Perhaps nothing better symbolized China's “century of humiliation” than extraterritoriality—the legal system that placed foreigners in China under the jurisdiction of their own consuls rather than that of domestic authorities. According to familiar narratives of modern East Asian history, Western powers imposed this unequal arrangement on China after the First Opium War (1839–42) and exported it throughout the region. Qing officials—helpless, hapless, or ignorant—myopically ceded the sine qua non of state sovereignty and effectively granted foreigners immunity from domestic authority. In China, extraterritoriality proved remarkably durable, formally abolished only in 1943 when wartime exigencies compelled Allied Powers and Japan to elevate the status of their respective Chinese allies. In Japan, by contrast, extraterritoriality was abolished at the turn of the twentieth century, when aggressive Meiji reforms finally satisfied Western demands for a modern legal system. Seen in this light, extraterritoriality was another example of Chinese “failure” and Japanese “success” on the road to modernity.

Pär Cassel's study presents a compelling revision to this dominant narrative in several ways. First, it excavates the origins of extraterritoriality to highlight the critical role of indigenous legal traditions in mediating the implementation and operation of a new legal arrangement. Second, it connects the evolution of extraterritoriality in China and Japan by tracing how understandings of foreign jurisdiction developed symbiotically, rather than independently. Taken together, these findings offer much-needed rethinking to long-unquestioned issues in Chinese, Japanese, and legal history.

The first half of Cassel's study lays out the case that Western extraterritoriality was not introduced into East Asia ex novo but built atop a long-standing legal edifice. Chapter 1 surveys the legally pluralistic orders of Qing China and Tokugawa Japan to illustrate how different ethnic, social, and professional groups have long been subjected to different laws and courts. Jurisdiction for trials involving groups like Manchus and samurai, Cassel reminds readers, was determined less by the location of the incident and more by the identity of the participants. Chapter 2 reexamines the “unequal treaties” and finds supposed extraterritorial innovations like consular jurisdiction and mixed trials analogous to existing legal traditions. Still, the treaties themselves were ambiguous—even silent—on how extraterritoriality operated in practice. Chapter 3 focuses on the development of the Shanghai Mixed Court to examine the contestations and negotiations that shaped extraterritoriality from the bottom up. Far from being helpless spectators, Qing officials actively participated in joint trials and doggedly fought to confine foreign jurisdiction to specific categories of cases. Although interpretations of extraterritoriality favorable to treaty powers eventually prevailed, Cassel shows how Qing officials during the treaty port system's formative years were nonetheless “able to mobilize their own assumptions about personal jurisdiction and how the code should be applied to foreigners that were firmly rooted in Qing legal thought” (p. 83).

The second half of Cassel's study looks at late nineteenth-century Sino-Japanese interactions and ways they shaped the divergent evolution of extraterritoriality. Chapter 4 traces the diplomatic maneuvers leading to the 1871 ratification of the Treaty of Tianjin, which formalized Sino-Japanese relations for the first time in centuries and enshrined the practice of bilateral extraterritoriality until 1895. In this encounter, a Qing China still confident of its legally pluralistic order successfully exported its version of extraterritoriality to a Meiji Japan increasingly keen to shed its Tokugawa heritage and embrace legal centralization. Chapter 5 looks at competing claims of jurisdiction that animated Sino-Japanese legal disputes quotidian and spectacular—theft, debt, assault, and murder. Whereas Qing officials consistently insisted on dealing with these cases in accordance with bilateral extraterritoriality, Meiji officials tenaciously jockeyed to exercise exclusive jurisdiction in accordance with international law. Chapter 6 compares nineteenth-century treaty revision efforts that eventually yielded the twentieth-century extraterritorial regime. While indefatigable negotiations and legal reforms laid the groundwork for treaty revision, it was victory from the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–95) that ultimately enabled Japan to join the club of empires and impose unilateral extraterritoriality in East Asia. China, meanwhile, prioritized recovering tariff autonomy over abolishing extraterritoriality in negotiating treaty revision until the Qing dynasty's final years. A desire to leave intact the existing legal order—combined with an aversion to challenging Manchu privilege—accounted for this belated shift in policy. If Qing China “failed” to realize legal centralization, Cassel implies, it was due ironically to its “success” at defending its legally pluralistic order long after its counterpart in Tokugawa Japan collapsed.

In his revisionist interpretation, Cassel does not exculpate the West from its responsibility in imposing a notorious legal arrangement. Instead, by historicizing the ostensibly timeless practice of extraterritoriality, he builds on John Fairbank's original insight that collaboration was as important as coercion in accounting for the treaty port system's operation. Through close readings of legal terms in treaties and cases—made possible by placing sources in different languages in mutual conversation—he also recovers past concepts and assumptions now obscured or replaced by neologisms. More broadly, Cassel's comparison of China's and Japan's tortuous paths toward legal centralization is a reminder to scholars to avoid anachronistically projecting backwards in time the idealized “unitary state,” with its perfect congruence of authority and territory. Pairing a fresh perspective with an impressive methodology, Cassel's study is a valuable read for scholars of China, Japan, law, and empire.