Economic Sanctions as Legal Ordering

This article recovers a critical episode in the history of economic sanctions and considers its implications for international legal order. Beginning in 1905, a group of Chinese citizens 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 imaginations of peace advocates, lawyers, and scholars, who saw in the boycotts either a fundamental threat to legal ordering, a promising avenue for enforcing interstate peace, or, most radically, an engine for new kinds of political organization outside the typical forms of state and empire.

The debates over the early twentieth-century Chinese boycotts invite us to rethink the relationship between economic sanctions and legal orders. Through historical and theoretical work, this article demonstrates that boycotts were understood at the time as a form of “insurgent legal ordering,” which threatened the unity of the state-based legal system. Drawing on the history of the boycotts, this article develops a theory of insurgent legal ordering. And it shows how lawyers of the period developed a response to the perceived threat of insurgent ordering that required states to centralize and control the means of economic warfare. The result sheds light on the history of economic sanctions and suggests a broader critique of the role that economic sanctions play in the international legal order today.