2 - Synarchy

Summary

The chapter explains how newly imported ideas faced sharp limits of official interest and perceived commensurability with Late Qing political cosmology, though they did play a role in early diplomatic disputes. While Chinese officials were tentatively exploring a new role for their state in a multilateral world order, however, the jurists of that order were also pondering the world-historical significance of this new “entrant into the Family of Nations” – and the profits to be made from it. It was during these very years in the 1860s–1870s that the field of “international law” in the West took on many of its key subsequent characteristics and a priori assumptions about both itself and the non-Western periphery. China played a major role in that process.