Negotiating Sovereignties
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Negotiating Sovereignties
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Legal Order from Disorder: The Chinese Maritime Customs Service

The Chinese Maritime Customs Service (CMCS) was born of legal disorder. Coming into existence in the aftermath of both domestic rebellions and foreign invasions, it was deeply involved in the legal transformation of the late Qing dynasty and played a significant role in the construction of a legal order.

How did a (seemingly foreign-led) customs service become a driving force in the legal transformation of late Qing China? In Chinese legal history, the CMCS exemplifies a legal transformation in the late Qing dynasty that was not state-centric. Nominally, it was an executive branch of China’s government, but counterintuitively, it was more of an international institution, with most of its senior officials being foreigners. Its unique nature stemmed from the semi-colonial and semi-feudal context of modern China that facilitated its emergence.

Initially, it was a makeshift solution devised by the consuls of Britain, America, and France to restore the foreign trade order in Shanghai in 1854. After the signing of the Treaty of Tianjin, the Self-Strengthening Movement witnessed the establishment of a “synarchy framework”. In this context, the CMCS gradually evolved into one of the most critical bureaucracies of China by serving as the bridge between Britain’s pursuit of free trade and hegemony and China’s goal of maintaining sovereignty, independence, and modern transformation.

The embodiment of tertius gaudens: Sir Robert Hart, 1st Bt (1835-1911), Inspector-General of Customs in China, caricatured in Vanity Fair, 1894. Source: Julius Mendes Price, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Under the leadership of Inspector General Robert Hart, the CMCS established itself as a neutral intermediary between the Qing government and Western powers. It functioned as a de facto tertius gaudens – a third party that strategically positioned itself to benefit from the interactions and tensions between the two sides. Through this, it was able to gain a high degree of independence and exert considerable influence over China’s modernization. This happened partly because of its crucial position for both China and the West, and also due to its hard work to establish authority.

Specifically, to support its objectives of preservation and expansion, the CMCS introduced an international legal order externally and established a systematic legal framework internally, deeply intertwining its operations with the broader legal transformation of the late Qing period.

The Introduction of an International Legal Order

The CMCS introduced Western international law into China to shape its external legal order, setting the course of China’s “entrance into the family of nations”, in Immanuel C.Y. Hsu’s words.1 The process began with the translation of international laws and legal education sponsored by the CMCS. Henry Wheaton’s Elements of International Law, translated into Chinese by W. A. P. Martin, brought basic principles, ideas, and concepts of modern international law to China. At the same time, the founding of Tongwenguan, a government school for teaching Western languages and science, in 1862 signaled the start of a new chapter in education on public international law in China.

Wheaton’s ideas take on a Chinese form: Bankoku kouhou (Elements of International Law). Source: w:ja:User:Dokutou, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The development would not have been so smooth without Hart’s help and encouragement. The Inspector General had such strong ties with the school that Martin himself called him the “father” of Tongwenguan. His support for public law education was evident in his appointment of Martin as the first professor of public law in China, the establishment of public law courses, and the popularization of public law education. Some of the foreign professors employed by Tongwenguan even came from the CMCS, such as Commissioners Morse, Oliver, and Piry.

The diverse faculty outside Tongwenguan. Source: Not identified, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

In diplomacy, the CMCS played an active role in Sino-foreign negotiations, so that “in all international questions, from negotiating a treaty to settling a land dispute, the Zongli Yamen in those days of inexperience had constant resort to the advice and help of the Inspector General at Peking”. Even in the local treaty ports, “viceroys, governors and taotais constantly consulted and acted in conformity with the advice of the commissioner”.2

Hart was acutely aware that the fate of the CMCS was tied to the Sino-foreign treaties. The CMCS was directly or indirectly involved in negotiating more than 60 Chinese-foreign treaties and agreements, both bilateral and multilateral, some concerning sovereignty and some focusing on specific issues. In effect, it served as a buffer against direct confrontation between China and the West, preventing the immediate collapse of the late Qing regime and thus sustaining the legitimacy of its existence.

The Making of a “Panopticon”

To regulate the service efficiently and make it competitive, Hart established modern and centralized bureaucratic governance by means of a customs law system. As Hans van de Ven concluded, “Hart turned the CMCS into a Foucauldian panopticon, not inappropriately, given Hart’s utilitarian instincts, by turning the Inspectorate General, its headquarters, into a monitoring center from which he supervised, managed, coordinated, and controlled the Service’s Custom Houses”.3

The internal legal order can be understood as two aspects: the fixed customs laws, including treaties, quasi-treaties, and other rules and regulations, and the flowing institutionalized instruments, with circulars of the Inspector General as their core.

The former provided the basic structure for the customs law order by serving as the legal origin of the CMCS. For example, the Rules of Trade Appended to the Treaty of Tianjin provided the treaty base for the foreigners managing customs in China. On this foundation, the Foreign Inspectors and the Board of Inspectors in Shanghai were developed into the Foreign Commissioners and expanded in each treaty port. The subsequent decades witnessed the consolidation and expansion of their rights and powers by successive unequal treaties. Besides, Hart engaged in the signing of specialized regulations and rules that enjoyed the status of quasi-treaties, like the Yangtze Regulation, Pilotage Regulations, Rules for Joint-Investigation in Cases of Confiscation and Fine by the Custom House Authorities, and others.

The essence of institutionalization: Inspector General’s Circulars: Official Circulars Classmark: 679 (1); Call number: 26890. The Second Historical Archives of China.

In addition, Hart wove a net of institutionalized instruments including circulars, dispatches, semi-official correspondences, and various other formats. Among them, the Inspector General’s circulars were the most universal official documents, issued to each local Commissioner for compliance, and highlighting the diversity and flexibility of the CMCS’s internal administration. These normative instruments had their own formats and functions, distinguishing the service from other Chinese government branches. The regular flow of these instruments brought orders – Hart’s will – into every corner of the service, making it a centralized and vertical management hierarchy. Notably, such a highly law-based customs operation system was unique within the Qing bureaucracy at the time and became a model for later administrative reforms.

The “Reason of CMCS”

To explain why the CMCS played such a central role in legal transformation during the late Qing period, I have introduced the concept of the “reason of CMCS”. This refers to the underlying rationale or driving force behind its actions and evolution. It helps make sense of its preservation and expansion, as well as its pursuit of autonomy and independence. Hart made great efforts that point to the ultimate goal of valuing the well-being of the organization and its members, such as shaping a cohesive and proud identity of customs staff, sidelining the authority of the Chinese superintendents, and resisting intervention in customs affairs by the British authorities as their core.

The “reason of CMCS” could serve as a theoretical tool to understand the various roles it played – as China’s representative, mediator, and backstage conductor, as diplomatic advisor to the Qing court and as accessory to the invasions of Western powers, as executant and beneficiary of Sino-foreign negotiations and as translator for the Chinese party. By its nature, the CMCS was an intermediate force operating in a “contact zone” against a semi-colonial backdrop. Only by focusing on the service itself can we move beyond a state-centric perspective that either makes it purely an advanced force for modernizing China or merely an instrument of imperialist aggression against China.

The CMCS emerged between a faltering Qing court and an overstretched British empire when the old, traditional legal order was collapsing, and the transition to a new legal order was beginning. The making of its external and internal legal order was the manifestation of the “reason of CMCS” and deeply affected the legal transformation of late Qing China. Externally, the international legal order was introduced into China by means of translation, education, and Sino-foreign negotiations, while internally, a rigorous and modern customs law system was constructed and became the template for the government’s institutional and legal reforms. The story of the CMCS challenges a linear narrative of state-driven legal transformation in modern China and offers a new perspective on the emergence of sovereignty in late Qing China.

  1. See Immanuel C.Y. Hsu, China’s Entrance into the Family of Nations (Harvard University Press, 1960). ↩︎
  2. H. B. Morse, The International Relations of the Chinese Empire III (Longmans, Green & Co, 1918), 390. ↩︎
  3. Hans Van de Ven, Breaking with the Past: The Maritime Customs Service and the Global Origins of Modernity in China (Columbia University Press, 2014), 65. ↩︎
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Li Cao 曹雳, "Legal Order from Disorder: The Chinese Maritime Customs Service," ant.e, July 2026, https://ante-blog.univie.ac.at/article/legal-order-from-disorder-the-chinese-maritime-customs-service/
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/
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
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Siam’s Tectonic Legal Reform Process

» It is appropriate to think of law in South East Asia geologically, as a series of layers each of which overlays the previous layers without actually replacing them, so that in places, due to tectonic shifts, the lower layers are still visible, although not perfectly distinguishable from each other. « – Andrew Harding1

What does it mean for a country’s legal system to modernise without colonisation? Applying Professor Harding’s geological analogy, the answer for Siam seems to lie beneath tectonic layers of law, culture, and reform – with the willingness to push forward change being the main tectonic force that caused the shifts.

Siam’s law reform in the 19th and early 20th centuries may be thought of as comprising two main parts: the reform of substantive law and the reform of the judicial system. Focusing on the first, we argue for a more comprehensive understanding of the reform process, to encompass the true complexities involved. Rather than a seamless transition from traditional to modern law, Siam’s legal reform may be thought of as piecemeal and shaped by multiple, overlapping influences. Accordingly, any research into the reform process should accommodate the many spheres of influence, not only from the obvious source that is pressure from colonial powers, but also from the much less discussed latent impetus.

For this blog post, we have chosen two aspects that highlight this complexity: our presupposition of the nature of “traditional law” and the under-acknowledged influence of the people who personified the law reform.

The Elastic Nature of Siam’s Traditional Law

There is no single accepted narrative of Siam’s legal history, and the roles that various factors played in the country’s legal development continue to be debated. However, for the purpose of this blog post, it is useful as a starting point to draw on the work of the late eminent Thai scholar Professor Preedee Kasemsup,2 according to whom Thai legal history may be divided into two broad eras: “pre-modern” or “traditional” law, and “modern” law.3 The former refers to the laws of previously ruling states in the geographical area of today’s Thailand (the Sukhothai, Ayutthaya and early Bangkok periods), while the modern era began with the reform period and continues to present-day Thailand.4

The progression from traditional law to modern law certainly hinges on the linear notion that the country moved from one broad type of “law” to another. This view was challenged when Baker and Phongpaichit recently argued that Siam’s traditional law, known as the Three Seals Code, should not be seen as legislation, but as an archive of socio-legal history. According to Baker and Phongpaichit, it would be illusory to impose our modern understanding of law and law-making on historical texts such as the Three Seals Code which, in their view, should be viewed as a historical archive reflecting the gradual accumulation of court rulings and decrees, as well as poetry, word play, and homily.5

More than “just” law: the Three Seals Code includes not only court rulings and decrees, but also poetry, word play and homily. Here displayed at the National Museum, Bangkok, Thailand.

This led to their thought-provoking suggestion that the Three Seals Code perhaps should not be treated as “law”, as far as law may be broadly understood as a system of rules, since it possesses different characteristics and may serve a wider social function – such as teaching the public about desirable behaviours – rather than a narrow statutory function.6 Instead, it may be considered as an archival compilation of written evidence of the evolution of legal conceptions.

Therefore, we should adopt a more flexible analytical framework when examining Siam’s reform process and recognise the true nature and characteristics of the subjects under study within their specific contexts. Certainly, it is more convenient to compare like with like – that is, one type of “law” with another type of “law”. However, such an approach may inadvertently obscure a richer, more nuanced understanding of legal history.

But if the law itself was elastic and layered, who or what were the “tectonic forces” – i.e. the agents shaping its form and direction?

Law-Shaping Lawyers

Another layer that adds to the tectonic landscape of Siam’s law reform comes from what Alan Watson called “Law-shaping Lawyers”, by which he referred to a group of the legal elite who shape the law either through their involvement in the legislative process or through the creation of precedents or authoritative legal interpretation.7 In a context of legal transplants, which Siam’s legal reform may be seen as, Watson argued that the law which emerged from the process tended to be strongly influenced by the knowledge of this group of lawyers, by their imagination, training, and worldviews.

The case of law-shaping lawyers in Siam is most fascinating. Tamara Loos acknowledged the transnational and transcultural nature of Siam’s legal reforms, as a number of foreign legal advisers from the East and the West worked alongside Siamese lawyers in shaping and implementing various changes.8 We have also taken an interest in the roles in which lawyers from the common law world helped shape the law reform process of Siam, a civil law country.

In our work on a comparative history of the courts of justice, we found that during the reform period, many British lawyers were appointed to the highest court of the land (and also to lower courts, but judgments of these were not recorded, rendering this a difficult topic for research), sitting alongside French, Japanese, and Siamese judges.9 We argued, among other things, that their legal backgrounds and professional experiences – such as their previous work as barristers in Britain or judges in British colonial territories – may have influenced Siam’s legal development, through their methods of legal analysis and application. However, their strong common law influence during the formative years of the country’s “modern” legal era was counterbalanced by the civil law influence from the French and Japanese judges. This is but one aspect of the hybridity of Siam’s reform process.

» In a context of legal transplants, Watson argued that the law which emerged from the process tended to be strongly influenced by the knowledge of a legal elite, by their imagination, training, and worldviews. «

In another article focusing on vicarious liability law, we argued that Thailand’s current main provision on vicarious liability (section 425 of the Civil and Commercial Code) may have been an incidental legal transplant from English law, influenced by the main Siamese drafters at the time, who were educated in England.10

Other “Law-shaping Lawyers” may be found in the Law Drafting Committee (currently known as the Office of the Council of State), the Ministry of Justice, and among personnel of other government departments such as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of the Interior, as well as foreign advisors to the government. Together, they established the country’s legal structure and navigated the devious course of modernisation in the shadow of colonial threats.

All these facts point to the importance of understanding the key persons behind each legal phenomenon in order to truly unpack the layers and spheres of influences affecting the change.

How Should We Approach the Multi-Layered Reform Process?

This blog post marks an early step in what we hope will be a sustained exploration of the rich and layered field of legal history. From among many facets of this complex process, we explore two aspects which yield two key lessons. The first is to be open-minded to a challenge to an accepted norm – such as the question if traditional law was “law” at all. Another lesson is to understand a process not only from its impetus, but also from the people who turn its wheels. In the case of Siam, internal motivations and domestic spheres of influence help form a wider and more holistic view of the process. An emphasis on colonial threats is never the whole story – just one tectonic force.

  1. Andrew Harding, “Comparative Law and Legal Transplantation in South East Asia,” in Adapting Legal Cultures, ed. David Nelken and Johannes Feest (Hart Publishing, 2001), 205.  ↩︎
  2. See Preedee Kasemsup, “Reception of Law in Thailand—a Buddhist Society,” in Asian Indigenous Law: In Interaction with Received Law, ed. Masaji Chiba (KIP Limited, 1986), 267–300.  ↩︎
  3. Another eminent Thai scholar who shares a similar view is Professor Kittisak Prokkati (see Kittisak Prokkati, The Reform of Thai Law under European Influences (Winyuchon, 2013), 55 (Thai language)).  ↩︎
  4. Note that other scholars may hold different views. For instance, R. Lingat divided Thailand’s legal development into four periods: the Ayutthaya period, the early Bangkok era (reign of King Rama I to early reign of King Rama IV), the Reform Period (reign of King Rama IV to reign of King Rama V), and the current period marked by the use of main codes of law (codification period). Robert Lingat, History of Thai Law (1935), 83-84 (Thai language).  ↩︎
  5. Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit, “The Child is the Betel Tray: Making Law and Love in Ayutthaya Siam,” Thai Legal Studies 1 (2021): 1-21. ↩︎
  6. Ibid. 11-13.  ↩︎
  7. Alan Watson, “Comparative Law and Legal Change,” CLJ 313, no. 37(2) (1978): 322-328.  ↩︎
  8. See Tamara Loos, Subject Siam: Family, Law, and Colonial Modernity in Thailand (Silkworm Books, 2006), 29-71. ↩︎
  9. Surutchada Reekie and Adam Reekie, “British Judges in the Supreme Court of Siam,” in Thai Legal History, ed. Andrew Harding and Munin Pongsapan (CUP, 2021), 103-121. ↩︎
  10. Adam Reekie and Surutchada Reekie, “The Long Reach of English Law: a Case of Incidental Transplantation of the English Law Concept of Vicarious Liability into Thailand’s Civil and Commercial Code,” Comparative Legal History 6, no. 2 (2018): 207-232. ↩︎
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Adam Reekie and Surutchada Reekie, “Siam's Tectonic Legal Reform Process,” ant.e, September 2025, https://ante-blog.univie.ac.at/article/siams-tectonic-legal-reform-process/.
Unseen Agencies of Transformation
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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/.