This well-researched book tells the story of how British extraterritoriality operated on two different frontiers that intersected with the British Empire: the British consular district in Tengyue Prefecture on the Chinese–Burmese border region in Yunnan, and the Kashgar consular district in Xinjiang, near the border to Russian Central Asia. The core of the book is based on meticulous research in five archives, most importantly the India Office Records and the National Archives in London. Full of details and rich in empirical insights, the book is an excellent testimony of the fact that extraterritorial privileges were just as much the outcome of the commercial treaties between China and the imperial powers as they were created on the ground in the complicated interplay between Chinese officials and foreign consuls.

Whewell divides the book into two parts, each consisting of three chapters, which cover the Burmese–Chinese frontier and the Xinjiang frontier, respectively. The British annexation of Upper Burma and its incorporation into British India in 1885 created a new restive frontier for the British Empire, which had to be policed and regulated in cooperation with Chinese authorities. The British authorities established a consular district in the Prefecture of Tengyue, which had traditionally been an important hub in the trade between Upper Burma and Yunnan province. Up to this point, the British imperial presence in China had been based on the opening of maritime ports, first in coastal China and later along internal arteries of trade, such as the Yangtze River. As British consular officials soon discovered, it was by no means self-evident that institutions in littoral China could be extended to the interior frontiers of the empire, and they struggled to combine their own imperial experiences with realities on the ground. For instance, British consular authorities created the legal fiction of “treaty marts” as a counterpart to the already existing treaty ports in coastal China. They then invited Chinese officials to participate in “frontier meetings” to resolve cross-border conflicts, not very different from the establishment of mixed courts and tribunals in other parts of China. The smuggling of salt and opium across the border became one major bone of contention, where British and Chinese officials argued over their divergent understandings of the scope of extraterritoriality. The migration of people who could claim allegiance to both the British and the Qing Empires created difficult questions for the policing of boundaries, and the treaties gave very little guidance on what body of law should be applied in adjudicating cases in which both British and Chinese authorities claimed jurisdiction.

The 1865–77 Muslim rebellion in Xinjiang created opportunities for the Russian Empire to extend its reach into Chinese Turkestan. The Qing re-conquest of the region in the late 1870s pitted the British and Russian Empires against each other, as the region became a battleground in “The Great Game” for supremacy over Central Asia. As the British belatedly established a presence in this region, they tried to base their extraterritorial regime both on precedents set by the Russian Empire and on the extension of practices in British India. Just as in Yunnan, the policing of migrants, who could claim multiple political allegiances, proved to be a difficult problem to solve. As a result, the British Empire often tried to rely on local judges, aqsaqals, as mediators between consular authorities and the local population. The book demonstrates masterfully how Britain's formal and informal empire in China was intimately connected with the careers of enterprising officials and diplomats, such as the British Consul George Macartney (1867–1945). In both cases, the ethnic diversity of both Qing subjects and British colonial subjects made boundary policing difficult, as did persistent patterns of forum shopping. The author is also very sensitive to the subtle interplay between local understandings of law, and the chapters are full of illustrative anecdotes. On both frontiers, the fluidity of residence and ethnic bonds made it difficult to demarcate boundaries among subject peoples.

While the book draws on new empirical material and makes productive comparisons across regions, it does so without advancing any particular new conceptual framework provoked by these novel comparisons. Its chronological structure cuts out several important formative decades from the history of extraterritoriality. This means, for instance, that the murder of Augustus Raymond Margary in 1875, which led to diplomatic repercussions that touched on extraterritoriality in the region, falls outside of the temporal scope of the book. The book would also have benefited from a more detailed recognition of the author's debts to earlier research, especially in regard to mixed courts on China's littoral frontier.

These drawbacks notwithstanding, Whewell has broken new ground and has made an important contribution to the history of extraterritoriality and informal empire in China. Whewell has shown how comparative and transregional scholarship can yield new insights to our understanding, and the reviewer hopes that this book will be followed by other books that link Southeast Asia to Central Asia in this refreshing way.