How did American schoolchildren, French philosophers, Russian Sinologists, Dutch merchants, and British lawyers imagine China and Chinese law? What happened when agents of presumably dominant Western empires had to endure the humiliations and anxieties of maintaining a profitable but precarious relationship with China? In Chinese Law in Imperial Eyes, Li Chen provides a richly textured analysis of these related issues and their intersection with law, culture, and politics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Using a wide array of sources, Chen's study focuses on the power dynamics of Sino-Western relations during the formative century before the First Opium War (1839-1842). He highlights the centrality of law to modern imperial ideology and politics and brings new insight to the origins of comparative Chinese law in the West, the First Opium War, and foreign extraterritoriality in China. The shifting balance of economic and political power formed and transformed knowledge of China and Chinese law in different contact zones. Chen argues that recovering the variegated and contradictory roles of Chinese law in Western "modernization" helps provincialize the subsequent Euro-Americentric discourse of global modernity.

Chen draws attention to important yet underanalyzed sites in which imperial sovereignty, national identity, cultural tradition, or international law and order were defined and restructured. His valuable case studies show how constructed differences between societies were hardened into cultural or racial boundaries and then politicized to rationalize international conflicts and hierarchy.

"The discussion of the conceptual differences between Chinese and Western legal orders, public and private, codified and non-codified law is so fascinating and fundamental that it stands as one of the signal contributions of the volume. . . . Sets a very high bar for new studies, and will be a standard for many years to come." - American Historical Review

"Extensively researched and well-written.... The aspiration of the author to restore the centrality of legal matters to Sino-Western interactions is clearly achieved." - H-Empire

"Engages different discursive levels and reveals the evolution and diffusion of knowledge of the Chinese law, from rational to sentimental perspectives." - Frontiers of History in China

"Chen's Chinese Law in Imperial Eyes, not only provides a much needed and significant contribution, but could be regarded as quite the masterpiece, outlining the importance of legal discourses to Sino-Western encounters from the eighteenth century onwards." - Chinese Historical Review

"Li Chen has delivered a carefully crafted and highly articulate study that will soon be required reading for students of comparative law, imperialism, and Sino-western relations in general." - Journal of Chinese History

"A confident exemplar of a now-flourishing field." - English Historical Review

"Enriches discourses on legal, intellectual, and political dimensions of modern Sino-Western relations." - Choice

"In this nuanced and convincing study, Li Chen not only probes why and how oversimplified, reductive culturalist interpretations of Sino-Western legal collisions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries became dominant, but also pushes past the discourses of Euro-Americentric hegemonic creep typically found in revisionist scholarship." - Journal of East Asian Studies

"This is a critical book for understanding a mutually influential relationship, as both Chinese and Western empires struggled to create their own legal identities and forge stable international practices. . . . With this book, Li Chen has equipped historians with an essential vision of the origins of longstanding presumptions about Chinese law." - Frontier of Literary Studies in China