Horowitz-International Law and State Transformation

International Law and State Transformation in China, Siam, and the Ottoman Empire duringthe Nineteenth CenturyAuthor(s): Richard S. HorowitzSource: Journal of World History, Vol. 15, No. 4 (Dec., 2004), pp. 445-486Published by: University of Hawai'i PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20079291Accessed: 16/08/2010 04:06

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International Law and State Transformation in China, Siam; and the Ottoman Empire during

the Nineteenth Century

RICHARD S. HOROWITZ

California State University, Northridge

^"TpHE king is a man no doubt wonderfully self-instructed, but

A that he should appreciate the great truths of political science, one could hardly expect." Thus wrote Sir John Bowring on 7 April 1855 about King Mongkut of Siam.1 He wrote this curious line during

his month-long stay in Bangkok to negotiate a treaty of friendship and commerce between Great Britain and Siam. An intimate of political philosopher Jeremy Bentham, a former member of parliament, and an

inveterate traveler and a prolific writer, Bowring was a specialist on

the management of those parts of "the East" beyond the direct control of the British Empire but very much in the sights of her merchants. From 1837 to 1838 Bowring served as a special commissioner sent by Lord Palmerston to investigate the commercial situation of Egypt and

Syria, and he played an active role in policy debates during the "East

1 Sir John Bowring, The Kingdom and People of Siam (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford Univer

sity Press, 1969), 2: 281. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Workshop on Late Imperial China in World History held at UCLA 2 November 2002 and at the Annual Conference of the World History Association in Atlanta in June 2003. I am grateful to commentators David Christian and Richard von Glahn and the participants in both con ferences. This paper has greatly benefited from suggestions from Michael Montesano, Tom

Devine, Rachel Howes, and Nan Yamane, and an anonymous reviewer for the Journal of World History, and was inspired by a decade of conversations with Caroline Reeves and Pat Giersch.

Journal of World History, Vol. 15, No. 4 ? 2005 by University of Hawai'i Press

445

446 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, DECEMBER 2OO4

ern crisis" of the time. The resolution of the crisis, which resulted in

Ottoman acceptance of unequal treaties and free trade in exchange for

British support against the renegade Egyptian regime of Muhammad

Ali, was not entirely to Bowring's liking (he advocated Ali's cause). Nevertheless Palmerston continued to find diplomatic uses for him. In

1847 Bowring was appointed British Consul in Canton, and in 1854 he became the governor of Hong Kong. In China Bowring was deeply involved in the creation of the semi-colonial treaty system?pressing for the establishment of a foreign customs service to collect taxes on

international trade, and in 1856 playing a key role in turning the man

ufactured Arrow incident into the casus belli of what is often referred to as the Second Opium War.2

At this time, Bowring was also the accredited British representa tive to the courts of Japan, Siam, Korea, and Vietnam. In that role he

went to Bangkok in March of 1855. King Mongkut's reputation for

scholarship and his familiarity with English language and history led

Bowring to expect an easy resolution. But while Mongkut proudly dis

played figurines of Victoria and Albert in his private apartments, he was stubbornly reluctant to accede to Bowring's demands, leading to

the frustrated entry in the British envoy's journal. A sharp increase in

the pressure placed on Siamese negotiators followed, and within a few

days Bowring was able to obtain what he felt was a satisfactory agree ment.3

What exactly did Sir John mean by the "great truths of political sci

ence"? The diplomatic record offers some clues. The Bowring Treaty established foreign diplomatic representation in Bangkok, extrater

ritoriality, and rules of international trade aimed at opening Siam's

markets. The agreement, along with the supplementary Parkes treaty

signed in 1857, bore a striking resemblance to the semicolonial systems

already in existence in the Ottoman Empire and partially in place in

China. They began Siam's integration into the European-dominated international society in precisely the way that the settlements of

2 On Bowring's role in the Ottoman crisis, G. F. Bartle "Bowring and the Near Eastern

Crisis of 1838-1840," English Historical Review 79 ( 1964): 761-774. For contrasting views on

his role in China see John K. Fairbank, Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast: The Open

ing of the Treaty Ports (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953), and J. Y. Wong,

Deadly Dreams: Opium and the Arrow War (1858-1860) (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer

sity Press, 1998). 3

Bowring, 2: 212-226 provides a summary and text. For a historian's discussion from

the British documentation see Nicholas Tarling, "The Mission of Sir John Bowring to

Siam," Journal of the Siam Society 50.2 (1962): 91-118.

Horowitz: International Law and State Transformation 447

1838-1840 had done to the Ottoman Empire and as the agreements of 1843, 1858, and i860 would do in Qing China. Clearly, Bowring had in mind the benefits of free trade?an enduring theme through his career?and the necessity and appropriateness of British diplo matic dominance. But surely Bowring's "truths" included the practices of international law that he was forcing a reluctant Siamese court to

accept. The agreements signed with Siam were articulated within the

conceptual universe of European international law and the patterns of

diplomatic behavior it embodied. This marked a sharp break from

Asian practices of interstate relations. These treaties and the patterns of relations they set out would come to form a fundamental infra structure of semicolonial political systems.

Bowring's involvements with China, Siam, and the Ottoman

Empire in the 1840s and 1850s point to some possibilities for investi

gating comparisons and connections among these three states. Rela tions with the Ottoman Empire offered European powers a model of

how to carry on relations with large, non-Christian Eurasian govern ments. This model was then pressed into use in the Treaty of Nanking that ended the Opium War, which in turn formed the basis for treaties

with Siam and Japan. Indeed, the semicolonial system?including legal

privileges for outsiders, a free trade regime imposed by outside power, and the ability and willingness of imperial powers to interfere in inter

nal affairs of subject states?applies effectively to all three, and points to common origins in British policy in all three states.4 While schol ars of Siam, Qing China, and the Ottoman Empire have been reluc tant to engage in comparative study, in this case it seems appropriate.5

4 For a systematic analysis of semicolonialism and its relationship to concepts of infor mal empire see J?rgen Osterhammel, "Semi-Colonialism and Informal Empire in Twentieth

Century China: Towards a Framework of Analysis," in Imperialism and After: Continuities and Discontinuities, ed. Wolfgang J. Mommsen and J?rgen Osterhammel (London: Allen &

Unwin, 1986), pp. 290-314. 5

Comparisons of China with Japan include Frances Moulder, Japan, China and the

Modern World Economy (1977), and Marion J. Levy, "Contrasting Factors in the Moderniza tion of China and Japan," Economic Development and Cultural Change 2.3 (1953): 161-197.

More recently historians of modern China have tended to look to early modern Europe for

comparison, e.g., R. Bin Wong, China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of Euro

pean Experience (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997), and Kenneth Pomeranz, The

Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton,

N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000). Benedict Anderson notes a reluctance to use com

parisons other than Meiji Japan among scholars of Thailand; see "Studies of the Thai State, the State of Thai Studies" in The Study of Thailand, ed. Eliezar Ayal (Athens, Ohio: Cen ter for International Studies, Ohio University, 1978), pp. 197-198. On comparisons of

Turkey and Japan see Robert Ward and Dankwart Rustow, eds., Political Modernization in

Japan and Turkey (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1964).


The three bear notable similarities. All were extensive states on the Eurasian continent. All managed to avoid European colonial occu

pation, but at the cost of humiliating treaties. In each case a monar

chical regime of long standing was able for a period of time to adapt to, and in some senses benefit from, the European presence. Faced

with common concerns, they dealt with them in the context of dis

tinctive frameworks of understanding and unique domestic political constraints.

In this essay I will begin to explore both connections and compar isons by focusing on just one piece of Bowring's "political science":

international law and its influence on the transformation of the state

in Qing China, the Ottoman Empire, and Siam. International law not

only served as an institutional framework for the maintenance of diplo matic relations, but also embodied key concepts about law, administra

tive organization, territoriality, and national identity. Ottoman, Qing, and Siamese statesmen, facing relentless diplomatic pressure and (usu

ally) veiled military threats, adapted to these standards to maximize

their autonomy. As a result, these three old Eurasian states came to

increasingly approximate the European models of a national state by the early twentieth century.

International Law in Semicolonial Environments

When European colonial representatives went abroad in the nine

teenth century, consciously or not they carried international law in

their intellectual portmanteau. International law has had a curious career in world history. Its roots lie in Europe before, during, and after

the Thirty Years War and efforts to bring some standards of civility to

interstate relations. Lacking any sort of presiding international body, international law was the province of professional diplomats and small

groups of intellectuals (many of whom had diplomatic experience) who sought to codify standards of international behavior and discern

its underlying principles. By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth

centuries, treatises of international law were on every diplomat's ref erence shelf.6 In the minds of European envoys, international law was

the model of civilized international behavior and served as an institu

tional framework for a European-centered international society. As

6 The best general survey is Arthur Nussbaum, A Concise History of the Law of Nations, rev. ed., (New York: Macmillan, 1954).


diplomats from Europe and the United States ventured into Asia and

Africa in the nineteenth century, they brought with them expecta tions that international relations would and should be carried out

within the frameworks of international law. Yet international law and

imperialism proved to be strange bedfellows: Europe's growing politi cal engagement in Asia and Africa forced international lawyers to

reconsider the intellectual underpinnings of their "science."

Scholars studying the history of international relations have given international law scant attention, but this is largely based on false

assumptions about its role. In spite of high hopes for international col

lective security through the League of Nations and United Nations in

the past century, international law has not functioned in a manner

analogous to criminal law. In times of conflict, powerful states breached

international law with impunity. Scholars therefore have presumed it

to be little more than legalistic cover for realpolitik.7 The key function

of international law in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

was quite different: it established norms for behavior (in the case of

"public" international law this was specifically the behavior of states) in international society. While international law often did not (and

does not) greatly constrain the actions of great powers in an interna

tional system, it does offer a standing body of understandings for

resolving the quotidian conflicts of day-to-day international relations.

For example, it defines which organizations (i.e., recognized states) are

players in the game of international diplomacy, it establishes standards

for the treatment of foreign diplomats and the modes of negotiation and ratification of treaties, it provides principles for settling compet

ing claims over legal and political jurisdiction, and it establishes com

mon definitions of terms used in treaties and other agreements.8 Inter

national law functioned as an institution, not in the "brick and

mortar" sense usually used by historians, but in the sense used by econ

omists. In the words of Douglass North, "Institutions are the humanly devised constraints that structure political, economic and social inter

actions" through formal rules and informal constraints, and they are

7 For example, Henry Kissinger, in surveying the European diplomatic arena from the

age of Richelieu to Napoleon, does not even mention the development of international

law in this period. See Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), pp.

56-77. 8 William D. Coplin, "International Law and Assumptions about the State System,"

in International Law and Organization: An Introductory Reader, ed. Richard D. Falk and

Wolfram Hanrieder (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1968); Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), pp.

136-142.

45o JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, DECEMBER 2OO4

intended "to create order and reduce uncertainty in exchange."9 By establishing modes of everyday political interaction, international law

has provided an institutional framework for international politics. These post-Westphalian conceptions of the "law of nations" (the

term "international law" was coined by Jeremy Bentham in the 1780s and only gradually came into widespread use) and diplomatic practice

were not recognized outside of Europe before the nineteenth century. Where international law presumed the equality of recognized states,

Qing China, Siam, and the Ottoman Empire constructed their rela

tions on the basis of hierarchies of rulers, with more powerful states

claiming special rights and responsibilities over lesser ones. At least in

the eyes of their own propagandists, both the Ottomans (as claimants to the caliphate and as the protectors of the commonwealth of the

faithful) and the Qing (where the emperor claimed to be the Son of

Heaven to the East Asian world and a great khan and a supporter of

Tibetan Buddhism in Central Asia) claimed special status in interna

tional political society.10 The Bangkok dynasty in Siam legitimated its own position internally and externally by its endorsement and patron

age of Theravada Buddhism.11 Tributary relations, common in East and

Southeast Asia, also played a role. These were based on the exchange of gifts between rulers, with the lesser acknowledging subordinate sta

tus and the more powerful claiming suzerainty.12 None of this would

9 Douglass C. North, "Institutions," Journal of Economic Perspectives 5.1 (1991): 97. The

work of Lauren Benton has inspired me to make the connection with new institutionalist

approaches. See the introduction to Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal

Regimes in World History, 1400-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 10 On the ideas of the caliphate Muslim commonwealth and Ottoman legitimacy see

Amira K. Bennison, "Muslim Universalism and Western Globalization," in Globalization in

World History, ed. A. G. Hopkins (New York: WW Norton, 2002), pp. 75-90. Selim

Deringal, "Legitimacy Structures and the Ottoman State: The Reign of Abdulhamid II

(1876-1909)," International Journal of Middle East Studies 23.3 (1991): 345-359, discusses

the increasing use of the idea of the caliphate in the late nineteenth century. On the mul

tiple legitimating strategies of Qing rulers see Evelyn Rawski's overview "Reenvisioning the

Qing: The Significance of the Qing Period in Chinese History," Journal of Asian Studies

55.4 (1996): 829-850. 11

Craig J. Reynolds, "Buddhist Cosmography in Thai History, with Special Reference to Nineteenth-Century Culture Change," Journal of Asian Studies 35.2 (1976): 203-211; Patrick Jory, "Thai and Western Buddhist Scholarship in the Age of Colonialism: King

Chulalongkorn Redefines the Jatakas," Journal of Asian Studies 61.3 (2002): 907-908. 12 On China's involvement in the tribute system and other kinds of relations with the

outside world, see the essays in John K. Fairbank, ed., The Chinese World Order, and, from a different perspective, James Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar: Qing Guest Ritual and the

Macartney Embassy of 1793 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 29-56. For a lucid discussion of tribute relations in Siam in the early Bangkok dynasty, see David K.

Wyatt, Thailand, A Short History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982), pp.

155-161.


have been surprising to Europeans before the mid-i6oos. But in the

late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries these hierarchies were

early flashpoints of conflict.

The first stage of the globalization of international law came in con

flicts over the practices and proprieties of diplomacy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Ottoman Empire had been a significant

player on the European international scene for centuries, and for

much of that time made its own rules. Only in the 1700s, as Ottoman

military weakness became obvious, did the Sublime Porte accede to

European standards of diplomatic exchange and intercourse and begin to send envoys abroad.13 In China, where practices of international

relations were quite varied, the rejection of the Macartney expedition in 1793 and subsequent Qing resistance to what the British regarded

as "normal" diplomatic relations famously showed the conflicts in Chi nese and British conceptions of international relations as played out in

the rituals of diplomacy. A long negotiation was required to find appro

priate rituals for Macartney's audience with the Qianlong emperor because Macartney, according to his own account, refused to kowtow.

In the end, the Qing emperor refused British requests for trade and

diplomatic residence. While the Qing throne made major concessions

after the Opium Wars, allowing foreign legations in Beijing and accept

ing European modes of diplomacy in i860, it was not until after the

Boxer War in 1900 that the conflicts over issues such as imperial audi ences for foreign representatives and the nature of the Qing foreign office were settled to the satisfaction of foreigners from Europe and

North America.14 Siam likewise operated as one of several major pow ers in mainland Southeast Asia within the tributary relationships

accepted in the Southeast Asian world. This produced similar debates over diplomatic ritual. The Burney mission in 1826 and the Bowring

mission in 1855 also began with extended negotiations over proper ritual forms.15

The debates over rituals in these cases had important underpin

13 Thomas Naff, "The Ottoman Empire and the European States System," in The

Expansion of International Society, ed. Hedley Bull and Adam Watson (Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1984), pp. 143-169. 14 For the most recent effort to understand the crisis over diplomatic rituals see James

He via, Cherishing Men from Afar. On foreign pressures to remake the Zongli Yamen into a

"proper" foreign office see Richard S. Horowitz, "Breaking the Bonds of Precedent: The

1906 Government Reform Commission and the Origins of Ministerial Government in

China," Modern Asian Studies 37.4 (2003): 775-797. 15

The Burney Papers (Farnborough: Gregg International, 1971) 1: 42-50; Bowring,

Kingdom and People of Siam, 2: 252-254, 259-262.


nings: European diplomatic rituals were understood to represent the

European conception of an international society in which states were

regarded as equals. In breaking with the hierarchical ritual systems of

old empires, foreign diplomats believed that they were sending a mes

sage in a language that "Oriental" monarchs, presumed to be con

cerned with ceremony rather than substance, could understand: Euro

peans were not to be treated within the patronizing styles of old

imperial courts. These squabbles over ritual were the first stage in a

European effort to globalize their own legalistic conception of inter

national society. But international law, as defined before 1800, proved an uncom

fortable fit with expansionist claims to empire, and the nineteenth

century saw a redefinition of its philosophical foundations in order to

make it applicable to colonial and semicolonial contexts. Early writers on international law had taken an inclusive, natural law approach that made it difficult to reject claims of indigenous states and rulers to

the same treatment as European states. Emerich de Vattel in his Law

of Nations, a standard treatise first published in 1758, declared "There

is no doubt of the existence of a natural Law of Nations, inasmuch as

the Law of Nature is no less binding upon States, where men are

united in a political society, than it is upon the individuals them

selves." Consequently to Vattel the law of nations "is a special science

which consists in a just and reasonable application of the Law of

Nature to the affairs and conduct of Nations and of sovereigns."16 The

idea that international law is founded on natural law was rooted in the

early seventeenth-century work of Hugo Grotius. It suggests the situ

ation of states is analogous to men in the state of nature, where cer

tain "natural" principles of morality apply even without government or religion to define them.17 The implication is that international law, while of European origin, is universally applicable, and quite separate from Christian morality.

During the nineteenth century the natural law justification disap

peared and was replaced by a more parochial idea: that international

law was Christian in its origins and that only those non-Christian

16 E. de Vattel, The Law of Nations or the Principles of Natural Law Applied to the Con

duct and to the Affairs of Nations and of Sovereigns, vol. 3, trans, of the 1758 ed. by Charles

G. Fenwick (reprint, New York: Oceana Publications, 1964), p. 3a. 17

Hugo Grotius, The Rights of War and Peace: Including the Law of Nature and Nation, tr. A. C. Campbell (reprint ed., Westport: Hyperion, 1979), pp. 17-24; Nussbaum, pp. 108-110.


states that had reached a comparable level of "civilization" could be

treated as full participants in international law. The shift away from

natural law theory is clear in the first edition of Henry Wheaton's trea

tise Elements of International Law, published in 1836. Wheaton, an

experienced American diplomat and jurist, carefully reviewed the

natural law justification and concluded that it was not sufficient. He

asserted that there was no universal law of nations and that in practice the Law of Nations was not regarded as fully applicable in relations

with Islamic states.18 He concluded with the following definition:

The law of nations or international law, as understood among civilized, Christian nations, may be defined of consisting of those rules of con

duct which reason deduces, as consonant to justice, from the nature of

the society existing among independent nations; with such definitions and modifications as may be established by general consent.19

Where Vattel's definition is universal, Wheaton (whose work replaced Vattel's as the standard handbook for diplomats) is quite clear that

international law is an artifact of Christian civilization. This served to

justify the reality of unequal treaty relations in European relations with states in Asia and Africa.

The work of nineteenth-century writers such as Wheaton pointed to a new focus on the concept of "civilization" in international law. In

his survey of international legal literature from the turn of the twenti

eth century, Gerrit Gong asserts that "a standard of 'civilization' had

emerged as an explicit legal principle and an integral part of the doc trines of international law," and a non-Christian state needed to meet

that standard to be considered a full participant in international soci

ety and fully subject to the rights granted under international law. The

"standard" for a civilized state included guarantees of basic rights of

property and person, an organized political system with a capacity for

self-defense, adherence to international law, maintenance of a system for diplomatic interchange, and a state conforming to the "accepted norms and practices of the 'civilized' international society."20 This

standard assumed a hierarchy of states, which in the late nineteenth

century were commonly divided into three groups?the civilized, the

18 Henry Wheaton, Elements of International Law (Philadelphia, 1836; reprint New

York: De Capo Press, 1972), pp. 35-46. Hereafter cited as Wheaton 1836. 19 Wheaton 1836, p. 46. 20 Gerrit W Gong, The Standard of Civilization in International Society (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1984), pp. 14-15.


barbarous, and the savage?and international law applied fully only to

the first.21

Nevertheless, the "standard of civilization" did offer non-European states a way forward to full participation in the international legal

regime. The officials in these states began to familiarize themselves

with concepts of international law and to use it in shaping their rela

tions with Europeans and North Americans. In China, the Qing

foreign office called the Zongli Yamen, created in 1861, sponsored American missionary W. A. P. Martin's translation of Wheaton into

Chinese in the mid-i86os and subsequently hired him as chief instruc

tor in the Yamen's interpreter school, where Martin and his students

translated several other international legal treatises.22 The Qing learned from bitter experience in the Tianjin massacre of 1870, the

Margary affair of 1874, and the Boxer Uprising that failure to live up to international legal standards, such as protecting foreign diplomatic

personnel, produced a punishing response from foreign powers. Simi

larly, according to Roderic Davison, adherence to international law was a fundamental principle of Ottoman diplomacy from 1840 until

the final breakdown of the empire. In the case of Siam, under the reigns of Mongkut and Chulalongkorn, care was taken to observe treaties

and, by the late nineteenth century, also to participate in interna

tional society. Francis Sayre, and American who served as an interna

tional legal advisor to the Siamese government in the 1920s, wrote

with great enthusiasm about the achievements of Chulalongkorn and

described Siam as having "a well developed sense of international

responsibility"?noting ironically that by 1910 extraterritorial privi

leges were at times preventing Siam from fulfilling some of their inter

national legal responsibilities for protecting trademarks and trade

names, as foreign residents were the chief offenders.23

21 Gong, pp. 5-6.

22 The Martin translation project and the Zongli Yamen's interest in international law

has been dealt with by several authors. Immanuel Hsu's China's Entry into the Family of Nations asserts that the Qing failed to take full advantage of international law to revoke the

unequal treaties?a position that seems unrealistic. Lydia H. Liu emphasizes the complex ities of translation and the international law as a means of conveying imperial/colonial ideas in China in "Legislating the Universal: The Circulation of International Law in the

Nineteenth Century," in Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circula

tions, ed. Lydia H. Liu (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), pp. 127-164. The

treatment in this essay follows my fuller discussion in Richard S. Horowitz, "Central Power

and State Making: The Zongli Yamen and Self-Strengthening in China," Ph.D. diss., Har

vard University, 1998, chap. 5. 23 Roderic H. Davison, "Ottoman Diplomacy and Its Legacy," in Imperial Legacy: The

Ottoman Imprint on the Balkans and the Middle East, ed. L. Carl Brown, (New York: Colum


The shift from natural law to the standard of civilization had pro found consequences for China, Siam, and the Ottoman Empire. It

served to justify the unequal treaties, extraterritoriality, and transgres sion of basic principles of international law in dealing with the non

Christian world. It gave each of these non-European states a strong incentive to adhere to European practices in order to justify equal treatment. Finally, despite the patronizing tone of the international

lawyers, it provided leaders of non-Western states, even those not fully "civilized" in the international sense, with a set of tools for playing the

games of international politics for their own benefit even though they remained in positions of profound military weakness.

Treaty Systems, Extraterritoriality, and

Semicolonial States

Systems of unequal treaties formed the international legal mechanism

for defining semicolonial relationships. Treaties, which were techni

cally agreements between equal and consenting states, were standard

practice in the European diplomatic world. But exported eastward, they came to have a much more negative connotation, defining the rules of

engagement between expanding European and U.S. powers and older

Eurasian states. These treaties were unequal in several senses: they were

forced at gunpoint; they expressed the economic and political interests

of Britain and other powers; and key provisions, including extraterrito

riality and restrictions on tariffs on foreign trade, were not reciprocal. The very inequalities of the treaty system, the justification of them

with arguments about the "standard of civilization," the demands of

modern European diplomacy, and the impacts of these agreements on

established state institutions and expectations of "civilized" govern ment put pressure on semicolonial states to transform themselves.

In each of the three cases presented here, the modern treaty sys tems were initiated by the British, but other European powers, the

United States, and, later, Japan also participated. In certain respects?

especially the emphasis on free trade?these systems fit British strate

gic priorities particularly well. But from the view of most other major powers, while these arrangements were probably not ideal, they were

acceptable. The British approach to informal empire left the doors

bia University Press, 1996), p. 185. On Siam see Gong, pp. 217-230, and Francis Sayre, "The Passing of Extraterritoriality in Siam," American Journal of International Law 22.1

(1928): 73-74.


open for other powers and their diplomats, merchants, and missionar

ies to play a role (in the universe of international law, Most Favored

Nation arrangements served to distribute privileges widely among

foreign powers). In midcentury other powers quickly joined in and

signed similar treaties?and at times pressed for further concessions.

France allied with Britain in the Arrow War against Qing China, and

Russia took advantage of the Qing defeat in i860 to demand similar treaties as well as territorial concessions. Both France and Russia

remained active players in semicolonial arrangements until World

War I. In the Ottoman Empire, Russia posed a direct threat to the

Ottomans and played a central role in all of the crises that came to

form the "Eastern Question." While forcing numerous territorial and

other concessions, the Russians, probably for reasons of balance of

power, accepted the treaty system and the continuation of a militarily overmatched Ottoman regime. France and Germany played an increas

ingly active role in the Ottoman situation in the latter half of the

nineteenth century as British economic interest receded. In Siam, fol

lowing Bowring's opening, France gradually became involved. In the

i88os and 1890s, seeking to secure its Indochinese colonies, France

placed Siam under intense pressure and gained major territorial con

cessions in Laos and Cambodia. But here, as well, France ultimately

accepted the continuation of the semicolonial arrangements. The semicolonial phenomenon spread beyond the leading Euro

pean powers. The United States, which shared the British interest in

free trade, followed the British lead in China and Siam, and played a

central role in forcing similar arrangements on Japan in the 1850s. By the 1890s, Meiji Japan had gone from victim to predator, becoming one

of the major forces behind the semicolonial arrangements in China.

The nationals of minor European states such as Belgium also benefited

from similar legal advantages written into treaties. While much more

research is needed, it seems that a key to the endurance of the treaty

system as a structure for semicolonial systems was that it provided a

framework that various powers were able to live with, even if it did not

fulfill all of their desires. The multinational nature of the semicolonial treaty system also

influenced the choices available to Ottoman, Qing, and Siamese polit ical leaders as they reshaped their state institutions. Rather than adher

ing to British models and using only British advisors, they had a choice

from a range of "civilized" (primarily European) models. The choices were eclectic: the Ottomans modeled their legal system on the French

and employed Prussian military advisors; Siam used British financial

advisors and Belgian legal experts; Qing China hired military advisors


and specialists from a host of countries; and in what has come to be seen as the quintessential semicolonial institution, the Maritime Cus toms Service was led by British inspectors-general, but it deliberately recruited both executive and technical staff from across Europe, the

United States, and, later, Japan. In contrast to fully colonial systems in which one power exerted both political and cultural dominance, the semicolonial treaty framework imposed a European-centered cos

mopolitan civilization as a standard upon which indigenous states

would be judged?a standard that the Eurocentric nature of nine

teenth-century international law both embodied and promoted. This section examines how the three Eurasian states adapted insti

tutions under pressure from the treaty systems. While the conse

quences of these pressures spread across the full range of government

activity, the focus will be on three aspects of the semicolonial state:

legal reforms aimed at ending extraterritoriality, the establishment of

ministerial forms of government, and the reform and restructuring of revenue systems in the face of opportunities and constraints created by the foreign presence.

First, an overview of the process of state transformation is in order.24

If one takes 1800 as a starting point, the structures of the three states

show at least as many differences as commonalities. The Qing state,

stretching from the county magistrate at the bottom to the emperor and his Grand Council at the top, was integrated, bureaucratic, and run by a highly educated elite in a large part (but by no means exclu

sively) chosen through the examination system. At the local level, officials were overworked, understaffed, and embattled, but there was

no question that officials were ultimately responsible to Beijing. The tax burden fell primarily on agriculture through land and grain taxes.

By contrast, the Ottoman Empire in the late eighteenth century had a small and less integrated civil bureaucracy, and central state leaders

negotiated a tense balance between military and civil organizations. As one traveled farther away from Istanbul there was a greater level of

decentralization than in Qing China, with power shifting to local

notables over the course of the eighteenth century. While the tax sys tem, as in China, was heavily dependent on agricultural taxes, the

Ottomans depended heavily on tax farming. Control of governors in

24 My choice of the term "state transformation" rather than "state building" is a con

scious one. The trajectory of these changes was often not "Europeanized" enough to fit the notions of state making or state building referred to in the literature?indeed, particularly in the Qing and Ottoman cases these periods have often been seen as part of long-term

processes of imperial decay?so I prefer the more neutral term "state transformation."


areas far from the empire's core in the western Anatolia was sometimes tenuous. By the nineteenth century, a few, such as Muhammad Ali in

Egypt, were independent in fact if not form.25 Siam was ruled by a king and a cadre of officials drawn from a small group of aristocratic fami

lies. Central government departments mixed territorial jurisdictions and functional roles. While the ultimate authority of the Bangkok court was accepted across the realm, on a day-to-day basis central

authority outside of the capital was limited. As time went on revenues

were increasingly dependent on the sale of tax farms on various com

modities.26

But a comparative look at existing scholarship suggests that nine

teenth-century processes of reform made the state in Qing China,

Siam, and the Ottoman Empire more alike. Each underwent a process of state transformation: a mixture of deliberate reforms and ad hoc

responses to necessities created by foreign threats and internal admin

istrative, economic, and military problems. Each restructured its mili

tary and imported modern European weaponry, but in the short term

had far greater success in suppressing internal challenges than in ward

ing off foreign threats.27 Each gradually instituted reforms to make its

central government more nearly fit European categories and expecta tions: the Ottomans in the 1860s and 1870s, Siam in the 1880s and

1890s, and Qing China during the post-Boxer reforms. Each moved far

25 For an institutional survey of the Ottoman government during the golden age of

Suleiman the Magnificent see Norman Itzkowitz, Ottoman Empire and Islamic Tradition

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972). For an outline of nineteenth-century devel

opments, see Carter Findley, Ottoman Civil Officialdom: A Social History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 20-28. On the rise of local notables, see Albert

Hourani, "Ottoman Reforms and the Politics of Notables," in Beginnings of Modernization in the Middle East: The Nineteenth Century, ed. William R. Polk and Richard L. Chambers

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), pp. 41-68. 26 Akin Rabibhadana, The Organization of Thai Society in the Early Bangkok Period,

1782-1873 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Southeast Asia Program, 1969); David K. Wyatt, "Fam

ily Politics in Nineteenth Century Siam," in Studies in Thai History, ed. David K. Wyatt

(Chiang Mai: Silkworm, 1993); Tej Bunnag, The Provincial Administration of Siam, 1892

1915 (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1977), chap. 1. Neil Englehart in Culture

and Power in Traditional Siamese Government (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Southeast Asia Pro

gram, 2001) argues that the literature overstates the weakness of the Bangkok government in the provinces.

27 On China see Richard S. Horowitz, "Beyond the Marble Boat: The Transformation

of China's Military, 1850-1911," in A Military History of China, ed. David Graffand Robin

Higham (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 2002); and Kemal H. Karpat, "The Transformation of

the Ottoman State, 1789-1908," International Journal of Middle East Studies 3 (1972):

251-256. Benedict Anderson makes the same point about Siam, citing the unpublished Cornell Ph.D. dissertation of Noel Battye; see Anderson, "Studies of the Thai State," pp.

202-205.


more quickly to implement administrative rather than constitutional reforms. There is also a loose pattern of the progression of reforms:

early reforms that sought to adapt indigenous institutions to new situ ations followed by much more systematic efforts to use European mod els. The Ottomans began the earliest, beginning with short-lived mil

itary reforms in the 1790s, the elimination of the janissaries in the

1820s, and the expansion of the central bureaucracy even before the

semicolonial structure came to be formalized. The Tanzimat reforms

(1839-1876), which brought about far more thoroughgoing reforms, followed the creation of the new treaty system. Qing China saw the

self-strengthening reforms from i860 to 1894 and more systematic and radical New Policy reforms (1901-1911) that followed the Boxer War. In Siam, King Mongkut began reforms after Bowring's visit, but his

successor, Chulalongkorn, began more systematic reforms in the late

i88os, after years of careful domestic political maneuvering.28

Extraterritoriality and Semicolonial Order

By the early twentieth century the aspect of the semicolonial regime that most enraged Chinese was the institution of extraterritoriality.

The exemption of foreign nationals from the jurisdiction of Chinese

courts, the use of foreign-controlled consular courts that were widely believed to be deeply biased, and the frequent abuse of these privileges became touchstones of growing popular nationalist and anti-imperial ist feeling. While the debates over extraterritoriality were particularly

bitter in China, where Chinese nationalists made it a central issue and

foreign nationals fought hard to preserve the status quo, it was a

prominent issue in other semicolonial societies as well.29 In a sense,

extraterritoriality was nothing new. Lauren Benton has shown that

plural legal systems were common in colonial systems. Powerful mul tiethnic empires, such as the Ottoman, were quite willing to accord a

28 On China's post-Boxer reforms see the overview in Chuzu Ichiko, "Political and Institutional Reform, 1901-1911," in Cambridge History of China, Volume 11: Late Ch'ing

Part II, ed. John K. Fairbank and Kwang-ching Liu (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 375-415. On the Ottoman reforms see especially Roderic Davison, Reform in the Ottoman Empire, 1856-1876 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1963), and

Carter V. Findley, Bureaucratic Reform in the Ottoman Empire: The Sublime Porte, 1789-1922 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980), chaps. 4-5; for Siam see Wyatt, Thai land: A Short History, ch. 7; and for a more detailed account focusing on the interior min

istry see Tej Bunnag, Provincial Administration. 29

Wesley Fishel, The End of Extraterritoriality in China (Berkeley: University of Cali fornia Press, 1952).


level of extraterritorial law to minority communities, but with ultimate

jurisdiction remaining in the hands of the sovereign.30 But the inscrip tion of extraterritoriality into treaties changed the situation in impor tant ways. This was a formalized system, which foreigners blatantly used to their own advantage in pursuing both commercial enterprises and carrying on private lives. Most importantly, within the treaty sys tem extraterritorial rights could not simply be revoked by the host

government without fear of serious reprisals. The origins of extraterritoriality in China have been a subject of

debate. John Fairbank's influential interpretation emphasized the joint role of the Qing officials and their Western interlocutors in shaping the treaty system. Joseph Fletcher made a convincing case that agree

ments with Kokhand in the mid-1830s were a direct antecedent to the

settlements that ended the First Opium War.31 Missing from this dis

cussion has been a vision of a global pattern, one driven in a large part

by British policies. In exploring these issues, a look to the Middle East

is quite revealing. Extraterritoriality as a semicolonial institution was

in important respects an adaptation of the system of capitulations in

the Ottoman Empire. The capitulations were initially concessions vol

untarily bestowed by the Ottoman Sultan on non-Muslim foreigners.

Extraterritoriality was granted as if the foreign ambassador was the

head of a millet (a recognized religious community within the empire). Both criminal and civil cases among foreigners were to be judged by the foreign representative or his appointee. The capitulations also pro vided for privileges for foreigners trading in the Ottoman realm: rights and conditions of residence, exemptions from some taxes, and so on.

The capitulations were very specifically reciprocal. Non-Muslim Otto man subjects were to be granted privileges in their conduct of trade in

Europe. Failure to provide such reciprocal benefits could lead the sul tan to revoke the capitulation. At the same time, capitulations were

limited to reign of a given sultan and had to be renewed with the

accession of a new sultan.32 This system, which apparently functioned

reasonably well for centuries, was part of the strategy of legal pluralism

30 Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures, esp. pp. 80-114 and 244-252.

31 John K. Fairbank, Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast; Joseph Fletcher, "The

Heyday of the Ch'ing Order in Mongolia, Sinkiang, and Tibet," in Cambridge History of

China, Volume 10: Late Ch'ing Part I, ed. John K. Fairbank (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer

sity Press, 1978), pp. 375-385. 32 Thomas Naff, "Ottoman Diplomatic Relations with Europe: Patterns and Trends,"

in Studies in Eighteenth Century Islamic History, ed. Thomas Naff and Roger Owen (Carbon dale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1977), pp. 97-103; Nasim Sousa, Capitulatory

Regime of Turkey (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1933), pp. 68-88.


through which Ottoman overlords dealt with the extraordinary diver

sity of their realm.

As the Ottoman regime found itself in a position of weakness in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it became necessary to grant a growing range of special economic concessions to individual Euro

pean powers. At the same time the problem of extraterritoriality was

exacerbated by foreign protection of "prot?g?s"?Ottoman nationals who had received protection from foreign powers by purchase or fam

ily connection. For the most part these were members of the Christian millets. By the mid-nineteenth century these prot?g?s numbered in the millions and constituted the primary activity of foreign courts in the Ottoman realm.33

It was not until the 1830s and 1840s that the capitulations began to be supplemented by a treaty system. In 1840 Great Britain, Austria, Prussia, and Russia agreed as part of a settlement to support the Sub lime Porte against Muhammad Ali and to refrain from seeking out

further special concessions that would be denied to others. In effect this agreement shifted the basis of policy from the capitulatory agree

ments to European model treaty agreements. Nevertheless, conces

sions granted in the capitulations continued in perpetuity under newly signed treaties. In the meantime, the Sublime Porte was expected to

observe treaties very closely.34 By i860 similar unequal treaty arrangements were securely in place

in China and Siam. The treaties with the Qing Empire signed between

1842 and i860 established extraterritoriality and related arrangements that formed the framework of the treaty system until the mid-twenti eth century. The Bowring Treaty brought a similar situation to Siam.35 In both cases, as in the Turkish example, the British and other foreign powers used the introduction of the treaty framework as a fundamen tal element of their diplomatic operations. Conversely, adherence to treaties?an important aspect of international law?was taken to be a

crucial part of the responsibilities of an indigenous state. There was a profound irony here. Extraterritoriality clearly contra

vened basic principles of European international law that asserted that

33 Sousa, pp. 89-102.

34 Thomas Naff, "The Ottoman Empire and the European States System," in The

Expansion of International Society, ed. Hedley Bull and Adam Watson (Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1984), pp. 162-169. 35

While not on the same scale as Ottoman Turkey, both had prot?g? problems as well. Siam had disputes with France over French claims for consular jurisdiction over French colonial subjects (defined very generously by France), while in China foreign missionary efforts to protect their converts were fundamental to disputes over missionary activity.

462 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, DECEMBER 2004

states are equals in diplomatic ceremony and share fundamental rights of independence (e.g., sovereignty) and self-defense. The first edition

of Henry Wheaton's Elements of International Law clearly identifies the

"exclusive power of civil and criminal legislation ... is an essential

right of every independent state."36 Similarly, "every sovereign state

has the exclusive right of regulating the proceedings in its own courts

of justice."37 Only toward the end of the chapter on "rights of inde

pendence" does the possibility of extraterritoriality (as applied to rela

tions between Christian and Muslim states) come up, and here it is an

exception to the natural state of affairs, voluntarily agreed to by two

parties.

The treaty agreements in Turkey, China, and Siam could not be jus tified if international law were still understood to be rooted in natural

law. The argument that they did not meet the "standard of civilization" was therefore an essential legal doctrine to support unequal treaties and

the semicolonial system in general, and extraterritoriality in particu lar. What "civilization" involved was not particularly clear; it included

(ironically enough) adherence to international law through fulfill ment of treaty obligations and the emerging international standards on the conduct of war, maintenance of diplomatic relations according to European standards, maintenance of social stability and protection of foreign nationals, and development of an "acceptable" legal code

and legal system. This "standard" offered the prospect that the unequal treaties could be revoked if the subject states played according to

European rules.38

One of the most important ways in which nineteenth-century

European international law and the unequal treaty system that embod

ied it influenced semicolonial states was through the promulgation of new legal codes. These were a direct answer to the justification of

extraterritoriality as an inevitable response to unjust and brutal legal systems in non-Christian states.39 The first example of this came dur

ing the Tanzimat reforms in Turkey and involved an effort to put into

practice commitments already made to the European powers and

announced in the famous 1839 and 1856 Tanzimat decrees. These

included a guarantee to ensure to Ottoman subjects "perfect security

36 Wheaton 1836, p. 98.

37 Ibid., p. 105.

38 Gong, esp. pp. 54-81.

39 For a late and very vigorous defense of extraterritoriality on this basis see former

U.S. Minister to China Charles Denby's "Extraterritoriality in China," American Journal of International Law 18.4 (1924): 667-675.


for life, honor and fortune" in the former and granting of full tolera

tion to non-Muslim minorities in the latter.40 Both posed challenges since to this point law in the Ottoman Empire had been based on

three elements: Islamic law (sharia), community custom, and the Sul tan's decree. Customary law in particular was extremely diverse, as the

Ottoman rulers did not try to impose Turkish law on non-Turkish

Muslim communities and allowed religious minorities to continue to use their own legal systems when Muslims were not involved. While

customary law (and in some places Islamic law) dealt with business

practices and civil disputes, there was no civil or commercial code that

Europeans recognized as functional or legitimate. Beginning in the

1840s elements of European-style penal and commercial law were

incorporated into the already complex Ottoman legal system. During the i86os and 1870s, systematic efforts were made to adapt French civil law to Ottoman circumstances, and in 1867 the Grand Vizier Ali

Pasha proposed that the Code Napol?on be applied to disputes involv

ing Muslims and non-Muslims. Ultimately, while they drew on French

influences, the reforms instituted remained within the traditions of

Turkish and Islamic law.41

In Siam as well, legal reform quickly appeared on the agenda dur

ing the reign of Mongkut's successor Chulalongkorn (r. 1868-1910).

Foreign observers sharply criticized the indigenous Siamese court sys tem and the lack of separation of judicial from administrative func tions. According to British diplomat W. Gifford Palgrave, in 1881 there

was under the existing system "no distinct provision whatsoever for the administration of law and justice throughout Siam" and indeed "no judicial or legal institution, in the proper sense of the word, can

find a place."42 Palgrave concluded that until the legal system "is

40 For translations of these edicts see J. C. Hurewitz, ed., Diplomacy in the Near and Middle East: A Documentary Record, 1535-1914 (Princeton, N.J.: Von Nostrand, 1956), pp.

113-116, 149-153. The quote is from p. 114. 41

My discussion draws from the following sources: Esin Orucu, "The Impact of Euro

pean Law on the Ottoman Empire and Turkey," in European Expansion and Law: The Encounter of Indigenous Law in 19th and 20th Century Africa and Asia, ed. W J. Mommsen and J. A. De Moor (Oxford: Berg, 1992), pp. 39-58; Findley, Ottoman Civil Officialdom, pp. 31-32; Davison, pp. 251-256; Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, 2nd ed.

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 118-119, 122-123. Nathan]. Brown suggests that the new, French-influenced legal codes that spread through the Middle East did not

simply replace Islamic law, but rather narrowed the range of issues in which Islamic courts were used for personal law; see Brown, uSharia and State in the Modern Muslim Middle

East," International Journal of Middle East Studies 29.3 (1997): 359-376. 42 W Gifford Palgrave, "Report on the Present Administration of the Kingdom of

Siam," in British Documents on Foreign Affairs: Reports and Papers from the Foreign Office


reformed, or rather created, no sane mind can contemplate for an

instant any relaxation of the existing Treaty rights of foreigners to

extra-territorial jurisdiction in Siam."43 Efforts to reform the legal sys tem began with an 1874 decree freeing those born into slavery at age 21, the first of a series of efforts to end various forms of servitude over

the next 30 years.44 In 1892 a Ministry of Justice was formed. The pre

siding minister, the European-educated Prince Rabi (son of Chula

longkorn), initiated a systematic revamping of the penal code and court system, dealing with criminal, civil, and commercial law with

the help of French and Belgian legal advisors. Not surprisingly, given his continental advisors, Prince Rabi's reforms drew on the Code

Napol?on and continental European law as a model.45 David Wyatt argues that the legal reforms had a dual purpose: not only were they aimed at foreigners and an effort to end extraterritoriality, but they

were also part of Chulalongkorn's effort to centralize judicial power in

the hands of his administration in Bangkok.46 In China the post-1900 New Policy reforms saw a thoroughgoing

reform of the legal structure. A commission lead by a British-trained

lawyer, Wu Tingfang (who mostly served as a figurehead), and a dis

tinguished Chinese legal scholar, Shen Jiaben, drew up a new legal code with the aid of Japanese legal advisors. The reformed code elim

inated the use of "cruel punishments," such as the use of torture to

extract confessions, and excessively brutal forms of corporal and capi tal punishment. At the same time the Qing regime instituted initial

efforts to establish commercial and corporate law.47 While this has

usually been seen as simply an effort to end extraterritoriality by adopt

ing European standards, Jerome Bourgon argues that the abolition of

"cruel punishments" drew as much on indigenous movement within

Chinese legal scholarship as it did on foreign influences.48

Confidential Print, part i, series E, vol. 27, ed. Ian Nish (Frederick, Md.: University Publi

cations of America, 1995), p. 25. 43

Palgrave, p. 26. 44 David K. Wyatt, The Politics of Reform in Thailand: Education in the Reign of King Chu

lalongkorn (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1969), pp. 51-52. 45

Gong, pp. 222-224. 46

Wyatt, Thailand, p. 210. 47 The standard work is Marinus J. Meijer, The Introduction of Modern Criminal Law in

China. See also Douglas Reynolds, China 1898-1912: The Xinzheng Revolution and Japan

(Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1993), pp. 179

185. On corporate law see William C. Kirby, "China Unincorporated: Company Law and

Business Enterprise in Twentieth-Century China," Journal of Asian Studies 54.1 (1995):

44-48. 48

Jerome Bourgon, "Abolishing 'Cruel Punishments': A Reappraisal of the Chinese

Roots and Long Term Efficiency of the Xinzheng Legal Reforms," Modern Asian Studies 27.4

(2003): 851-862.


But new law codes and judicial systems were no quick fix for extra

territoriality and the treaty system. The reports of the annual confer ences of the Association for the Reform and Codification of the Law

of Nations indicate that among legal scholars there was considerable

dispute over the role of international law in mediating relations

between Christian and non-Christian states in general, and specifi

cally the place of extraterritoriality in the international legal order. A

committee appointed in the 1876 meeting to report on this issue con

cluded the following year that relations between the two "great classes

of nations . . . have been on the whole extremely unsatisfactory. The

root of the evil lies in the fact that even such imperfectly defined prin

ciples of international law as exist are not regarded as binding by Christian, in their intercourse with non-Christian states." While it

was "doubtless the duty of civilized governments to employ moral

influence to induce a non-Christian people to reform its laws when

these are characterized by injustice or barbarity," they insisted that use

of force to interfere in a state's affairs was wrong.49

Japanese and Chinese representatives articulated their concerns

about extraterritoriality in subsequent meetings, but were unable to

make much progress in the European-dominated association. In the

1879 meeting G. A. van Hamel of the Dutch Ministry of War suggested that extraterritoriality in China and Japan could be abolished only if a range of conditions were fulfilled, including the adoption of West

ern-style law codes, the implementation of these codes throughout the

country, and the formation of courts that are "independent, impartial and composed of scientific jurists." Curiously, he added that free trade

must also be established throughout the country?even though free

trade had no special role in the principles of international law. Even if

the necessary legal instruments were put in place, Christian states

must, he insisted, retain the right to resume the extraterritorial system in the event that the Asian state backslid and sought to eliminate

these reforms.50 Even among the relatively idealistic community of

international lawyers, support for extraterritoriality remained strong. It was only on the eve of the Sino-Japanese War in 1894 that the

British relented and agreed to forego extraterritoriality in Japan. After

the war firmly established the military power of Japan, the other Euro

49 Association for the Reform and Codification of the Law of Nations, Report of the

Fifth Annual Conference Held at Antwerp, 30 August to 3 September 1877 (London: William

Clowes and Sons, 1878), p. 58. 50 Association for the Reform and Codification of the Law of Nations, Report of the

Seventh Annual Conference held at the Guildhall, London, 11-16 August 1879 (London: Wil

liam Clowes and Sons, 1880).


pean states and the United States followed suit. In Turkey, after the

Ottoman regime took advantage of World War I to abrogate the capit ulations, the victorious allies did not accept the new state of affairs.

Nevertheless, subsequently the Turkish Nationalist forces succeeded not only in overthrowing the remains of the Ottoman regime, but also in driving out foreign forces that sought to intervene. This cleared the

way for the formal end of the capitulations. Unable to scrape up the

political will or military force for further intervention, the European powers recognized the new Turkish government and reluctantly signed the Treaty of Lausanne in July 1924, which ended foreign legal privi

leges in Turkey.51 China was able to chip away at extraterritorial

arrangements, with popular Chinese nationalist movements demoniz

ing the treaty system in general and extraterritoriality in particular. But the system was only finally eliminated as a by-product of the

alliance with the United States and Britain against Japan during World

War II.52 Military might?and conversely the relative military decline

of European imperial powers?proved a more effective route to inter

national recognition than legal argument. Only Siam, which managed to undo extraterritoriality through a process of quiet diplomacy in the

1920s, can be said to have succeeded in supplanting this system

through domestic legal reform, and only after World War I dramati

cally weakened British and French ability to project power on a global scale.53

Central Government Administrative Reform

A second area in which we can see the parallel development of the

three states in response to the treaty systems is in the adaptation of

European patterns of central government ministries and ministerial

government. A major concern of European imperial powers related to

the efficacy of the organs of the semicolonial state?particularly the

maintenance of order (essential for trade to flourish and for the safety of foreigners) and the proper management of foreign relations. Euro

pean and American diplomats expected a tolerably efficient foreign

ministry, manned by individuals of social and political prominence with at least some familiarity with foreign languages and customs.

Equally important, the foreign ministry was expected to be one of a

51 Sousa, pp. 177-249; Gong, pp. 115-119.

52 Fishel, passim.

53 Gong, pp. 230-237; Sayre, pp. 70-88.


handful of prominent, functionally defined central government depart ments. Ministers in charge of each department were to play a primary role in defining and implementing central government policies. This

system of ministerial or cabinet government was accepted practice in

Europe by the age of Napoleon. It formed the standard by which Euro

pean and American representatives judged semicolonial states.54 Indig enous state administrative institutions in Qing China, the Ottoman

Empire, and Siam failed to meet this test in the early nineteenth

century.

Not surprisingly, developing organizations to efficiently manage for

eign relations and create a body of diplomatic specialists was an early

priority. The Ottoman regime, facing growing diplomatic demands in

the late 1700s and early 1800s, first created a translation bureau, which

gradually evolved into a full-fledged foreign ministry?the first part of

the dramatic expansion of the civil bureaucracy from an estimated two

thousand officials to some thirty-five thousand.55 In the aftermath of

the Second Opium War the Qing dynasty created the Zongli Yamen.

While it was a powerful organization in the 1860s and 1870s, it was

not organized on a European pattern. Through its interpreters school

it trained a corps of young diplomats and translated international law

treatises as well as works on science and geography into Chinese. But

when the Yamen's leadership changed in the 1880s and it became far more ant ?foreign in its orientations, a chorus of complaints from Euro

pean and American diplomats followed. After the Boxer crisis, at the

demand of the foreign powers, the Zongli Yamen was transformed into

the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and given new prominence in the Qing state structure.56 In Siam, the management of foreign affairs had been

part of the duties of the Krom Phra Khlang, a ministry that combined

the administration of trade, revenue, and foreign affairs as well as

control over some provincial territory. In 1885, King Chulalongkorn created a Department of Foreign Affairs, and it became a full-fledged

ministry a few years later.57 In other words, none of these states

54 By the mid-nineteenth century the ministerial system?in various forms?was so

universal that it was rarely mentioned and its benefits were assumed to be inarguable; see,

e.g., Theodore Woolsey, Political Science or the State Theoretically and Practically Considered

(New York: Scribners, 1889) 2: 281. 55

Carter Findley, Ottoman Civil Officialdom: A Social History (Princeton, N.J.: Prince ton University Press, 1989), pp. 22-28.

56 On the Zongli see Yamen Horowitz, "Central Power and State Making: The Zongli Yamen and Self-Strengthening in China, 1860-1880," Ph.D. diss., Harvard University,

1998. On the reforms from 1901-1906 see Horowitz, "Breaking the Bonds of Precedent." 57 William J. Siffin, The Thai Bureaucracy: Institutional Change and Development (Hono

lulu: East-West Center, 1966), pp. 56, 60.


responded by immediately adopting a European model, but gradually moved in that direction.

Partial measures or the innovative use of indigenous institutions

generally would not do the trick. Foreign estimations of non-European government institutions and patterns were at times acerbic. British

diplomat Gifford Palgrave declared that "Siam is nominally, and by an

abuse of European words and phrases, a Kingdom, with a King, Minis

ters, Government, &c; in reality it is an extensive slave estate, some

what unequally divided between four proprietors."58 Sir Edmund

Hornby, who had reformed the British consular courts in the Ottoman

Empire and was sent to do the same in China, was remarkably unim

pressed by the Zongli Yamen, the new Qing foreign office organized fol

lowing Qing patterns for a central government ministry. He believed

that it was deliberately placed in an uncomfortable building in an iso

lated location (he was probably right about the first and wrong about

the second). He found Prince Gong, the Yamen's titular leader, "rude"

and "impertinent" and the other Yamen ministers "were all old men

and looked and behaved extremely like old women. ... I am bound to

say they seemed to talk a great deal of nonsense and to take up a great deal of time about doing it."59 While these may be extreme examples,

they do point to the fact that foreigners were not inclined to accept

anything that greatly deviated from a familiar institutional model.

In the end, something approaching a modern ministerial cabinet

system came into being in all three states. The climax of the Tanzimat

reforms in the 1860s and 1870s brought functionally defined central

government ministries and a council of state to Ottoman Turkey.60 In

Siam, beginning in the late 1880s and through the 1890s Chulalong korn initiated a thoroughgoing reform of central government ministries as well, drawing extensively on Western models, appointing as minis

ters princes with at least some foreign education and hiring a range of

foreign advisors.61 In China the New Policy Reforms culminated in

the 1906 reforms of the central government ministries. In these reforms

58 Palgrave, p. 32.

59 Edmund Hornby, Sir Edmund Hornby, An Autobiography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,

1928), p. 234. 60

Davison, pp. 239-244. Findley, Bureaucratic Reform, pp. 162-190, discusses several

ministries in detail. Richard Chambers, "The Civil Bureaucracy: Turkey," in Political Mod

ernization in Japan and Turkey, ed. Robert E. Ward and Dankwart A. Rustow (Princeton,

N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1964), pp. 318-322. 61 For a general account see Siffin, pp. 42-63; for a more sophisticated analysis of the

role of foreigners see Ian Brown, "British Financial Advisers in Siam in the reign of King

Chulalongkorn," Modem Asian Studies 12.2 (1978): 193-215.


the expansion of the administrative model of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was applied to other ministries, and functionally defined depart ments were created along European lines?a product of a conscious

effort to examine the benefits of Western institutional models.62 It is important to recognize that foreign pressure was not the only

cause of change. In China, the creation of the Zongli Yamen in 1861, while welcomed by foreign diplomats, was also a vehicle for a group of

officials associated with Prince Gong to assert a position of authority.

By the same token, the memorials that reformers wrote surrounding the 1906 reforms focused on the potential for the European minister

ial models of organization for solving problems endemic to the Qing

bureaucracy.63 Similarly, we can see the administrative reforms in

Siam as expressing Chulalongkorn's desire to centralize power in Bang kok, particularly under the central control of the throne. The sec

ondary literature on the Tanzimat reforms is less clear, but it seems

plausible to suggest that the central government reforms of the Tanzi mat era were at least in part aimed at strengthening the hand of the

civil bureaucracy vis-?-vis the military (which had been a major obsta

cle to reform in and earlier period) and the religious establishment.64

State Finances

A third area in which treaty relations influenced administrative insti

tutions in all three states was state finances. Generally speaking, for

eign pressure came from two directions. First, the treaties in all cases

structured relations to promote international trade by seeking to limit tax rates and eliminate arbitrary fees and corruption on imports and

exports. Semicolonial states therefore faced constraints on the kinds

of commercial tax and commercial tax policies they could implement and were pressured to reform existing systems of taxation that British

representatives saw as constraints to trade. Second, the Ottoman

Empire and later Qing China contracted huge foreign debts, and both were forced to agree to expanding foreign control of state revenue

and financial institutions. It was well established in international law

that a state could not simply renege on a loan from private individu

als at home or abroad except in special circumstances, and close links

between financiers and political leaders in London and Paris produced

62 Horowitz "Breaking the Bonds of Precedent," pp. 789-796. 63

Ibid., passim. 64

Findley in Bureaucratic Reform argues that the civil bureaucracy was rising relative to other parts of the Ottoman state during the nineteenth century.


strong imperial actions to ensure repayment of loans. The invasive nature of the foreign debt collections seriously constrained the auton

omy of semicolonial states.

Imposing limits on taxation on international trade was part and

parcel of the free trade regime of the British Empire in the mid- to late

nineteenth century.65 In the eyes of British officials in the mid-nine

teenth century, opening the gates to trade was of fundamental impor tance. In 1838, in the Anglo-Ottoman commercial treaty of Balta

Liman, the Ottomans conceded what amounted to free trade: duties were set at 5 percent on imports, 12 percent on exports, and 3 percent on transiting goods. The Ottomans also agreed to the abolition of all

monopolies (a measure aimed more at Egypt, still perceived as part of

the Ottoman realm). While modifications were made to make the sys tem less injurious to Ottoman exports, the free trade regime remained in place until the end of the empire and resulted in rapid increases in

foreign aid.66

Again, the Ottoman precedent set the stage for what would occur

farther east. Infamously, the Opium War in China was fought under

the auspices of free trade: the settlement not only reopened opium

imports, but also abolished the monopoly of the foreign trade guild known as the Cohong, and sought to bring customs rates under con

trol. The Second Opium War sought to strengthen the enforcement of a free trade regime in the late 1850s; subsequently the Qing establish

ment of the foreign-manned Imperial Maritime Customs Service insti

tutionalized the free trade element of the treaty system within the

Qing state itself.67 In Siam, the opening of trade was the central goal of Sir John Bowring's mission: he forced a limitation of import duties to 3 percent and export duties to 5 percent, and the abolition of com

modity and trading monopolies with the exception of opium.

65 The classic work of John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, "The Imperialism of Free

Trade," inspired decades of discussion about the causes of the "new" imperialism, but their

assertion that the free trade regime was central to Britain's mid-century informal empire remains unchallenged. See the original article and its critics and elaborations in Wm. Roger

Louis, ed., Imperialism: The Robinson and Gallagher Controversy (New York: New Viewpoints,

1976). 66

Findley, Ottoman Civil Officialdom, pp. 28-29; Charles Issawi, ed., Economic History

of the Middle East: A Book of Readings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), pp.

38-40. 67 Fairbank's Trade and Diplomacy remains the classic analysis of British and Chinese

diplomacy. More recently, Wong, Deadly Dreams, deals with the origins of the Arrow War, and a good recent discussion of the customs service is Hans van de Ven, "The Onrush of

Modern Globalization in China," in Globalization inWorld History, ed. A. G. Hopkins (New York: W W. Norton, 2002), pp. 177-187.


To British representatives at midcentury, the benefits of free trade were unquestioned. As Bowring wrote to Mongkut's heir apparent, "Your Majesty's sagacity cannot fail to appreciate how rapidly the

friendly trading relations of one country with another tend to develop the riches and strength of each."68 Nevertheless, it must be pointed out

that the free trade regime was not standard practice in Europe. The

imposition of these demands was a direct contradiction of principles of international law that allowed states the right to administer trade

and taxes as they chose. But once these were integrated into properly

signed and ratified treaties, they became instruments of international

law that were vigorously policed by British diplomats. The impact of the free trade regime on the revenues of semicolo

nial states were varied. Qing China and the Ottoman Empire were

dependent primarily on agriculture-based taxes, and it was only begin

ning in the mid-nineteenth century that trade became a key source of revenue. In China before 1861, revenues on foreign trade went into

the coffers of the imperial household department and were not ordi

narily available for more general use. The introduction of the foreign manned Imperial Maritime Customs service, which reported to the new foreign office (the Zongli Yamen) in Beijing, was a windfall for

the Qing state, playing a major role in financing military reforms and

modernization from the mid-1860s until the outbreak of the Sino

Japanese War in 1895.69 The Ottoman case seems similar. While the

onrush of foreign imports may indeed have done much harm to sectors

of industry in the Ottoman realm, there is little evidence that the free

trade regime did much harm to state finances. The expanding use of

commercial taxes kept the Ottoman Empire financially afloat, with customs revenues playing a particularly important role.70

But Siam was a different story. Where the Qing and Ottoman

Empires had depended primarily on revenues on agriculture in the early nineteenth century, the Siamese state depended on tax farming and

monopolies related to commerce, as well as corv?e labor demanded

from rural farmers. The Bowring Treaty abolished the commodity

monopolies and internal trade taxes that had been a mainstay of state

revenues, and appeared to hurt the leading princes and the ethnic Chi

68 Bowring, 2: 439-440.

69 For a breakdown of the use of customs revenues, see Tang Xianglong, Zhongguo jindai

haiguan shuishou he fenpei tongji (Beijing: Commercial Press, 1992). The analysis is drawn

from Horowitz, "Central Power and State Making," chap. 4. 70 Stanford Shaw, "The Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Tax Reforms and Revenue

System," International Journal of Middle East Studies 6.4 (1975): 421-459.


nese merchants who controlled the monopolies. In the end, the rev enue base of the Siamese state shifted toward excises on spirits, opium,

gambling, and the lottery, as well as the customs duties set by treaty. Corv?e labor was at first informally replaced with payments, and later

formally replaced by a head tax. Within that context, tax farming per sisted as a mode of administration. While the central government became directly involved in tax collection in the 1890s, even then tax

farms remained; much to the dismay of King Chulalongkorn and finan

cial reformers, eliminating the tax farms on opium, gambling, lottery, and liquor proved fiscally impossible.71 A major problem for the Sia

mese government were the restrictions the treaty system placed on

altering commercial taxes?Britain and other foreign powers resisted

Siamese requests for revision. Beginning around 1870, Siamese rice

exports expanded rapidly, stimulating an expansion of land used for

rice farming. Import tax rates of 3 percent were low (certainly com

pared with China and the Ottoman Empire), and duties on exports were fixed at the 1855 currency rate, even as the value of the baht

declined over the following thirty years. According to Hong Lysa, in

1900 the customs and inland transit taxes produced less than 15 per cent of total revenues. Direct taxes?land and capitation taxes?were

less than 10 percent of total revenues in 1892 and rose only slowly thereafter.72 In short, while the treaty system certainly encouraged economic expansion in the second half of the nineteenth century, it

placed significant constraints on the growth of state revenues.

While the free trade regime was the most obvious economic base

of the semicolonial system, the most direct impact on both the Otto man and Qing states came from foreign debts. As debts rose, foreign

diplomats and creditors demanded more invasive measures to secure

repayment. In this case they had international law on their side. While

Europe had a long and rich history of unpaid public debts, this was not

71 There has been some debate on the impact of the Bowring Treaty. Wyatt, Thailand,

pp. 184-185 (which fits with Bowring's claims) is harshly criticized by B. ]. Terwiel, who

argues that there is evidence to suggest that the existing taxes persisted for at least a decade

after the treaty. See "The Bowring Treaty: Imperialism and the Indigenous Perspective," Journal of the Siam Society 79.2 (1991): 40-47. But at issue here seems to be the speed of

changes rather than their basic direction. Hong Lysa, Thailand in the Nineteenth Century: Evolution of the Economy and Society (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies,

1984), pp. 75-131, presents a detailed treatment of the tax farming system and efforts to

reform it. 72

Hong Lysa, pp. 125-129; James Ingram, Economic Change in Thailand, 1850-1970 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1971), pp. 175-182. On the rise of Siamese

rice exports see Ingram, chap. 3.


reflected in theories of international law. Vattel strongly endorsed the

state's responsibility to repay loans: "loans made for the needs of the

State, debts incurred in the administration of public affairs, are strictly

legal contracts and are binding upon the State and the whole Nation.

Nothing can release the Nation of the obligation of discharging such

debts."73 Europeans took this very seriously indeed and used diplo matic pressure to encourage foreign loans, then used debts to extract

greater financial concessions. In Egypt, loan defaults became an excuse

for direct British intervention. While the resolution was not so drastic, the politics of foreign debt dramatically increased foreign influence in

both the Ottoman Empire and Qing China.74

During the 1850s, 1860s, and 1870s, the heyday of the Tanzimat

reforms, the Ottoman regime turned to foreign loans to help pay for

military expenses, budget deficits, and, increasingly, debt service. The

Russo-Turkish conflict of 1877-1878 brought things to a crisis, and in

1881 an agreement between the Sublime Porte and foreign creditors

created the Public Debts Administration to manage the debt crisis

and reestablish Ottoman access to credit abroad. The Public Debts

Administration was foreign controlled and foreign run, and, through control of major portions of Ottoman revenue, constituted an enor

mous incursion on Ottoman sovereignty.75 In China, early loans were quite modest in size and guaranteed

with customs revenues. They were used reasonably carefully to spread the cost of fighting internal rebellions and preparing against foreign threats. Foreign debt became a serious problem only after 1895, when

the immense indemnity from the war with Japan had to be financed

with an international loan and required mortgaging the customs rev

enues and expanding the foreign customs service to oversee taxation

of "native customs" on the still-flourishing coastal junk trade.76 Here

73 Vattel, p. 186.

74 In an important re interpretation, P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism, 1688-2000, 2nd ed. (New York: Longman, 2000), argue that the role of financial services

was ultimately more important than that of trade in driving British imperialism. Moreover

they point to the close links between the financial elites of the city and Britain's political elite in influencing British imperial policy. See especially their treatment of China and the

Ottoman Empire, pp. 340-351, 360-380. 75

Rafii-Sukru Suvla, "The Ottoman Debt, 1850-1939" in Issawi, Economic History of the Middle East, pp. 95-106; Donald Blaisdell, European Financial Control in the Ottoman

Empire (New York: AMS Press, 1966). 76 On loans see the massive documentary compilation Zhongguo renmin yin hang

zonghang can shi shi, comp., Zhongguo Qingdai waizhai shi ziliao, 1853-1911 (Beijing: Zhong guo jinrong chubanshe, 1991). The takeover of native customs is treated in Stanley F.

Wright, Hart and the Chinese Customs (Belfast: 1949), pp. 745-753.


after foreign debt became an albatross on the necks of Qing statesmen

and their Republican successors. States needed money and foreigners

always seemed willing to make loans, but only for further investment

and revenue concessions. After the fall of the Qing in 1912, Yuan Shi

kai's government contracted the infamous Reorganization Loan, which

turned the salt monopoly over to a foreign administration. In any event, foreign debts forced the Qing to reexamine the revenue system and begin to move toward a system of modern budgeting.77

In Siam under Mongkut and Chulalongkorn, the government

wisely avoided foreign loans, perhaps seeing the results of European finance in Egypt and the Ottoman Empire. While foreign trade with

Siam grew rapidly beginning in the 1870s, it was still quite modest, dominated by rice exports and imports of manufactured goods. Only with the growth of the teak cutting industry did British enterprise move much outside of Bangkok, and compared with China and Turkey

it was not seen as much of a prize by British financiers.78 Meanwhile, the new Ministry of Finance, created with foreign advice, was con

cerned with establishing sufficient clarity of budgeting to enable the

contraction of foreign loans for major investments, such as railway

building. The hiring of a few high-profile foreign advisors to the new

Ministry of Finance was also seen as helping to enable the Siamese gov ernment to contract foreign loans. But this occurred only after 1900 and on a comparatively small scale.79

To sum up this long section, the treaty systems imposed on semi

colonial states had important implications for the transformation of state institutions. First, extraterritoriality offered incentives for the

development of European-style law codes and judicial institutions.

Second, foreign expectations of "normal" diplomatic relations and

pressure to establish "effective" systems of government encouraged the

Ottoman Empire, Qing China, and Siam to create "modern" foreign ministries and move in the direction of a ministerial structure of cen

tral government. The imposition of a free trade regime for better or

77 Hans J. van de Ven, "Public Finance and the Rise of Warlordism," Modem Asian

Studies 30.4 (1996): 829-868 tries to untangle financial history in the early twentieth

century. 78 On the general patterns, see Ingram, passim. On British investment see Malcolm

Falkus, "Early British Business in Thailand," in British Business in Asia Since i860, ed. R. P. T.

Davenport-Hines and Geoffrey Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp.

116-156. 79 Ian Brown, "British Financial Advisers in Siam in the Reign of King Chulalong

korn," Modern Asian Studies 12.2 (1978): 193-215.


worse constrained the systems of taxation in each of these three states, in some respects proving to be a boon and in others forcing reform. The

insistence on free trade had to be respected, but on the other hand, even with treaty limits, trade taxes often constituted a valuable new

source of revenue for states, such as Qing China and the Ottoman

Empire, that had depended on agricultural revenues. At the same time,

foreign loans did tend to result in greater foreign involvement in the

financial management of semicolonial states.

Interstate Simplifications: International Law

and the Territorial State

Treaty systems were an obvious manifestation of European power over

indigenous Eurasian states, but international law also played an impor tant role in a more subtle and enduring phenomenon: the emergence of the territorially defined sovereign state as the key participant in

international society. Before the nineteenth century, Siam, Qing China, and the Ottoman Empire were all complex, compound states

in which external boundaries were poorly defined, and near the fron

tier the use of indirect rule and suzerain "tributary" relationships with

local power holders were common. While this would have seemed

familiar in late medieval and early modern Europe, the situation had

changed over time. Intense competition between states led them to

seek territory that was defensible and from which resources could be

extracted. Linear boundaries slowly replaced vaguely defined border zones as states sought to define precisely the extent of their sovereign

domain.80

In the nineteenth century, as the global map was redrawn with a

European pen, semicolonial states had to adapt to European ideas

about the expression of power over space. This European map pre sumed that the world should be organized into territorially discrete states defined by linear boundaries. It also increasingly favored the

establishment of states that could be identified with a specific "nation."

80 On the relationship between the emergence of national states and the demarcation of boundaries see Jeremy Black, "Boundaries and Conflict: International Relations in ancien

regime Europe," in Eurasia: World Boundaries, ed. Carl Grundy-Warr (London: Routledge,

1994) 3: 19-54. Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), suggests that the process of establishing linear boundaries was slower than a traditional political narrative would suggest.


This new map represented a desire on the part of both European statesmen and international lawyers to simplify the formulation of

legitimate political power across the globe: an analogue to what James Scott describes as "state simplifications" imposed by high modernist

states in the twentieth century.81 In much the same way as Scott sees

modern states instituting a variety of measures to make complex soci

eties less differentiated and more "legible," the rise of the territorial state simplified the global map. By dividing the world into neat terri

torial states each inhabited by a single "nation"?i.e., a group of peo

ple with a shared identity?the territorial state simplified geography and the problems of controlling people and resources. But it did so by

obscuring ethnic differentiation within states (hence the need to

invent national identities to fit diverse nations), ignoring both the

complex relationships among political power holders and the social,

economic, and cultural networks that transcended linear boundaries.

International law texts point to the growing importance of terri

tory in the conception of statehood in the nineteenth century. In the

1750s Vattel wrote that "A Nation or a State is ... a political body, a

society of man who have united together and combined their forces in

order to procure their mutual welfare and security." The state is

defined as a group of people, not as a territorial domain. While states

or nations have territory, this is a secondary characteristic.82 Wheaton

in 1836 likewise does not identify territory as one of the defining char

acteristics of a state, although he does seem to assume in other sections

that states have territory.83 The revised 1855 edition is far more

explicit: "a state is .. . distinguishable from an unsettled horde of wan

dering savages not yet formed into a civil society. The legal idea of a

state necessarily implies that of the habitual obedience of its members

to those persons in whom the superiority is vested, and of a fixed abode, and definite territory belonging to the people by whom it is occu

pied."84 Yale University president Theodore Woolsey's Introduction to

the Study of International Law, first published in i860, was even more

clear, inserting the territorial element into his definition of a state: "A

state is a community of persons living within certain limits of territory, under a permanent organization, which aims to secure the prevalence

81 James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condi

tion Have Failed (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), esp. pp. 11-83. 82

Vattel, p. 11. For his treatment of territory see pp. 138-143. 83 Wheaton 1836, p. 51. 84

Henry Wheaton, Elements of International Law (Boston: Little & Brown, 1855),

p. 28.


of justice by self-imposed law." Similarly, he defines sovereignty as "the

uncontrolled exclusive exercise of the powers of the state" that is

"supreme within a certain territory."85 Where earlier works on inter

national law dealt extensively with conceptions of limited sover

eignty, protectorates, and so on, by the 1860s these were (literally) no

more than footnotes.

International law was important to the emergence of the territor

ial state in other ways as well. Boundaries were the subjects of agree ments, usually treaties, among states. Those treaties were regarded as

law, binding on the signatories. In the event of a change of government or a revolution, the new government takes on the legal obligations of

its predecessor; that is, it is expected to observe international agree ments signed by its predecessors and to continue to pay sovereign debts.

Applied to the issue of boundaries, this means that a new government, indeed a new state, is expected to inhabit the same territory as its pre

decessor. This has meant that the territory of states created by the

retrocession of colonies perpetuates the colonial borders.86

There is an important consequence to these principles: space is

crucial to the definition of a state, and once boundaries are demarcated

it is extraordinarily difficult to alter them. Boundaries are inscribed

both on paper and on the ground with boundary markers. Invasions,

rebellions, and even long-term occupations do not destroy the bound

ary as a concept or a political instrument, at least within the concep tual universe of international law.

For large Eurasian states such as Siam, Qing China, and the Otto man Empire, the division of the world into these discrete spaces into

which "nations" were supposed to fit posed obvious challenges. None

had particularly well-defined frontiers. The definition of a nation was

problematic. The Ottoman Empire was extraordinarily diverse, with

huge non-Turkish and non-Muslim populations. The Qing Empire was

a Manchu empire, ruled (at least at the top) by an ethnic minority, as

an explicitly multiethnic and multilingual enterprise. The conquests of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had established Qing

political paramountcy in vast areas outside of both Manchuria and

China proper. Siam, while perhaps not quite so complicated, was a

85 Theodore Woolsey, Introduction to the Study of International Law (Boston: James Mon

roe, i860), pp. 81-83. 86 For background and a critical evaluation of the approach of international law to the

boundaries of new states see Steven R. Ratner, "Drawing a Better Line: Uti Possidetis and

the Borders of New States," American Journal of International Law 90.4 (1996): 590-624.


kingdom with loosely defined boundaries and significant minority pop ulations. The Tai-speaking peoples, who would form the defining eth nic group of Siam's modern descendant, Thailand, were spread across

much of mainland Southeast Asia and the southwestern borderlands of

the Qing Empire. On the periphery of Bangkok's control were outer

provinces and tributary kingdoms, including the Lao kingdoms in the

north (which were Tai-speaking, but linguistically and culturally different from the core of Siam) and Malay provinces (sometimes described as sultanates) in the south. Siam also had a large and pow erful ethnic Chinese population.87 All three states used indirect rule

by local chiefs in various contexts. Especially on the frontier, it was

not always a simple matter to define whether such local chiefs were

fully independent or not. In these conditions, the construction of

modern territorial states was not a simple task.

In his landmark study Siam Mapped, Thongchai Winichakul

explored how these issues influenced the creation of Siam and Thai

land as geographical entities and contributed to the construction of

Thai identities. He shows how different the indigenous conceptions of

boundaries were from those that the British (and later the French) were imposing on the Kingdom of Siam in negotiations over boundary demarcations. Similarly, he sees the use of shared or overlapping sov

ereignties of Cambodia that accepted the overlordship of both Viet nam and Siam as a logical strategy for survival. The use of tributary relations based on gift-giving contained a fundamental (and useful)

ambiguity?if one side gave tribute to the other (and acknowledged

overlordship) but received larger gifts in return, who was the more

powerful? Flexibility and ambiguity were fundamental to Asian inter

state relations. By contrast, the British and the French, as they sought to define the boundaries of their colonial possessions, were unable to

accept this. They wanted the rigid delineations observed in Europe. In this context, Siamese statesmen gradually learned to play by Euro

pean rules. The elaboration of a new system of provincial administra

tion, directly responsible to the throne, served not only to expand central control and improve administration, but also to assert more

clearly Bangkok's territorial claims.88 Gradually, the boundaries were

demarcated. While the process cost Siam what is said to be 176,000

87 Tej Bunnag, pp. 28-39; G- William Skinner, Chinese Society in Thailand: An Ana

lytical History (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1957), pp. 126-154. 88

Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Hono lulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1994), pp. 62-112.


square miles of territory, or almost half of what it claimed control over

in 1850, by the early twentieth century Siam did have a territorial

domain that would be clearly recognizable to Theodore Woolsey and

other international lawyers.89 In i860 the Qing Empire's situation was in many respects quite

similar to Siam's. It was a state largely without boundaries, at least in

the sense of precisely defined linear boundaries set out in international

agreement. Only the Russian border with Manchuria and Mongolia had been demarcated as a result of the treaties of Nerchinsk (1689) and

Kiakhta (1727). The Manchurian boundary was to be revised under the

i860 Beijing convention, with the Qing reluctantly ceding territory to

the north and west of the Ussuri River. Elsewhere the situation was

much fuzzier. Even the frontier with Korea, the state that had perhaps the most regulated relationship with Qing China, did not have a

boundary in the modern European (linear) sense. The frontier was

understood to be defined by the Yalu and Turnen rivers, but rather

than setting out a linear boundary, both sides tried to maintain an

uninhabited frontier zone to prevent unregulated contacts.90

Again, like Siam, much of the Qing state's involvement in frontier areas was built around the concept of tributary relations and the use of native chiefs ruling non-Chinese populations. In these cases, the nature of Qing power was unclear. Was a tributary a separate state or

a subordinate? Was a native chief the ruler of an autonomous mini

state or a Qing official? In both relationships power was defined more

by jurisdiction over people than over territory. To make the issue still more complicated, Qing policies on the frontier shifted over time,

reacting to changes in strategic outlook and the state's financial situation.91

During the boundary demarcations with Russia in the early 1860s, the officials in the Zongli Yamen faced a particularly difficult situa

tion.92 In 1860-1861 they had a difficult time finding detailed maps of

the remote Ussuri River area in state offices and archives in Beijing, and when they did, officials with experience in that area were impos sible to find. The reality, they eventually concluded, was that the Qing

89 The estimate of territory is from Wyatt, Thailand, p. 208.

90 Qinding da Qing huidian shili (Beijing: 1891), 511: 1-6; Mary C. Wright, "Adapt

ability of Ch'ing Diplomacy: The Case of Korea," Journal of Asian Studies 17.3 (1958): 365. 91 C. Patterson Giersch, "China's Reluctant Subjects: Indigenous Communities and

Empire along the the Yunnan Frontier," Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1998, thoughtfully describes and analyzes this process on the Yunnan-Burma frontier.

92 The following paragraphs draw on Horowitz, "Central Power," pp. 273-295.

48o JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, DECEMBER 2004

had little control and few interests in that border region.93 But through this process Qing officials soon learned to take these territorial issues

seriously. Preparations for the demarcation of the boundary in Xinjiang two years later were far more organized. The Zongli Yamen began to

systematically collect information about the frontiers and concern

itself with the problems of preventing further territorial losses, and at

the same time recognized the potential value of international law in

diplomatic negotiations. The Zongli Yamen sponsored American mis

sionary W. A. R Martin's translation of the 1855 edition of Wheaton into Chinese. Subsequently, Martin served as the director of the

Yamen's interpreter school and together with his students (many of

whom became diplomats) translated other texts into Chinese. These

works were distributed to provincial officials.94 By the mid- to late 18 70s, Qing officials discussing the Russian occupation of the Yili Val

ley in Xinjiang on a number of occasions referred to international law to support the Qing position. When the unfortunate Qing diplomat

Chonghou, inadequately prepared for negotiations, signed the Treaty of Livadia, which would have obtained a Russian withdrawal at only the price of continued Russian control of the strategically crucial

Muzart Pass, an uproar at court followed, and the Qing regime refused to ratify the treaty.95 In the discussions of the Yili issue, officials fre

quently cited international law in support of their positions. A con

sensus emerged that it would be better to reject the treaty and not recover Yili for the time being than to give in to the Russian demands.

When the diplomatic and military situation was more propitious the issue could be revisited.96

The wily Qing diplomat Zeng Jize seems to have had the situation

figured out most clearly. While posted in London in 1879, in his travel

journal (written for publication) he noted that while the principles of

international law were "not unreasonable," in reality the European treatment of areas like Burma and Vietnam was far less benevolent

than Qing tributary relationships.97 He subsequently describes a con

versation with an international law expert about treaties: "I asked him

93 Chouban yiwu shimo xianfeng (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1980), 7: 2631-2632. 94

Horowitz, "Central Power and State Making," pp. 276-277. 95 For a detailed account and analysis of these events see Immanuel Hsu, The Hi Cri

sis: A Study in Sino-Russian Diplomacy, 1871-1881 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965). 96

Jindai zhongguo dui xifangji lieqiang renshi ziliao, vol. 3, part 1 (Taipei: Institute of

Modern History, Academia Sinica, 1986), pp. 154, 281, 289-292; Qingji waijiao shiliao, 17:

6b-7b; Hsu, The Hi Crisis. 97

Zeng Jize, Shi xi riji (n.p. 1893), 2: 22b-23.


if it was correct to understand that treaties to demarcate boundaries and commercial treaties must be distinguished from one another, because boundary demarcation treaties are fixed for good, while com mercial treaties are easily changed. 'Correct' he replied."98

Zeng's successful negotiation of a Russian withdrawal while retain

ing the existing boundaries ultimately solved the Yili crisis. In an 1887 article published in English, Zeng noted that one of the most impor tant Qing priorities was to place China's vassal states?meaning Xin

jiang, Tibet, and Korea?on a "less equivocal footing" and resist fur ther foreign incursion.99 Zeng understood the realities of the European insistence on linear boundaries and the single-minded emphasis on territorial sovereignty in nineteenth-century international law. Qing officials such as Zeng and their Republican-era descendents learned their lessons well. In spite of its weakness the late Qing state lost lit tle in the boundary demarcations. While Republican China was weak and often threatened, on paper at least those boundaries remained

except for Outer Mongolia. According to William Kirby, under the Nationalist government "the non-recognition of unpleasant realities

in China's border areas was brought to an art form."100 For better or

worse, in terms of territory the People's Republic of China largely mir rors the late Qing state.

In both China and Siam, for all of the painful concessions made in the demarcation process, they established territories that have endured.

Once national territory was defined, national identity was molded to fit that territory. In modern Thailand, with its substantial populations of non-Tai peoples, the boundaries define "Thainess," and even Khmer art from sites within Thailand has been perceived as Thailand's cultural

patrimony.101 In China, the Revolutionary movement of 1901-1911 thrived on Han Chinese ethnic nationalism in opposition to Manchu control. By 1919, with the Manchus gone, Sun Yatsen was declaring that the revolution had achieved only "the negative half of the goal of

nationalism." Now they needed "the Han people to sacrifice the sepa

98 Zeng, 2: 34.

99 Marquis Tseng [Zeng Jize], "China: The Sleep and the Awakening," Chinese Recorder

18(1887): 152. 100

William C. Kirby, "The Internationalization of China: Foreign Relations at Home and Abroad in the Republican Era," China Quarterly 150 (1997): 436. 101

Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped, pp. 163-170. Charles Keyes, "Presidential Address: The Peoples of Asia'?Science and Politics in the Classification of Ethnic Groups

in Thailand, China, and Vietnam," Journal of Asian Studies 61.4 (2002): 1163-1203, empha sizes the political nature of defining ethnic groups in both Thailand and China in the twen tieth century.


rate nationality, history, and identity that they are so proud of and

merge in all sincerity with the Manchus, Mongols, Muslims, and

Tibetans in one melting pot to create a new order of Chinese nation

alism."102 The common identity that brought these groups together in

Sun's mind was not history or culture or ethnicity, but the fact of their

coinhabiting the national territory of China.

If the problems faced by state leaders in China and Siam and their

responses to them were quite similar, the situation in the Ottoman

Empire was dramatically different. Whereas late Qing leaders and their

Siamese counterparts faced a thirty- or forty-year struggle to define

boundaries and assert sovereignty, the Ottoman Empire saw 120 years of erosion in its territories. The Ottoman Empire came to be referred to as the "Sick Man of Europe," and the breakup of the old empire was

ominously described as the Eastern Question. The major European powers were concerned about the instability of the Ottoman regime and feared that a breakdown would shatter the precarious balance of

power in European politics, so they tended to prop the sick man up. At the same time they found rebellions by Christian minorities in

Greece and the Balkans irresistible, and repeatedly came to their sup

port.103 In contrast, while the Qing Empire had its own restless minori

ties, foreign powers were not interested in supporting them. The

Muslim Panthay rebellion in Yunnan in the 1850s and 1860s and the

Northwestern Muslim rebellions in the 1860s and 1870s were unable to attract foreign support.

In the Ottoman realm the claims of rebellious minorities were rec

ognized by the international community and given geographical form, often in multinational settings such as the Congress of Berlin, which

defined boundaries between the Ottoman Empire and the Balkans in

1878. Whereas in Asia suzerain relations under the tributary systems were unacceptable to British and French imperialists, in the Balkans autonomous principalities under at least nominal Ottoman suzerainty

were created in a series of international settlements. Autonomy proved to be a way station on the road to full sovereignty. For example, Ser

bia, through a series of international agreements from 1812 to 1829, became an autonomous principality within the Ottoman Empire. In

1878, under the Congress of Berlin, Serbia became fully independent

102 Julie Lee Wei, Ramon H. Myers, Donald G. Gillin, eds., Prescriptions for Saving

China: Selected Writing of Sun Yat-sen (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution, 1994), p. 225

(cf. the 1904 definition on p. 42). 103 For a standard survey see M. S. Anderson, The Eastern Question, 1774-1923 (New

York: Macmillan, 1966).


along with Romania and Montenegro, and Bulgaria became an auton

omous principality under Ottoman rule. In other words, while Euro

pean powers happily negotiated agreements with the Sublime Porte to

give Christians limited sovereignty (much like the tributary relations

that Qing China and Siam had, which the European powers rejected), these were not stable arrangements, but short-term compromises extracted from a weakening Ottoman state. With new Balkan states,

Austria-Hungary, and Russia all competing for influence in Ottoman

Europe, boundaries continued to be subject to dispute.104 Over time

the physical forms of the autonomous principalities and newly inde

pendent states in the Balkans were shaped in part by the legacies of

Ottoman administration, which had divided the region into manage able administrative units, in part because of the pressures of nationalist

groups demanding historical rights and self-determination and in part on the deal making of the great European powers, which sought the

spoils while worrying about maintaining a balance of power.105 As the struggle over space continued through the nineteenth cen

tury, it promoted a transformation in human geography. The mixed

populations of Ottoman Europe began to separate. By choice or coer

cion, five to seven million Muslims left newly independent or auton

omous Balkan states and former Ottoman territories occupied by Rus sia and moved to predominantly Muslim areas in Anatolia, Syria, and

Arabia. By the same token, some Christians left Ottoman-controlled areas for the new Christian-controlled states. Kemal Karpat argues that these population shifts, together with the weakened Ottoman

positions, fueled changes in national identity in the Ottoman realm.

Increasingly, Ottoman subjects, particularly migrants, saw a Muslim

social identity as important and supported the movement known as

pan-Islamism, a movement "for Islamic unity and action to assure the

survival of the states as a Muslim entity and to better the lives of the

faithful." This development was not a turn to fundamentalism, Karpat argues, but rather a modern political movement responding to Otto

man weakness.106 Migration was, in a sense, the movement of what

104 For an overview of the politics see Stevan K. Pavlowitch, A History of the Balkans,

1804-1945 (London: Longman, 1999); J. R. V. Prescott, Political Frontiers and Boundaries

(London: Allen & Unwin, 1987), chaps. 7, 11 provide an overview of the boundary shifts. 105 Maria Todorova, "The Ottoman Legacy in the Balkans," in Imperial Legacy, pp.

54-57 106

Kemal Karpat, "The hijra from Russia and the Balkans: The Process of Self-Defini tion in the Late Ottoman State" in Muslim Travellers: Pilgrimage, Migration, and the Religious

Imagination, ed. Dale Eickelman and James Piscatori (Berkeley: University of California


Vattel called "nations" into national territories created in the diplo matic maneuvers of European international politics. Ottomanism (pro moted by the Tanzimat leadership), pan-Islamism (supported by Sultan

Abdulhamid II, who reigned from 1876 to 1909), and Turkish nation

alism were different efforts to construct a national identity to fit the

reduced territory and increasingly Muslim population of the Ottoman

Empire.

Conclusion

The experiences of the Ottoman Empire, Siam, and Qing China are

just one chapter in one of the great developments in modern world

history: the emergence of national states as the dominant form of

political organization. A considerable body of scholarship in recent

decades has examined the rise of national states in Europe over the course of many centuries. Charles Tilly and other scholars have focused on the intensely competitive political environment of Europe as a key causal factor in this process: states had to adopt certain characteristics,

including substantial contiguous territories, large armies, efficient

bureaucracies to tax and administer the military establishment, and so

on.107 But the process of creating national states elsewhere in Eurasia in

the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was in a large part shaped by external expectations. Processes of decolonization, great power inter

ventions to limit the scope of conflicts, and external models of "mod ern states" have all influenced the shape and structure of new states.

As Tilly remarked, "On the average state formation has moved from a

relatively 'internal' to a strongly 'external' process."108 In the semi

colonial environment, international lawT embodied in unequal treaties

and the associated discourse about civilization provided powerful exter

nal incentives for indigenous political elites to comply with this "stan

dard" European model.

Press, 1990), pp. 131-151. The quote is from p. 142. For a much more extensive discussion

see also Karpat, The Politicization of Islam: Reconstruction of Identity, State, Faith and Commu

nity in the Late Ottoman State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). On population, see

Karpat, Ottoman Population, 1830-1914: Demographic and Social Characteristics (Madison:

University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), chaps. 3-4. 107 Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990-1992, (Oxford: Black

well, 1992), surveys the literature and sets out the most sophisticated and integrated ver

sion of this general argument. See also the essays in Tilly, ed., Formation of National States

in Western Europe (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975). 108

Tilly, Coercion, 181.


The coming of ministerial cabinet systems of state organization and

the introduction of European-modeled law codes and legal systems in

China, Siam, and the Ottoman Empire were products of the efforts by

political elites in those countries to introduce models of public admin istration that would be perceived as civilized. The law codes were

aimed primarily at ending the offensive use of extraterritoriality. Min

isterial government was part of the search to assert that government was stable and civilized and that foreign relations were given due attention. While the process was driven externally, this undoubtedly also served the domestic political goals of political elites who sought to centralize power in their own hands.

Europeans' increasingly territorial conception of sovereignty was

inscribed in international law by the mid-nineteenth century. In soci eties in which sovereignty was expressed primarily over a people? "nation" in eighteenth-century usage?this meant that a new atten

tion to territory was essential. The European obsession with boundaries and their demarcation, and their demand for formal treaties defining lines of demarcation, forced semicolonial societies to mark territory and claim new relationships with the people who inhabited it. In the

world of international law, these boundaries written into treaties

became a more-or-less permanent part of human political geography. The challenge left for state leaders was establishing actual administra tive control and seeking to cultivate common identities among the inhabitants of that domain. Siam and the Qing Empire had consider

able success retaining large territories and trying to subsume diverse

populations into a communal identity defined by the largest ethnic

groups: Tai and Han Chinese.109 The Ottoman Empire saw the reverse:

European interest in Ottoman Christians made retaining Greece and the Balkans impossible. Their tolerance of "autonomous" Christian territories within the empire was just a way station on the road to

independence. Territories defined national spaces, and to an impressive degree "nations," by choice or coercion, migrated to reinforce those

simplified spatial-national identities.

Sir John Bowring's "great truths of political science" were a reality that semicolonial elites had to accept. The globalization of European international law, and the European international society of which it

was part, created an institutional structure for global politics that has

long outlasted European expansion. The homogeneity of accepted

109 Of course, particularly in central Asian territories such as Xinjiang and Tibet, non

Chinese ethnic groups have been less than enthusiastic about Chinese dominion.


political forms in the contemporary world is a monument to the

endurance of the process and a sharp contrast to the situation of two

centuries ago. Today, "failed states" in which no effective government has emerged to fit a preexisting boundary proliferate; the tensions

between ethnic and religious minorities seeking political expressions of their own identities flare across the globe. The rationalization and

simplification of the international order, inscribed in and even hal

lowed by international law, has left an ambiguous legacy.

Horowitz-International Law and State Transformation

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