Law and the Making of Modern Asia

From India to Japan, emperors, European colonizers, reformers, revolutionaries, and ordinary people turned to law courts to implement their ideals of a just social and political order. We will search out how legal sources can be used to tell the histories of South, Southeast, and East Asian states and their subjects between the mid-eighteenth century and the present. We will follow their trail out of stuffy courtrooms, through bedrooms, battlefields, and morgues, below decks, and across the pages of newspapers and novels. Topics include: indigenous legal orders, colonial and postcolonial knowledge, extraterritoriality and sovereignty, gender and sexuality in court, migration and state control, sensationalized trials and the emergence of mass opinion, fundamentalism and modernization, revolutionary and postcolonial justice.