Jonathan Ocko and David Gilmartin are to be congratulated on producing a truly valuable piece of comparative work. Particularly as one who is not a legal historian, I have learned an immense amount not only about the nature of law in the two societies but also how to think about legal questions in relation to other historical and comparative questions. I do have a serious interpretive difference with them regarding their characterization of the Qing as governed by the rule of law, but what I have learned from them far surpasses what I think they should rectify.
Toward the end of the comparison, the writers declare that they want to show that the “rule of law,” when seen in a wider and more institutionally embedded context, was no less meaningful in non-Western societies than in modern Western ones. By showing how one may view legal processes in the functioning of...
