Law of the Four Seas: Grassroots Legal Cosmopolitanism in Manchuria, 1900–32

This paper examines the transnational making of a grassroots form of cosmopolitanism in the Northeast Asian borderland of Manchuria. Conventional studies of cosmopolitanism in East Asia often focus on intellectual thinking in the coastal regions, where capitalist globalization nourished a transnational class of cultural elite. The vast hinterlands of Inner and North Asia, by contrast, are too often seen as insular spaces where connections to the outside maritime world were weak and incidental. I challenge this assumption by reconstructing the cultural texture of transnational legal life in the villages and fields of Manchuria in the early twentieth century. Peasants running elections using global norms under empires; popular literature preaching international law to semi-literate villagers; rural activists proposing utopian liberal governance to colonial overlords: the buzz and frenzy of this underground world of law shows how modern cosmopolitanism could also be a subaltern affair. Bringing the techniques of subaltern studies from South Asia to bear on Northeast Asia, I aim to offer an alternative narrative about the pre-communist village culture in Manchuria through the unlikely lens of law.