Extradition and Empire
Sovereignty and Subjecthood in Hong Kong

Uncovers the interwoven origins of British colonial rule in Hong Kong and the British imperial law of extradition.

Ivan Lee (Author)

9781009356930, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 3 July 2025

260 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm, 0.49 kg

'Lee provides a careful account of extradition law's fitful development in Hong Kong, showing how it has always been entangled with adjacent practices like deportation and rendition. Though we often imagine law being made in treaties, Lee shows its genesis in the ad hoc choices of colonial governors, judges, and other law officers. He also reveals the changing meanings of borders, as the extra-territorial claims to jurisdiction of overlapping sovereignties operated in surprising ways across law's empire. This is a must-read for lawyers and historians who want to understand why and how extradition came to occupy the place it holds in international law.' Paul Halliday, University of Virginia

In the first book-length study of the imperial history of extradition in Hong Kong, Ivan Lee shows how British judges, lawyers, and officials navigated the nature of extradition, debated its legalities, and distinguished it over time from other modalities of criminal jurisdiction – including deportation, rendition, and trial and punishment under territorial and extraterritorial laws. These complex debates were rooted in the contested legal status of Chinese subjects under the Opium War treaties of 1842–43. They also intersected wider shifts and tensions in British ideas of territorial sovereignty, criminal justice and procedure, and the legal rights and liabilities of British subjects and alien persons in British territory. By the 1870s, a new area of imperial law emerged as Britain incorporated a frontier colony into an increasingly territorial and legally homogenous empire. This important perspective revises our understanding of the legal origins of colonial Hong Kong and British imperialism in China.

Acknowledgements
List of Maps
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: Dimensions of Extradition and Empire
1. Improvising Sovereignty
2. Domesticating Mobility
3. Navigating Disorder
4. Rationalising Reciprocity
5. Founding Alsatia
Conclusion: Legacies of Extradition
Notes
Index.

Subject Areas: Legal history [LAZ]