348 Book Reviews / Journal of American-East Asian Relations 19 (2012) 345–358

Pär Kristoffer Cassel, Grounds of Judgment: Extraterritoriality and Imperial Power in Nineteenth-Century China and Japan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012; xi + 272 pp. $39.95 (cloth).

Gunboat diplomacy is a familiar story to historians. China’s defeat in the Opium War, the unequal treaties, and Japan’s opening to the West regularly appear in narratives that analyze East Asia’s struggle against Western impe- rialism. In the treaty ports and legations, however, the reality was more complicated. In important ways, legal systems in Qing China and Tokugawa Japan served as precedents for extraterritoriality. Grounds of Judgment explains how and why this was so. This thought-provoking work stands on a broad foundation of research in multiple languages, including Chinese, Manchu, and Japanese. While other scholars have explored extraterritorial- ity in East Asia, Pär Kristoffer Cassel fully identifies its multiple facets. Like a good jurist, he marshals a wealth of evidence and makes a compel- ling case. The unequal treaties of the mid-nineteenth century established the legal system of “extraterritoriality” or “consular jurisdiction.” The Western pow- ers regarded Qing and Tokugawa legal systems as barbaric because of the practice of torture and corporal punishment. Consequently, they placed their citizens in China and Japan under the legal jurisdiction of their resi- dent consuls, not under the jurisdiction of local Chinese and Japanese authorities. According to Cassel, historians of East Asia typically understand extra- territoriality as a relationship of unequal power between states because they have written from the perspective of national history. Extraterritori­ ality, though, was not simply the unilateral application of power by the West. Instead, scholars should view it through the lens of international his- tory and recognize it also as “the result of a complex and triangular rela- tionship between China, Japan, and the Western powers” (p. 7). In an innovative application of the concept of “legal pluralism,” Cassel details the multiple, sometimes overlapping, legal arenas in Qing China and Tokugawa Japan. Legal pluralism refers to sovereign regimes that emphasize personal rather than territorial jurisdiction: it comprises legal rule over persons not territories. Both countries had centuries of experience in dealing with different social groups under different jurisdictions. Qing law, for example, distinguished between officials and subjects, each having a different set of obligations. Guilds and descent groups also served

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2012 DOI 10.1163/18765610-01904001 Book Reviews / Journal of American-East Asian Relations 19 (2012) 345–358 349 as sources of law and loci of jurisdiction. Further, the legal code included sections devoted to non-Han ethnic and religious groups, like Mongols and Muslims. Finally, Manchus – the ethnicity of the ruling dynasty – had privileged legal status. Cassel argues that extraterritoriality was in many ways a complement to the preexisting system of legal pluralism in Qing China. When establishing Shanghai’s Mixed Court with the foreign consuls in 1864, the Qing government drew on these experiences. In China, extraterritoriality added a new arena to an already plural legal order. Legal pluralism prevailed in Tokugawa Japan as well. Multiple jurisdic- tions coexisted, based on the four-class social system and on local rule by the daimyō. Although the unequal treaties added extraterritoriality to the plural legal order in Japan, the emergence of the Meiji government soon signaled a new approach. To consolidate power at home, the Meiji oligarchs began extinguishing legal pluralism by abolishing the class system and local rule. To reclaim Japanese sovereignty in the international sphere, they embarked on a long-term effort to reform their legal code: the prerequisite to revising the treaties and ending extraterritoriality. In the latter half of the book, Cassel examines Sino-Japanese relations under the often overlooked Treaty of Tianjin (1871), which provided extra- territorial rights to Japanese residents of China and to Chinese residents of Japan. Grounds of Judgment is the first work to examine the treaty’s execu- tion and, in particular, the extraterritorial rights enjoyed by the Chinese in Japan. Only handfuls of Japanese resided in China, but the Chinese consti- tuted the largest foreign community in Japan. Cassel provides rich, detailed case studies of consular jurisdiction, involving forgery, opium, murder, and a riot. In retrospect, one wishes he had analyzed salient cases in similar fashion in his earlier chapters. After China’s defeat in the Sino-Japanese War, the Treaty of Shimonoseki (1895) ended extraterritoriality for the Chinese in Japan but extended it for the Japanese in China. In the previous year, the Japanese had won treaty revision from the Western powers, leading to the complete abolition of extraterritoriality in Japan in 1899. Meiji leaders succeeded in centralizing the state and eliminating the last element of legal pluralism. China’s experience, of course, was different. The Qing historical experi- ence in dealing with non-Han groups led the Chinese initially to “trivialize” the problem of extraterritoriality (p. 83). Moreover, to reform the legal code with the intent of satisfying the Western powers and revising the treaties would have required fundamental change in the Qing legal order. For the