The English School of international relations invites scholars to explore the history of ideas and institutions, including legal ideas and institutions, along with material power, in order to better understand world politics. In this study, Turan Kayaoğlu incorporates aspects of a historical–ideational approach while also using quantitative methodology to provide a more robust explanatory account of the abolition of extraterritoriality in Japan (1899), the Ottoman Empire/Turkey (1923), and China (1943). Extraterritoriality in this context refers to one state's claim to exclusive jurisdiction over its own citizens within another state's territory. Kayaoğlu seeks to illustrate how extraterritoriality and its associated “legal episteme” privileged and entrenched a Western positivist idea of sovereign statehood as the basis for Western conceptions of international society in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Kayaoğlu's book begins with a wide-ranging and erudite discussion of sovereignty, extraterritoriality, and relevant scholarship, and concludes with a brief consideration of extraterritoriality in the twenty-first century. The heart of the book consists of detailed investigations of successive attempts by three states to eradicate extraterritoriality within their borders. It argues the success or failure of these attempts can best be explained by the degree to which the host country had, in fact, created Western-style legal institutions designed to protect the rights and interests of foreigners.

Kayaoğlu defines “legal episteme” as “the collective understandings and discourses of law determining the scope, application, and underlying values of law” (4). In his view, Western states constructed international society in their own image in significant part by requiring non-Western states to fulfill certain conditions in order to terminate extraterritoriality agreements. These conditions were defined predominantly in legal terms. For example, Edmund Hornby, chief judge of the British Supreme Court at Istanbul, lamented in an 1859 report on the Turkish religious courts that there was “no surety of a clear or a just case being adjudicated upon properly” (125). Hornby expressed the view that, in order to protect foreigners, domestic courts required “a system of laws and procedure, and competent judges to administer them,” which he deemed these courts not to have (125). Competence was defined using exclusively Western standards. During the course of later negotiations on extraterritoriality in Turkey, the United States delegate, Richard W. Child, opined that the security of foreign persons and property “may exist in mind of the Turkish Government, but the vital necessity is that foreigners themselves must feel that it exists” (141–42). Interestingly, under the system of extraterritoriality, even foreigners who wished to subject themselves to local laws and institutions were prohibited from doing so by their countries of origin.

In addition to providing an account of the end of extraterritoriality in the three target jurisdictions, Kayaoğlu's study reveals certain dynamics of legal institutionalization. For example, the creation of appellate courts aided the suppression of local and customary law, just as it had in early modern Europe. In part for this reason, domestic elites often used extraterritoriality as a lever to extract concessions from domestic constituencies, as greater standardization (which enhanced their own power) was the prerequisite for terminating unpopular extraterritoriality agreements. In an 1893 speech to the Japanese Diet, for example, Prime Minister Viscount Enomoto apparently characterized the proposed Japanese Civil and Commercial Codes as “our indispensable weapon of offense, so to speak, against these hated Consular Courts” (95). The emphasis on demonstrable standardization and codification helps explain why the push for legal reform, which came largely from common law countries such as Great Britain, resulted in the creation of legal institutions that more closely resemble those in civil law countries.

Kayaoğlu takes great care at various junctures to discount alternative hypotheses through the use of counterfactuals, while remaining judicious in assessing the comparative explanatory value of his own approach. For example, he appropriately indicates that, particularly in the case of China, a normative emphasis on the sovereign equality of states in the postwar international order left little place for extraterritoriality, even though complete legal standardization within China remained largely aspirational. He reconciles this observation with his legal institutionalist explanation by emphasizing that China had achieved many reforms by 1943, and that it explicitly promised more.

Kayaoğlu's concluding remarks on United States foreign policy and extraterritoriality will no doubt resonate with contemporary lawyers preoccupied with these issues. A deeper exploration of these issues might usefully explore certain doctrinal manifestations of concerns about the adequacy of foreign courts, from forum non conveniens decisions and cases involving the exhaustion of domestic remedies, to the increasing concern over whether and when United States courts should recognize and enforce foreign judgments against United States and multinational companies in high-stakes cases with political overtones. On the historical side, the book leaves room for additional in-depth explorations of the operation of consular courts and their reception by domestic and foreign constituencies, building on the work of other scholars. Kayaoğlu's decision to focus on the attempted and actual termination of extraterritoriality makes sense from a certain methodological perspective by enabling comparisons that are the stock-in-trade of political science. That said, this project design comes at the expense of a more fine-grained account of the substance and operation of extraterritoriality itself, which would also make an intriguing and important contribution.