Legal modernization in the early Meiji period and the Japanese research on the mixed courts of Egypt

Abstract

With the development of the concept of international law into domination tool in the hands of the European powers, non-European states such as Japan and the Ottoman Empire signed commercial treaties that granted extraterritorial privileges to the Great Powers. The Meiji government determined the revision of the unequal treaties as its primary objective and in 1871 dispatched the Iwakura Mission to negotiate this issue with the treaty powers. During the negotiations, the mission was advised to analyze legal formations in countries such as Greece, the Ottoman Empire, and Egypt, which were “more suitable examples” for Japan. A member of the Iwakura Mission, Fukuchi Genichirō, carried out this important research and wrote a significant report on the Mixed Courts of Egypt. This was followed by two subsequent reports. The Research on the Mixed Courts of Egypt conducted within this historical context was an important episode of the Japanese experience of legal modernization that saw the Ottoman and Egyptian experiences at the crossroads. Placing this important episode at its center, this work aims to offer an alternative narrative of the nineteenth-century global order by questioning the Eurocentric perception of the extraterritorial regimes or nation-state victimization narratives of the histories of legal modernization by taking the agencies of Japan, the Ottoman Empire, and Egypt into account. Rather than defining these unique experiences of modernization as success stories or failures, this work regards these experiences within the historical context, considering the political and economic realities of these states comparatively.