Norms Beyond Empire: Law-Making and Local Normativities in Iberian Asia, 1500-1800

Norms beyond Empire seeks to rethink the relationship between law and empire by emphasizing the role of local normative production. While European imperialism is often viewed as being able to shape colonial law and government to its image, this volume argues that early modern empires could never monolithically control how these processes unfolded. Examining the Iberian empires in Asia, it seeks to look at norms as a means of escaping the often too narrow concept of law and look beyond empire to highlight the ways in which law-making and local normativities frequently acted beyond colonial rule. The ten chapters explore normative production from this perspective by focusing on case studies from China, India, Japan, and the Philippines.

Contributors are: Manuel Bastias Saavedra, Marya Svetlana T. Camacho, Luisa Stella de Oliveira Coutinho Silva, Rômulo da Silva Ehalt, Patricia Souza de Faria, Fupeng Li, Miguel Rodrigues Lourenço, Abisai Perez Zamarripa, Marina Torres Trimállez, and Ângela Barreto Xavier.

Manuel Bastias Saavedra, Ph.D. (2012), is Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory and Lecturer at the Freie Universität Berlin. He is Principal Investigator on the European Research Council-Consolidator Grant (ERC-CoG) funded project ’IberLAND’.