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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.

Chosŏn’s 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/
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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/
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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/
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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/.