Journal of the history of International Law 22 (2020) 269–305 brill.com/jhil The Politics of History in the Late Qing Era: William A. P. Martin and a History of International Law for China Maria Adele Carrai Assistant Professor of Global China Studies, New York University Shanghai, Pudong, Shanghai, China
[email protected] Received: 12 March 2019 | Revised: 18 November 2019 | Accepted: 30 January 2020 | Published online: 28 October 2020 Abstract In the light of 19th-century attempts to universalize history and international law, the purpose of this article is to show how the theory of an Ancient Chinese inter- national law matured and disseminated within one politics of history and helped generate another at the end of the Qing Dynasty. On the one hand, the middleman William Alexander Parsons Martin, who as part of his Christian mission and in order to make international law more acceptable to the Chinese, translated systematically international law into Chinese and attempted to universalize it by finding a proto- international law in Ancient China. On the other hand, Chinese scholars and officials sought to use Martin’s theory to universalize Confucianism and rectify international law according to what they believed to be their own superior morality and history. Keywords international law – W. A. P. Martin – translation – Confucianism – history – politics – China 1 Introduction More than neutral descriptions of past events, histories of international law are often normative reconstructions responding to contemporary necessities. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/15718050-12340152Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 06:04:24AM via free access 270 Carrai In the 19th century, Western powers’ expansion forced them into contact with cultures and civilizations that shared little in common with Christianity.