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Book Review
Asia
Eileen P. Scully. Bargaining with the State from Afar: American Citizenship in Treaty Port China, 18441942. New York: Columbia University Press. 2001. Pp. x, 306. Cloth $49.50, paper $19.50.
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In the Chinese context, extraterritoriality traditionally connotes arrogant imperialists gaining carte blanche for their citizens in treaty enclaves. By claiming that Chinese laws were too barbaric for Westerners to submit to, imperial powers ensured that their citizens could escape punishment for crimes while abroad. Historians have recently begun to re-examine these assumptions, revealing a complex legal structure designed less to protect criminal behavior than to promote trade relations and exert social control. Eileen P. Scully examines how extraterritoriality reflected the debate over defining national citizenship, and how its American enforcers envisioned it as a tool of diplomacy, designed to model "proper" behavior to the Chinese. |
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Beginning in the late eighteenth century, the ideology that individuals carried with them "natural rights" independent of legal rights led citizens to believe that their government had a duty to protect them while traveling abroad. With the rise of imperialism in the nineteenth century, Western countries increasingly measured the level of "civilization" in a country by how well it protected those rights. Westerners expected diplomatic immunity for all official representatives, but in "uncivilized" countries, extraterritoriality extended that protection to all citizens. |
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