Why do American lawyers export American legal norms, particularly to places with their own rich legal traditions? Jedidiah J. Kroncke’s book answers this question in two ways: first, by investigating the export of American law to China and, second, by turning inward to chronicle more than 200 years of the American relationship with China. More broadly, Kroncke asks, what are the roots of the American desire to export American legal philosophy to East Asia?

Kroncke’s book laments that the US’s relationship to comparative – particularly East Asian – law is today “a sickly shadow” of what it was at the nation’s founding (p. 2). At that time, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin – architects of American independence during the eighteenth century – turned to Asian law and philosophy “for [their] inspiration” (p. 1). Their hope in Chinese law would be replaced, centuries later, by the opposite goal to Americanize Chinese law. Why? The answer is as unexpected as it is revelatory: American Christian missionaries during the nineteenth century took their faith with them across the Pacific to Asia, along with their love of American law and “the presumed mutuality of American law and … Christianity” (p. 3). Their work educated Chinese citizens about American law and Christianity, and it taught American citizens about China. Later, despite the increasingly secular development goals of the twentieth century, the American “faith” in exporting American law never died. However, American lawyers’ faith in comparative law did dissipate (pp. 5–7). Chinese citizens and officials received American law in different ways, depending on the historical period under scrutiny. Legal reformers in China at various times “welcomed, stigmatized, and manipulated” American law for their own political purposes (p. 10).

The book begins with a pithy introduction. Eight substantive chapters follow, along with two chapter-length case-studies, on Frank Goodnow’s and Roscoe Pound’s work with Chinese law. Chapters 1–2 draw on Jesuit Catholic missionary writings “that portrayed Chinese law as … ordered and efficient” (p. 10) to show how the rise of European colonialism began to denigrate China and its legal history. Unlike their counterparts in Europe, American state builders were more open to learning from China – including Chinese history and legal philosophies – as the US sought to build its international reputation and foreign relations. Chapter 3 moves to the late nineteenth century, and the subject of American missionaries in China and their faith in equal parts in Jesus Christ and in American law. These reformers, many with deep humanitarian impulses, saw legal reform and Christian conversion as their self-sacrificing religious service to the Chinese people. Chapter 4 discusses the 1890s American occupation of the Philippines, and contrasts America’s international idealism with its domestic racism (here, in the Chinese exclusion acts)—a story that would repeat itself later during the Cold War. Chapter 5 turns to the early twentieth century, tracing how an exportable American legal “science” is constituted. Chapter 6 sets the stage for the export of that science: the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911, which fuelled American beliefs that China was ready to Americanize. Chapter 7 argues that Chiang Kaishek’s non-democratic rule in China was buttressed by his conversion to Christianity and his allegiance to American law. Chapter 8 turns to post-1949 China. The contemporary American approach to promote the rule of law in China involves not so much the export of US law as much as the export of “technical aspects of American legal practice,” including clinical legal education and adversarial legalism (p. 231).Footnote ¹ Together, the book’s distinct, historical, and chronologically oriented chapters and case-studies constitute a rich legal history of Sino-American foreign relations.

There should be much interdisciplinary interest in this book. First, it builds upon and can be read alongside other socio-legal critiques of Western rule-of-law promotion efforts in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere.Footnote ² Second, legal philosophers may also be interested in the second case-study, on Roscoe Pound’s work in China before and after the 1949 communist revolution. The book’s case-studies pinpoint “the classic missionary mindset and its recurrent pitfalls” (p. 13). Third, the book (particularly the preface and conclusion) adopts a deeply personal tone – the anguished voice of an American lawyer disenchanted with the profession’s “conceit,” calling for Americans to remain “introspective” by following the example of the political architects of the US (p. 237). Legal scholars and historians who share Kroncke’s values of “restor[ing] [the US’s] early history of legal cosmopolitanism” (p. 235) would be sympathetic to the author’s self-reflective (and, at times, self-critical) tone as a progressive American lawyer and scholar.

Many of the book’s historical findings will also be relevant to those studying Western impacts on Asian law and society. Kroncke deftly weaves China into the colonial-and-European-origin story of the discipline of international law (pp. 35–46). The book adds the foundational work of the Far Eastern American Bar Association, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the American Political Science Association (pp. 123–31).

In sum, The Futility of Law and Development is a meticulously documented and ethnographically inspired history of Chinese and American foreign relations. Missionaries (of one kind or another) have been essential to American foreign policy in China (p. 93). The contribution of this book is in its unravelling of how American foreign relations are built upon the meeting of two unexpected forces and disciplines: law and religion. Asian law and society scholars may engage Kroncke on whether a complete embrace of pre-missionary American cosmopolitanism is the answer to the problems his book carefully lays out. Ultimately, the book underscores how scholars can come to understand the “futility” of law and development by placing the American legal development export industry into its two-century historical context. The book is essential reading for comparative legal historians, rule-of-law practitioners, and those who study the impact of law in Sino-American relations.