Unseen Agencies of Transformation
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Unseen Agencies of Transformation
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Intro: Legal Reforms as Reorganisation of Order

The colloquy “Unseen Agencies of Transformation” explores how non-Western legal systems transformed during the 19th and early 20th centuries – not as passive recipients of Western legal models, but through contested, negotiated, and often locally driven processes of reform and adaptation.

In December 2022, the symposium “Legal Orders under Pressure: Non-Western Experiences of Legal Transformations in the 19th and early 20th Centuries” critically reassessed what it means for legal systems to modernise under the pressure of Western influence and internal reform1. While modern legal history is often framed in terms of Western legal expansion – highlighting codification, constitutional moments, and the transplantation of foreign legal models – this colloquy argues that such narratives obscure the lived experience of legal change and the local rationalities that shaped it.

» Legal change must be understood not only in terms of institutional design or textual production, but also in terms of how people used, contested, and reinterpreted law in their social worlds «

Global history has encouraged scholars to view the “long nineteenth century” as a unified temporal framework that captures global transformations of commerce, empire, nation, and ideas. Yet, applying this historiographical turn to legal history remains challenging. A key reason for this is the continued emphasis on the formal adoption of Western legal codes, often in the late nineteenth century, particularly in relation to unequal treaties. This focus obscures earlier, more gradual legal developments that emerged from within each society. To overcome this limitation, we need to turn to legal practice itself – examining transformations in customary norms, the involvement of various actors in shaping legal reasoning, and the cross-regional exchanges that shaped these changes.

By focusing on legal practices involving Christian, Muslim, and Jewish merchants as well as local bureaucrats, we can more accurately capture the complexity and diversity of legal modernisation outside the West. Legal reform in these cases is more clearly understood in terms of regionally embedded processes of rationalisation, dispute settlement, and the reorganisation of order, which preceded the formal enactment of modern legal codes.

Perspectives on the world depend greatly on where you stand: Shintei – Chikyu Bankoku Hozu (Square Map of all the Countries on the Globe), 1853, source: Wikimedia Commons/Geographicus Rare Antique Maps.

The westernisation of law should not be reduced to a single moment of rupture – such as the promulgation of a civil code or a treaty – nor should it be understood solely as legal reception. Instead, we highlight the agency of local actors, the continuing importance of customary and religious law, and the tensions between official reforms and everyday legal practices. Legal change must be understood not only in terms of institutional design or textual production, but also in terms of how people used, contested, and reinterpreted law in their social worlds.

The three case studies presented – the Ottoman Balkans, Thailand, and Ethiopia – illustrate this approach by foregrounding the internal dynamics of legal transformation in non-Western contexts. These studies show how non-Western societies engaged with legal modernity not as passive recipients of European norms, but as active participants negotiating legal change on their own terms.

Local Agency, Tradition as Archive, and Selective Engagement

Ivelina Masheva’s text “Merchants, Local Elites, and New Commercial Litigation in the Ottoman Balkans” shifts the focus from central legal reforms to local dynamics. By examining how commercial courts emerged in the Ottoman Balkans in the 1840s and 1850s in response to local demands for more efficient legal mechanisms, Masheva shows that the institutionalisation of commercial litigation was a negotiated process shaped by competing interests at multiple levels. This bottom-up perspective challenges the assumption that legal modernisation in the Ottoman Empire was exclusively state-driven and shows how legal practices evolved organically from the initiatives of provincial actors. It enriches our understanding of Ottoman legal pluralism and invites comparison with other regions where local agency also drove legal innovation.

Surutchada Reekie and Adam Reekie’s text “Siam’s Tectonic Legal Reform Process” examines the role of the Three Seals Code in shaping legal norms. Contrary to the common view that traditional Thai law was replaced by Western-style codification, it argues that the Three Seals Code served as a living legal archive that continued to inform legal reasoning well into the modern period. It emphasises that legal modernisation in Thailand was not a simple replacement, but a hybrid process shaped by indigenous legal traditions, foreign (especially British) advisers, and commercial imperatives. This dynamic account reframes Thai legal reform as a negotiation between tradition and modernity.

Hailegabriel Feyissa’s text “European Imperialism and Legal Transformation in 20th Century Ethiopia” offers a two-stage framework for understanding Ethiopian legal reform. Distinguishing between early 20th-century constitutional initiatives (such as the 1931 Constitution) and later codification efforts (such as the 1960 Civil Code), Feyissa critiques the dominant view of Ethiopia’s legal modernisation as either entirely endogenous or externally imposed. He shows that Ethiopia’s legal transformation was shaped by selective engagement with foreign models, including Japan’s Meiji Constitution, and active domestic debates about sovereignty and legitimacy. He also highlights the limited attention given to Ethiopian legal history in scholarly discussions.

Rethinking Legal Transformations Through Practice and Pluralism

Taken together, these contributions offer more than region-specific insights – they contribute to a reconceptualisation of legal modernity itself. They show that economic rationality, moral imagination, and institutional experimentation emerged in various forms throughout the non-Western world, often well before or independently of direct colonial rule or Western intervention. This challenges the dominant historiography that associates modern law with codification and centralised state power, and opens space for a more pluralist, actor-centred, and practice-based understanding of legal change.

In sum, legal reforms in the Ottoman Empire, Thailand, and Ethiopia cannot be explained simply as a response to pressure from Western countries or as a mere imitation of European legal systems. Rather, they were a multi-layered process of restructuring legal orders, deeply rooted in local realities and involving a variety of actors – judges, merchants, bureaucrats, lawyers, national and local politicians – in creative and controversial ways. By reconstructing the process of formation of these alternative modern legal systems, we can deepen our understanding of the history of law and develop new conceptual tools for thinking about law and order that are rooted in each region and history.

  1. Online symposium 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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Makiko Hayashi, “Introduction: Legal Reforms as Reorganisation of Order,” ant.e, September 2025, https://ante-blog.univie.ac.at/article/introduction-legal-reforms-as-reorganisation-of-order/.
Unseen Agencies of Transformation
COLLOQUY
Unseen Agencies of Transformation
ARTICLE

European Imperialism and Legal Transformation in 20th Century Ethiopia

Ethiopia is perhaps the least studied case of legal transformation under pressure from Western European powers during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Its successful contest with the Italians at the Battle of Adwa in 1896 meant that Ethiopia escaped direct colonisation by European powers during what in African historiography is labelled as the “Scramble for Africa” (1884-1914). Nonetheless, it was a site of Western imperialism, and is often compared to Asian and African countries whose encounters with European empires were generally framed through such lenses as informal imperialism and semicolonialism.

A History of Reluctance

In Ethiopia, scholarly interest in the legal history of European legal imperialism and the attendant legal transformations – changes in the normative and institutional structures of the legal system, and shifts in the composition of elites with roles in the system – began only in the 1980s and remained low thereafter.1 Seminal works on the legal history of imperial Ethiopia ignored juristic developments during the first third of the 20th century as well as later phases of legal transformations that were induced by Western legal imperialisms (1940s-1960s).2 Furthermore, there has been no or little effort to situate Ethiopia’s encounter with Western legal imperialisms in broader comparative and/or global perspectives.

As a result, the only semicolonial encounter between the West and sub-Saharan Africa during the first half of the 20th century remained invisible in national, transnational and global histories of legal transformations. Ethiopians’ reluctance to examine the history of European legal imperialism in their country and global legal historians’ focus on well-known cases of informal legal imperialism in Asia and the Middle East explain the absence of Ethiopia in global historical studies of early 20th century legal transformations.3

A key actor of legal transformation: Emperor Haile Selassie I (centre) and members of the royal court. Source: Wikimedia.

In view of this history, the emerging conversation between students of Ethiopian and other non-Western legal transformations is encouraging. It offers an opportunity to reassess received and at times flawed understandings of “voluntary receptions of law”. This is particularly relevant in cases like Ethiopia, where non-reciprocal treaties of amity and commerce, such as the Franco-Ethiopian Treaty of Amity and Commerce of 1908 (“Klobukowski Treaty”), led to ambivalent yet consequential legal reform measures. These reforms have since been inflected by both postcolonial contests and neo-colonial continuities.

A Break with Past Trends

Over the last few years, I have been studying Western legal imperialism and its relationship with legal reform measures in imperial Ethiopia (1889-1974) using concepts that have traditionally been used for describing and analysing European legal imperialism in the few juridically independent Asian countries of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, such as extraterritoriality and mixed courts.4 I have been able to identify important markers of the Ethiopian experience in the relatively short,5 two-phased period of pressure for legal transformation from Western powers. That period saw weak Western legal imperialism and moderate legal transformation inflected by a strong “new traditionalism” during the first phase (1908-1936) and strong European legal imperialism and major legal transformation in the second phase (1942-1966). This was chased by a more left-oriented “modern universalism” that further complicated the permutations of the legal reform projects of the earlier period.

Aspects of these Ethiopian trajectories of legal transformations in the shadow of Western legal imperialism are discussed in detail elsewhere and are not repeated here.6 There is still much to be learnt about the legal transformations, resulting from Ethiopia’s interesting but not necessarily unique encounter with Western legal imperialism.

Placing Ethiopia within Broader Frameworks of Historical Research

As elsewhere, Ethiopia’s encounter with informal legal imperialism involved state transformation in pursuit of independence from informal colonisation (e.g., extraterritoriality) and strategic appropriation and redeployment of imported legal ideas and institutions in the service of Third World imperialism. As such, studying early 20th century Ethiopian legal transformations contributes to the comprehensiveness of global legal histories of non-western legal transformations that are often done through leading cases of “unconquered states” such as China.

Such conversations and collaborations are also important in challenging students of Ethiopian history and law to consider historical and contemporary developments in Ethiopia from broader perspectives and thereby deepen our knowledge of Ethiopian experiences of borrowing foreign legal ideas and institutions. Historical studies of modern Ethiopia have largely been undertaken based on outdated frameworks, the limitations of which have been identified by some since the 1990s.7

The only semicolonial encounter between the West and sub-Saharan Africa during the first half of the 20th century remained invisible in national, transnational and global histories of legal transformations

Besides, Ethiopians have not been that concerned about their legal history, and local interest in historical studies of legal developments in modern Ethiopia remains low. There is also a lack of progress in comparative legal scholarship on Ethiopia’s major legal reform projects (such as the famous 1931 Ethiopian Constitution and the 1960 Ethiopian Civil Code) despite the fact that emerging perspectives on legal transfer, imperialism, and the Ethiopian state strongly suggest a new way of talking about them.8

As someone who is concerned by the current state of historical and legal scholarship regarding Ethiopia’s past and contemporary legal reform projects, I welcome looking at histories of legal transformation (e.g. codification, constitution-making, and dispute settlement) in Ethiopia anew and in conversation and collaboration with students of legal transformation in “unconquered states”. Placing Ethiopia within broader frameworks of historical research not only offers richer insights into some of the “landmark” cases of 20th century legal transfer projects but also prepares the ground for more wide-ranging accounts of transformations of non-European legal systems that, inter alia, give attention to little considered entanglements and interconnectedness, e.g. the influences of the 1889 Meiji Constitution of the Empire of Japan on the 1931 constitution of the Ethiopian Empire.

  1. See Heinrich Scholler, “The Special Court of Ethiopia 1922–1936: Mixed Jurisdiction as an Instrument of Legal Development,” in Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference of Ethiopian Studies, ed. Sven Rubenson (Institute of Ethiopian Studies, 1984), 381; Jon Edwards, “’…and the King Shall Judge’: Extraterritoriality in Ethiopia, 1908-1936,” in Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference of Ethiopian Studies, ed. Sven Rubenson (Berlings, 1984), 373. ↩︎
  2. See, for example, Aberra Jembere, An Introduction to the Legal History of Ethiopia: 1434 1974 (Shama Books, 2012). See also Kenneth R. Redden, The Legal System of Ethiopia (Michie, 1968). ↩︎
  3. For a critique of the sorry state of comparative and historical legal scholarship in the study of legal developments in 20th century Ethiopia, see Hailegabriel Feyissa, “The Ethiopian Civil Code Project: Reading a ‘Landmark’ Legal Transfer Case Differently” (PhD diss., Melbourne Law School, 2017), chapter 2. ↩︎
  4. See, e.g., Hailegabriel Feyissa, “European Extraterritoriality in Semicolonial Ethiopia,” Melbourne Journal of International Law 17, no. 1 (2017): 107-134; Hailegabriel Feyissa, “Mixed Courts of Ethiopia,” in Max Planck Encyclopedia of International Procedural Law, ed. Hélène Ruiz Fabri (Oxford University Press, 2019). ↩︎
  5. Ethiopia’s experience with European legal imperialism (e.g., regimes of mixed courts) was comparatively shorter than some of the most notable cases of European extraterritoriality in the semicolonial world, such as Thailand, Egypt and China (see Turan Kayaoğlu, Legal Imperialism; Sovereignty and Extraterritoriality in Japan, the Ottoman Empire, and China (Cambridge University Press, 2010), 5). ↩︎
  6. See, e.g., Aberra Jembere, An Introduction to the Legal History of Ethiopia: 1434-1974 (Shama Books, 2012); Kenneth R. Redden, The Legal System of Ethiopia (Michie, 1968); Norman J. Singer, “Modernization of Law in Ethiopia: A Study in Process and Personal Values,” Harvard International Law Journal 11, no. 1 (1970): 73; Robert Allen Sedler, “The Development of Legal Systems: The Ethiopian Experience,” Iowa Law Review 53 (1967): 562. ↩︎
  7. See, e.g., Pietro Toggia, “History writing as a state ideological project in Ethiopia,” African Identities 6, (2008): 319-343; Christopher Clapham, “Rewriting Ethiopian History,” Annales d’Ethiopie XVIII, (2002): 37-54; Alessandro Triulzi, “Battling with the Past: New Frameworks for Ethiopian Historiography,” in Remapping Ethiopia; Socialism and After, ed. Wendy James et al.(James Currey, 2002), 276-288. See also Christopher Clapham, “Heinrich Scholler: The Special Court of Ethiopia 1920–1935. (Äthiopistische Forschungen, Bd. 15). 414 pp. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag Wiesbaden GmbH, 1985,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 50, no. 1 (1987): 214; Pietro Toggia, “Aberra Jembere: An introduction to the legal history of Ethiopia, 1434–1974. Lit Verlag Münster, 2000,” African Identities 6, no. 4 (2008): 529-532. ↩︎
  8. For more on this, see Hailegabriel Feyissa, “The Ethiopian Civil Code Project: Reading a ‘Landmark’ Legal Transfer Case Differently” (PhD diss., Melbourne Law School, 2017) ch. 2. ↩︎
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Hailegabriel Feyissa. “European Imperialism and Legal Transformation in 20th Century Ethiopia,” ant.e, September 2025, https://ante-blog.univie.ac.at/article/european-imperialism-and-legal-transformation-in-20th-century-ethiopia/.