In the early 1990s, when organizations representing the 2.6 million U.S. nationals living abroad appealed to Congress for their own non-voting representative, the response of one Senator was to dismiss these "moans of the mink-swathed Americans abroad." However, the image of a life of luxury abroad is usually a harsher reality complicated by income taxes, military duty, and legal jurisdiction. What exactly is the obligation of a state toward citizens who live outside its borders? Bargaining with the State from Afar traces the relationship between the United States federal government and sojourning Americans living in the colonial enclaves of pre-World War II China. This group of Americans was not subject to Chinese law, but rather to an amalgam of laws borrowed from the District of Columbia and other territorial codes, as well as to local ordinances enacted by foreigners themselves. Scully explores U.S. government efforts to police this anomalous zone in the American policy and places the struggle between federal officials and sojourning U.S. nationals in the larger context of changing international law and modern citizenship regimes. She argues that the American experience with extraterritorial justice in China offers an important new vantage point from which to examine a singular area in the history of modern states. This case study of U.S. consular jurisdiction reveals the legal, political, and cultural process through which modern states have struggled to govern citizens outside their borders. Scully's examination of the U. S. Court for China is one of the first serious analysis of this anomalous institution.

-- Foreign Affairs.

Contributions to this volume summarize and discuss the theoretical foundations of the Collaborative Research Centre at Leipzig University which address the relationship between processes of (re-)spatialization on the one hand and the establishment and characteristics of spatial formats on the other hand. Under the global condition spatial formats are products of collective negotiations on the most effective and widely acceptable balance between the claim for sovereignty and the need for interconnectedness.

Examining the influential accounts of Westerners at the center of early US cultural development abroad, Johnson conceives a romance of free trade with China as a quest narrative of national accomplishment in a global marketplace. Drawing from a richly descriptive cross-cultural archive, the book presents key moments in early relations among the twenty-first century's superpowers through memoirs, biographies, epistolary journals, magazines, book reviews, fiction and poetry by Melville, Twain, Whitman, and others, travel narratives, and treaties, as well as maps and engraved illustrations. Paying close attention to figurative language, generic forms, and the social dynamics of print cultural production and circulation, Johnson shows how authors, editors, and printers appealed to multiple overlapping audiences in China, in the United States, and throughout the world.

DIVA groundbreaking interdisciplinary collection that rethinks the connection between the intimate and United States colonial and postcolonial histories./div

Perhaps more than anywhere else in the world, the nineteenth century encounter between East Asia and the Western world has been narrated as a legal encounter. Commercial treaties--negotiated by diplomats and focused on trade--framed the relationships among Tokugawa-Meiji Japan, Qing China, Choson Korea, and Western countries including Britain, France, and the United States. These treaties created a new legal order, very different than the colonial relationships that the West forged with other parts of the globe, which developed in dialogue with local precedents, local understandings of power, and local institutions. They established the rules by which foreign sojourners worked in East Asia, granting them near complete immunity from local laws and jurisdiction. The laws of extraterritoriality looked similar on paper but had very different trajectories in different East Asian countries. Pär Cassel's first book explores extraterritoriality and the ways in which Western power operated in Japan and China from the 1820s to the 1920s. In Japan, the treaties established in the 1850s were abolished after drastic regime change a decade later and replaced by European-style reciprocal agreements by the turn of the century. In China, extraterritoriality stood for a hundred years, with treaties governing nearly one hundred treaty ports, extensive Christian missionary activity, foreign controlled railroads and mines, and other foreign interests, and of such complexity that even international lawyers couldn't easily interpret them. Extraterritoriality provided the springboard for foreign domination and has left Asia with a legacy of suspicion towards international law and organizations. The issue of unequal treaties has had a lasting effect on relations between East Asia and the West. Drawing on primary sources in Chinese, Japanese, Manchu, and several European languages, Cassel has written the first book to deal with exterritoriality in Sino-Japanese relations before 1895 and the triangular relationship between China, Japan, and the West. Grounds of Judgment is a groundbreaking history of Asian engagement with the outside world and within the region, with broader applications to understanding international history, law, and politics.

In 1800, Europeans governed about one-third of the world's land surface; by the start of World War I in 1914, Europeans had imposed some form of political or economic ascendancy on over 80 percent of the globe. The basic structure of global and European politics in the twentieth century was fashioned in the previous century out of the clash of competing imperial interests and the effects, both beneficial and harmful, of the imperial powers on the societies they dominated. This encyclopedia offers current, detailed information on the major world powers and their global empires, as well as on the people, events, ideas, and movements, both European and non-European, that shaped the Age of Imperialism.