Heath: ‘Rival Lawmakers’: China’s Boycotts and the Making of Modern Economic Sanctions

J. Benton Heath (Temple Univ. - Law) has posted ‘Rival Lawmakers’: China’s Boycotts and the Making of Modern Economic Sanctions. Here's the abstract:

This paper traces the influence of a series of Chinese boycotts between 1905 and 1932 on the development of the law concerning modern economic sanctions. During this period, Chinese citizens, often despite official condemnation from the government, launched a series of protests targeting American, British, and Japanese goods. These boycotts caused economic damage, disrupted international relations, and at times won significant political victories. At the same time, they captured the attention and imaginations of peace advocates, lawyers, and scholars, who saw in the boycotts either a fundamental threat to state-based legal ordering, a promising avenue for enforcing interstate peace, or, most radically, an engine for new forms of political organization outside of the typical forms of state and empire. And, in responding to the boycotts, these lawyers and scholars articulated a set of principles that, today, form the basis for the modern law of economic sanctions.

This history, it is argued, requires us to reconsider the conventional wisdom on economic sanctions. This paper encourages a break from prevailing narratives, emphasizing instead the role of non-Western ideas. It challenges any attempt to draw easy distinctions between private, citizen-led boycotts and state-based economic sanctions, showing how arguments about the two practices were long intertwined. It demonstrates how the actions of the Chinese boycotters impacted the international legal history of modern sanctions, and it shows how this history might have unfolded differently. And it recovers the relationship between economic sanctions and fundamental questions of state formation and legal ordering, which remain relevant today.