How does law travel in Inter-Asia? This chapter focuses on traveling law as an empirical event and does so to reflect on prevailing theories in comparative law that explain how law moves from one jurisdiction to another. The dominant paradigm in comparative law for traveling law is legal transplants, a concept that has generated a sprawling literature. The point of this chapter is not to say that Inter-Asia is aberrational regarding legal transplants; instead, the perspective is to use the Inter-Asian Law material, and specifically the fraught movements of Chinese law in Inter-Asia, to critically reflect on comparative law conventions. Whereas Inter-Asia is embedded within global trade and migration routes, it has also been populated by outsiders – pirates or jihadis – whose participation within those circuits creates contrast and distance, elements that are prerequisites to critical reflection. Chinese law may also be such an outsider that permits reflecting on taken-for-granted paths.

This chapter discusses Caribbean antifascism’s roots and its connection to the Comintern’s regional radical network, tracing the evolution of the movement from its anti-imperialist origins as early as 1924. The discussion provides specific examples as to how visions of fascism and antifascism were created for and/or adapted to the local and regional realities through an anti-imperialist prism. The study also maps the transnational and transatlantic journey of an antifascist discursive formula from its origins as a Caribbean hologram equating fascism with imperialism, to its official incorporation to the Communist internationalist lexicon as Comintern policy in 1935, and finally to its application as a propaganda formula during the Spanish Civil War. In the long run, while Caribbean antifascism’s anti-imperialist sensibilities may have been lost in translation in the mayhem of theoretical battles and iron-fist, Stalinist policies, the gist of the messages survived the turmoil, and perhaps still lingers on in our culture even to this day.

This chapter is the second building bloc of a wider reconstruction of the main economic, (geo)political, and ideational forces that enabled European integration to take off as of the spring of 1950. It describes the practical unfolding of European integration after the Second World War. This part of the book tries to uncover deeper layers (of psychology and belief) in this history through three crucial sub-histories. This chapter deals with the second of these sub-histories. It traces how the coming about and the workings of the Marshall Plan gradually illuminated an institutional, economic, and political pathway for integration in Western Europe. This second sub-history shows how the gradual (self-)outmanoeuvring of the United Kingdom in matters of European cooperation happened to that country and the West, and how this worked as a catalyst for regional European integration and ‘the emergence of a continental West’.

Chapter 3 examines the Permanent Inter-Allied Committee for the War Disabled (PIC), which, from 1917 to 1922, hosted annual conferences, created an institute on the Rue du Bac in Paris for the study and cataloguing of pertinent information, and published the Inter-Allied Review to circulate the results of their efforts. PIC members and affiliates – many of whom were prolific contributors to the Allied culture of rehabilitation – shared a common vocabulary for, and framing of, the work of rehabilitation. They also, by and large, shared an understanding of their role within it, in terms that preserved the social hierarchy through preservation of their masculinity vis-à-vis the working-class soldier. The cooperative space created by the PIC, where government and military officials, social reformers, and medical practitioners came together, encouraged the reimagination of belonging, but whether the soldier and his sacrifice belonged to the nation, the Allies, or to humanity – and therefore whether nations ought to maintain exclusive responsibility for the disabled soldier – was never fully resolved.

This chapter discusses the members of foreign royal families who moved in court circles at Rome. In general, these fell into two groups: princely children who were raised at the Roman court and spent time there as adults; and members of royal houses from semi-independent states who found refuge at the Roman court. The chapter suggests that the Roman court was a ‘contact zone’ – a social space in which disparate cultures met and interacted. The argument develops chronologically, highlighting how Republican practices were adapted under the Julio-Claudians, how a new phase of integration started under the Flavians, and how the phenomenon developed in the second and third centuries. Two functions of the court emerge: the court as a meeting place where foreign royals were integrated into transnational networks; and the court as a platform for the pursuit of power, where foreign royals attempted to gain the emperor’s favour.

Chapter 4 examines the ways that transnational regulatory regimes are organized and governed. It also explores how the tension explored in Chapter 3 between a functional concern for efficacy and a functional concern for interest balancing finds resonance in a tension between a regime adopting a more exclusivist form of governance called the ‘club model’ or a more inclusive form of governance the chapter refers to as the ‘pluralist model’ – with the pluralist model being further divided into a more hierarchical form called the multi-stakeholder initiative, and a more decentralized form called networks. All have their own set of comparative advantages and disadvantages. Also explored is how the interaction between these two models of governance, on the one hand, and the two kinds of regulatory functions explored in Chapter 3, on the other, can give rise to issues of ‘operational legitimacy’. Finally, Chapter 4 investigates efforts to constrain possible abuses of power by transnational governance regimes, much like public law works to constrain possible abused of power by domestic governments. These efforts are generally referred to as ‘global administrative law’.

The Introduction provides an overview of the themes and arguments of the book. It first situates this book within the larger literature on foreign banks in modern China, the history of globalization and the history of international and multinational banking. It then presents the ‘frontier bank’ and the Chinese frontier as a conceptual framework for understanding the activities of foreign banks in modern China. Then it introduces the four main themes of the book: financial internationalization, transnational networks, the conflict between nationalism and economic globalization, and risk. Finally, the Introduction discusses how this book fits into larger discussions about modern China’s relations with the global economy, modern Chinese economic development and economic globalization. The Introduction concludes with an overview of the book’s chapters.

In Chapter 4, the book turns to the involvement of foreign bankers and financiers in Chinese railway development during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, the chapter focusses on the loan negotiations for the financing of the railway connecting Tianjin in northern China and Pukou in China’s south between 1898 and 1910. These loan negotiations were mainly undertaken by representatives of German and British financial groups in China and Chinese officials. By exploring the interaction between these foreign and Chinese negotiators, the chapter highlights the important role the ’contact zone’ and transnational networks played on the Chinese frontier in the foreign financing of Chinese railways. The chapter also shows how Chinese negotiators exhibited substantial agency within such transnational networks and were able to win very favourable loan terms. More generally, the chapter shows how these transnational financial networks reflected the development of financial globalization during the early twentieth century, connecting local officials in China with markets and individual investors in Europe.

As Imperial Germany came into being in 1871, it entered into the consciousness of people who already belonged to an emigrant nation.It contained people who lived far outside that nation-state’s borders, and it included many who considered themselves German plus other things. It was tied together by dynamic forms of communications: ever-more-efficient methods of correspondence, a growing German-language press, not to mention the pedagogical networks that thickened during the last decades of the nineteenth century and ever-more-powerful networks of trade, transport, and travel. The global consciousness that had grown over the previous century now included a consciousness of German communities around the globe and an ever-greater comfort with mobility. That not only extended older forms of labor mobility beyond Europe’s borders but also witnessed an increase in families extending their membership into an ever-greater variety of transcultural places. There were, in fact, millions of Germans living transnational lives in transcultural communities by the end of the century—some in Europe and some far from it.

Chapter 6 demonstrates how the varied conversion of diaspora activists' resources—their home-country network ties, social capital, and fungible resources—mitigated their interventions in the Libyan, Syrian, and Yemeni revolutions from the United States and Great Britain.

Chapter 6 demonstrates how the varied conversion of diaspora activists' resources—their home-country network ties, social capital, and fungible resources—mitigated their interventions in the Libyan, Syrian, and Yemeni revolutions from the United States and Great Britain.

Chapter 4 traces the origins of the global environmental movement in the nineteenth century. It discusses the emergence of transnational environmental networks and the first international NGOs. It examines the first international efforts at environmental protection, mainly for managing shared resources and colonial conservation projects. It then traces the first failed attempts to establish an international environmental agenda, from the 1913 Berne Conference to the League of Nations.

After briefly comparing the findings of the above cases, Chapter 7 considers their broader reach through a preliminary exploration of the mobilisation of ethics experts in the case of synthetic biology of the United States. It then connects the argument of the book to the literature on the politics of ethics in IR, making it clear that the expertisation of ethics has in fact allowed for a more efficient political mobilisation of ethics. It finally points to the relevance of the book’s findings to existing debates on the making of knowledge, agendas and policies in global governance.