Carol Tan's book is a valuable legal history of the British-leased territory of Weihaiwei, located in Shandong Province of north China. Britain obtained that territory through an imposed “lease” in 1898, supposedly to counter Russian expansion in China. Although the lease should have expired when Russia returned Port Arthur (Lüshun) to China in 1905, Britain continued its occupation until 1930, citing the presence of Germany and later Japan in China as its justification. At 288 square miles, Weihaiwei had a population of over 120,000 in 1901, with fewer than 200 Europeans (14–17). Hence, oddly, Britain exercised exclusive jurisdiction over a predominantly Chinese population in a technically Chinese territory.

Tan does a great job in highlighting the tensions and inconsistencies that characterized such a legal regime. With the original legal archives no longer extant, the author has gleaned about fifty reported legal cases and supplemented them with British diplomatic correspondence and private papers. In the seven substantive chapters in a lucidly written book, Tan traces the process of colonial legislation in London, the structure of the Weihaiwei courts and their sources of law, and the administration of the local police and of civil and criminal justice there. She argues, inter alia, that a host of factors, including lack of economic development, small European presence, conservatism of local British agents, and financial “parsimony” of the home government in London, jointly shaped the structure and operation of British rule in Weihaiwei. That also explains why the local Chinese police and village headmen were heavily relied upon to maintain law and order and collect taxes.

In civil litigations among the Chinese, Chinese law and customs, if not “repugnant to justice and morality,” could be applied, although the British decisions often ended up changing the meaning of the former. English law and procedure were to apply in all criminal cases, but legal representation and trial by jury were not available to the Chinese in most cases; for many years, that was true even in capital cases. Some Western observers in 1912 found this scandalous given that Britain had long claimed to administer law and justice equally among its subjects regardless of their races. Nevertheless, London had been adamant in disallowing any such “unnecessary” cost for the governance of Weihaiwei while the local British administrators perceived no need of the English procedural safeguards for Chinese villagers either. Editorials in the North China Herald, the leading Western newspaper in China, defended the British policy on the grounds that Chinese residents in Weihaiwei (unlike Hong Kong) were not “British” and thus not entitled to the “benefit” of Britain's law and procedure. We should add here that the Chinese were also deprived of the benefits of their own legal system, including the right to automatic review by higher courts in most capital cases. The British rule that a defendant should appeal to the Supreme Court of Hong Kong or ultimately the Privy Council in London was hardly meaningful to a Chinese villager.

The procedural revision subsequent to these debates did little to improve the situation of “the vast majority” of Chinese defendants, who were subjected to “a summary trial” in front of a British diplomat-turned “magistrate” with no training in either English or Chinese law (162–72). Curiously, Tan observes that such “a lack of legal training and a close proximity” to the daily life in Weihaiwei gave the two major British judicial officials “a tendency towards pragmatism rather than legal principle … [and led them to see] more reasons to depart from English law than others might have” (47). Such pragmatism also accounted for the British establishment of “village tribunals” or imprisonment of village headmen for having failed to prevent crimes in their villages presumably under the doctrine of “collective responsibility.” Absent in the book is discussion of the irony that since the early eighteenth century, such (imputed or real) Chinese practices had been condemned as primitive and incommensurable with British/Western notions of justice and served to legitimate Western extraterritoriality and domination in China in the first place.

Despite these conflicting agendas and institutional restraints, Tan seems to think quite highly of British justice in Weihaiwei. Given the limited number of cases and the virtual silence on how the Chinese felt about the system (no Chinese sources cited), however, a reader ought to take with a grain of salt a conclusion like this: “The [British] system worked reasonably well and there was nothing to suggest that the inhabitants of the leased territory were critical or resentful of the criminal justice process” (183). The scanty evidence of Chinese “resentment” might be attributable to the fact that such an unflattering facet of empire, but for unusual circumstances, was not always registered in the English sources. The same might also be said of her conclusion that “the [British] legal system in Weihaiwei contributed to the cordial relationship between the government and people of Weihaiwei” (269).

Although the author is not to blame for the limited sources available, the book could have benefited by addressing the nature of the sources. Postcolonial scholars like Ann Stoler and Nicholas Dirks have studied the complex operation of similar colonial archives in knowledge production, colonial governmentality, and identity formation. Likewise, recent legal scholarship also calls for a more critical analysis of the regime of international law itself in legitimating imperial expansion than the author's discussion of its technical applicability in this case implies (69–82). To further situate Weihaiwei within a global context might help readers better understand, for instance, how “native” laws and customs were often invented or reconceptualized to serve colonial agendas. Needless to say, a monograph cannot cater to every reader, and the author should be commended for advancing our understanding of the history of Sino-British relations, British colonial justice, and law and empire in general.