In recent decades, research studies in legal history, international law, the history of empires, and global history have begun to look more closely at the relationship between law and empire. Within this, the study of empires has started to observe law more closely, through the lens of imperial law and legal pluralism, and legal historians have begun to consider the legal experience in colonial territories. These studies have moved away from previous narratives that focused on Europeans delivering civilization to the world, proposing critical and empirical readings of this process instead, highlighting the localization of law and the colonial origins of international law, as well as illustrating how much of European law was ‘made in empire’. The research that articulates questions of law and empire, however, still tends to dedicate too much attention to the European experience, particularly concerning its focus on how European empires ruled their overseas territories and how European law was modified as a result of the colonial enterprise. American, Asian, and African experiences are usually not given a role other than as fields of action or objects of interest for European agents and legal scholars.
By focusing on case studies from the Iberian empires in Asia, this volume seeks to revise this narrative of law and empire by proposing a decentered perspective that places a multiplicity of normative arrangements at the center of observation. By focusing on the idea of normativity, it looks at the experiences of empire to understand how norms adapt to new conditions, how local communities navigate these changing normative orders, and how law-making was tied to diverse local histories, traditions, and practices. This approach allows integrating different orders of norms, from imperial law, canon law, and moral theology to local rituals, customs, and practices, as well as written traditions such as Dharmaśāstra and Smṛti, the Ritsuryō, and Confucian and Taoist philosophy. The case studies highlight these features of the relationship between law and empire by looking at China, India, Japan, and the Philippines, illustrating the ways in which the making of law in Iberian Asia drew from diverse experiences and normative knowledge beyond that of the empire to produce unique configurations of norms from place to place.
The question of law and empire also addresses the global origins of contemporary law and raises important analytical and methodological questions. Research being done from a global perspective has unsettled certain very deeply ingrained manners of conducting legal-historical research through the use of intertwined, connected, and more comparatively aware readings of national or regional legal histories. Further, the global perspective has reorganized the spatial framework of legal historiographical
The ten chapters of this volume thus restate the relationship between law and empire using this more nuanced perspective. The first chapter (Manuel Bastias Saavedra) provides an introductory study that places the historiographical discussion of law and empire within the context of Iberian imperialism in Asia. The following chapters explore normative production in China (Fupeng Li; Marina Torres Trimállez), the Estado da Índia (Patricia Souza de Faria; Miguel Rodrigues Lourenço; Ângela Barreto Xavier), Japan (Rômulo da Silva Ehalt; Luisa Stella de Oliveira Coutinho Silva), and the Philippines (Marya Svetlana T. Camacho; Abisai Perez Zamarripa). The volume also integrates a range of different themes of the Iberian experience in Asia ranging from the Christian mission (Coutinho Silva; Ehalt; Torres Trimállez) and Church history (Camacho; Faria; Lourenço) to the processes of empire-building (Perez; Xavier) and the influence of Western science in Asia (Li). The legal-historical topics discussed in the volume include the compilation/creation of local customs for imperial rule (Perez; Xavier), the adjustment or creation of rules and procedures to conform to local norms and societies (Faria; Lourenço; Torres Trimállez), the ways in which local conditions reshaped the practice of Catholic sacraments (Camacho; Coutinho Silva; Ehalt), and the articulation of norms with culturally diverse forms of knowledge and representations of time (Li). Finally, the chapters also illustrate the interaction between local norms and the circulation of normative knowledge, which not only involved connections between Asia and the Iberian Peninsula and Rome, but also reflected dense exchanges within Asia—Goa, Macau, Manila, Malacca—and between Asia and America.
The volume was produced under the very unique circumstances and disruptions of the global Covid pandemic. I am therefore grateful to the contributing authors for making the best out of what has been a very challenging year for everyone. The initial impulse for this volume came from the panel “The Iberian Empires and the Production of Normativities in Asia (1500–1800)”, co-organized with Luisa Stella de Oliveira Coutinho Silva for the 49th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Legal History held in Boston in 2019. Ângela Barreto Xavier’s contribution was presented in the “Norms and Empires Lecture Series” at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory, within the context of the joint project “Glocalizing Normativities: A Global Legal History (15th–21st Centuries)”. I would like to thank the participants
Manuel Bastias Saavedra
Frankfurt am Main, May 2021