for possible pathways to the abolition of capitulations in Iran, Mossadegh favored European-style legal codification and judicial modernization. In his view, these were not incompatible with Islamic law, which had to be adapted to the “exigencies of the time and the interests of mankind”.9

The Lasting Legacies of an Elite Institution

In the educational reforms of the 1920s, the School of Political Science merged with the School of Law, later forming the Faculty of Law, Political Science, and Economics of the University of Tehran (1934). These structural developments transformed small institutions tasked with training government bureaucrats into a single institution of mass education. An elite institution in its origins, the School of Political Science was an integral part of the complex history of the engagement of Iranian lawyer-politicians with state modernization and global diplomacy in the pre-WWI and interwar periods. It was in the pedagogical fabric of this institution that Iranian jurists began to reimagine international law as an object of scholarly reflection, and as an element of the institution-building and state modernization projects they undertook in the next decades.

A group of professors and students of the Faculty of Law of the University of Tehran in the academic year 1934-35. Source: Yearbook of the Faculty of Law, 1935, p. 108.

A series of judicial reforms introduced in 1911 by Hassan Pirnia, then minister of justice, was followed by European-style legal codification in the 1920s and culminated in the abolition of capitulations in 1928. Following decades of exclusion from the international community, Iran joined the League of Nations in 1920. Leveraging the possibilities that the League system offered, Iran increasingly used the language of international law to express its historical grievances vis-à-vis imperial powers, including in its oil dispute with Britain in 1932-33. This generation of legalism, born in the intellectual aura of the School of Political Science and the School of Law, later outlived the political disruptions following the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran in August 1941.

In the immediate post-WWII years, a coalition of prominent jurists of the interwar generation, notably Mossadegh, and younger jurists in the elite establishment breathed life into a new wave of (international) legalism. Many of these young figures, such as Ali Shayegan (1903-1981) and Karim Sanjabi (1905-1995), had completed part of their education at the Faculty of Law or its predecessor institutions. Relying on an anti-colonial legalist rhetoric to push for “resource sovereignty”, this wave of legalism culminated in the early-1950s oil nationalization policy led by Mossadegh’s government. This era of the ascendancy of liberal legalism in Iran arguably only came to an end following Mossadegh’s overthrow by a U.S.-backed coup d’état in August 1953.

  1. Mohammad-Ali Foroughi, Hoquq-e asāsi yā ādāb-e mashrutiyat-e dowal [Constitutional Law or the Elements of Constitutional Governments] (Madrasa-ye ʿolum-e siāsi, 1907), 2. ↩︎
  2. Hassan Moshir-al-Molk, Hoquq-e Beyn al-Melal [International Law] (Dār-al-tebā’e, 1901). ↩︎
  3. Mohsen Nikbin, “On the Origins of the Earliest Lecture on International Law in Persia”, Jus Gentium – Journal of International Legal History, vol. V, issue 1 (2020): 179. ↩︎
  4. Mohammad Mazaher (Sadiq Hazrat), Hoquq-e beyn-al-melal-e omumi [Public International Law] (1912). ↩︎
  5. René Foignet, Manuel élémentaire de droit international public, à l’usage des étudiants en droit et des candidats aux carrières diplomatique et consulaire (6th ed., Librairie nouvelle de droit et de jurisprudence Arthur Rousseau, 1908). ↩︎
  6. Hossein Motamen-ol-Molk, Majmu’e-ye mo’āhedāt-e dowlat-e ’alliye Irān bā doval-e khārejeh [Recueil des traités de l’Empire persan avec les pays étrangèrs] (Matba’e-ye Pharos, 1908). ↩︎
  7. Mohammad Mossadegh, Kāpitulāsion va Irān [Capitulations and Iran] (Matba’e-ye Barādarān-e Bāqerzādeh, 1914). ↩︎
  8. Ibid. 53. ↩︎
  9. Ibid. 52. ↩︎

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Soheil Ghasemi, “The Tehran School and International Law in Early 20th Century Iran”, ant.e, January 2026, https://ante-blog.univie.ac.at/article/the-tehran-school-and-international-law-in-early-20th-century-iran/
Forced and Forged Bridges of International Law
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Forced and Forged Bridges of International Law
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Comment: International Law in Three Histories

Yes, states had made agreements with, and warred against, each other for ages, yet in the decades between the 1870s and the 1930s, industrial-era politics and globally connecting capitalism drove people around the world closer together. Treaties and wars took on new and different forms. In the context of accelerating connections, an emergent framework of “international law” promised to rationalize relations among nations. While framed by its early promoters as law “among nations”, Euro-American approaches to international trade and treaties were hardly global in the mid-19th century. Rather, “international law” largely referred to the norms shared by the industrialized countries of Europe and the Americas, norms that were at times imposed on countries deemed outside the civilizational pale.

Toward Occidental Orientations

These blog posts on Japan, Korea, and Iran show the ways in which something called “international law” spread beyond its Euro-American roots. They reveal how an emerging corpus of law that pretended to a kind of internationalism became increasingly global. Giorgio Fabio Colombo’s detailed accounting of an 1872 dispute over coerced Chinese laborers on a Peruvian ship moored in Japan, which was ultimately arbitrated in Russia, reveals the undeniably global dimensions of the early 1870s. Nearly concurrently, the Japanese empire, with other global empires of the world in mind, imposed an unequal treaty on Korea, as described by Ki-Won Hong. Japanese imperialism showed that all kinds of countries could exploit the inequalities baked into international law.

The HMS Iron Duke, the vessel to which Chinese coerced laborers fled from the María Luz. Unknown author, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Then, a few decades later, elites in Tehran used international law as the departure point for establishing a law-based political order – as described by Soheil Ghasemi. By the turn of the 20th century, international law had become both an object of study by people the world over and a collection of practices from London to Lima, from St. Petersburgh to Seoul.

Early Euro-American adopters of international law used it to connect commerce and diplomacy to rules that reflected an emergent and increasingly cohering group of practices. This provoked a curious dynamic as international law stretched across the planet, sometimes by force. From the 1850s, diplomats and reformers in China, Korea, and Japan rushed to translate Euro-American legal texts from Johann Kaspar Bluntschli to Henry Wheaton into Asian languages.

» It was the potentially leveling power of international law, wedded to domestic reform, that accelerated its adoption. «

Around the same time, reformers in Tehran shifted their focus from existing regional modes of international relations to European forms, particularly French models. In Japan, Korea, Persia, and elsewhere, the cross-pollination of new ideas prompted students to study abroad in Holland, France, Germany, England, and the United States. The international movement of legal advisers from these same countries diffused a range of legal knowledge. All of this gave rise to the establishment of schools, such as the Tehran School of Political Science. By the 19th century’s end, law schools had become sites for incubating political leaders of nation-states the world over.

While the dynamic of engagement, inquiry, and then adoption unfolded both within and at the geographic margins of an Atlantic-centered world, the processes of international law’s spread reflected internal demands in many countries. For their own reasons, from shoring up sovereignty to suppressing internal dissidents, domestic reformers, thinkers, and politicians inside and outside of Europe and the Americas enthusiastically adapted newly emergent approaches to law among nations.

Legal Equality’s Elusive Promise

The three blog posts, and the papers on which they were originally based,1 generally read international law, or its spread, as a moment of possibility, if not positivity. Colombo writes: “[T]he Japan-Peru controversy was the first instance in which an Asian country successfully invoked the instruments of international law to defend itself in the community of civilized nations.” In Ki-Won Hong’s text, we see the complaint that the Meiji government “approached international law pragmatically, using it to bolster its regional ambitions, while selectively ignoring its [international law’s] egalitarian ideals.” Hong writes as if an egalitarian impulse had been widely adopted elsewhere only to be forsaken by Japanese imperialists.

Japanese and Korean diplomats at the commemorative feast for the Treaty of Kangwha. Painting by Ahn Jungsik (1861-1919), public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

In other words, the tone across the posts is generally positive. Colombo notes that Meiji politicos in Japan believed that by using international law to best Peru, they could raise their status among the world’s leading nations. As described by Hong, Chosŏn reformers hoped they could contain their erstwhile Japanese neighbor with international law. And Ghasemi describes how Hassan Mošīr-al-Molk Pirnia used international law as the scholarly medium for introducing modern politics to Persia. Yet despite the enthusiastic embrace of international law in each case, it was an embrace under the shadow of unequal treaties, the threat of war, or existential dread.

The promise of equal sovereignty under something called “the Westphalian System” had always been a mirage. Ghasemi notes how Tehran elites knew both the sweet and the sour of international law, as “Iran increasingly used the language of international law” – which had in the past been leveraged against Persia – “to express its historical grievances vis-à-vis imperial powers”. As self-described “pawns” in Britain and Russia’s Great Game, Persians had grudgingly resigned themselves to the system of capitulations since the 1820s. The prospects for international law serving as a leveler among nations were decidedly mixed.

» These are not histories of the weak using international law to contain the strong. «

These are not histories of the weak using international law to contain the strong. Tellingly, the Meiji government’s success in the María Luz incident was not replicable in cases when the Japanese government’s antagonist was the more formidable Great Britain. Japanese litigants fared somewhat poorly in other notorious maritime cases of the 1870s and 1880s, such as the sinking of the Japanese naval vessel Chishima in a collision with the British-flagged Ravenna, and the deaths by drowning of nearly all the Japanese passengers of a British-flagged ship, the Normanton, while the largely European crew survived. By 1910, the Japanese empire had absorbed a strategically situated and militarily weak Korea. In the case of the School of Political Science and School of Law, if one ends its history in the 1920s, then it reads as a triumph of rational constitutionalism. Yet in the longer sweep of Iranian history, the success of the school’s brand of restraint and adherence to the rule of law did not survive internal and external pressures.

And Still …

Thinking about these cases and the context in which they operated, both domestic and international, one sees the interweaving of a range of interests, extending inward and outward. Foreign pressure and imperialism certainly drove international law’s spread. But it was the potentially leveling power of international law, wedded to domestic reform, that accelerated its adoption. Savvy operators around the world, including in Korea, Japan, and Iran, exploited opportunities in the space between idealism and pragmatic statecraft to achieve goals that included convincing other nations of their civility, imposing modern imperialism on a neighbor, and crafting a constitutional nation-state.

Countries once at the margins of international law began to make it global, shaping it in the process. These histories of Japan, Korea, and Iran show that “law among nations” was not just imposed, but demanded, which made it integral to globalizing systems of nation-states and capital.

  1. Papers given at the online symposium “Legal Orders under Pressure: Non-Western Experiences of Legal Transformations in the 19th and early 20th Centuries” of the Max Planck Research Group Translations & Transitions, 7–9 December 2022, organised by the Chair for Globalisation and Legal Pluralism, Faculty of Law, University of Vienna, Austria, together with the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Theory, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. ↩︎

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Darryl Flaherty, “Comment: International Law in Three Histories”, ant.e, January 2026, https://ante-blog.univie.ac.at/article/comment-international-law-in-three-histories/