| Abstract | This is a history of America's extraterritorial court in Shanghai, extant from 1906-43. Integrating various social history methodologies into the concept of 'informal imperialism,' this study benefits from, and also adds to, the small but growing literature concerning the function of transplanted legal institutions in the Western colonial enterprise in China and elsewhere. in particular, the history of the UniversityS. Court attests to the ability of individuals and groups outside of formal political structures to influence the effective meaning and impact of American foreign policy once articulated from the center. From Washington's perspective the role of the UniversityS. Court in Shanghai was to inculcate Chinese with an appreciation for American jurisprudence, but even more important, to punish among UniversityS. nationals the sort of predatory, rapacious behavior that hindered the growth of and rise to official power of a collaborative indigenous elite. However, the Court's effort to punish opportunism for the benefit of collaboration brought it into long-term conflict with a coalition of locally powerful treaty port Americans comprising Catholic missionaries, local (Anglo-American) real estate companies, attorneys at law, and gambling and prostitution interests. These groups supported a heavy handed punitive jurisprudence only when it came to Chinese or those legions of destitute American 'beachcombers' wandering the Far East in search of their share of expansionism's dividend. None of the five successive judges of the Court were effectively able to harness treaty port Americans to the self-denying rigors of a 'special relationship' between their home government and collaborative Chinese. The rule of law is, as a number of social and legal historians have argued, a 'potent fiction' which provides the framework for societal conflict, as groups and individuals invoke its hallowed presumptions and prescriptions for divergent and sometimes subversive purposes. This is no less so when the rule of law is extraterritoriality. |
