Social Order through Contracts (eBook)

This book is the first Western-language monograph on the study of the Qingshui River manuscripts. By examining over 3,000 contracts and other manuscripts, this book offers constructive insights into the long-standing question of how and why a society in late imperial China could maintain a well-functioning social system with few laws but many contracts, i.e., Hobbesian 'words without sword.' Three interrelated questions, what contracts were, how and why they worked, are explained successively. Thus, this book presents a non-stereotypical 'contract society' in southwest China, arguing that the social order which provides predictability and regularity for economic prosperity could be formed and maintained through contracts even under the condition of relatively weak influence of governmental and legal authorities.

Jian Qu has accomplished his doctorate from Heidelberg University, Germany, in 2020. Prior to that, he graduated from Tsinghua University with a Master of Law degree (2015). He also studied at Sciences Po, Paris, and obtained two bachelor's degrees from Southwest University of Political Science and Law (LL.B., 2012) and from Southwest University (B.A., 2012). His studies on legal theory and legal history were supported by the CSC, the Max Weber Foundation, and the DAAD. He was a visiting researcher with a scholarship at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History, Frankfurt, in 2018, and the year after, he published his first book, Yanchu fasui ('Taking Promulgated Words as Law,' in two volumes), for which he won the biennial Zeng Xianyi Prize for Outstanding Monographs on Legal History (2019).

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This book is the first Western-language monograph on the study of the Qingshui River manuscripts. By examining over 3,000 contracts and other manuscripts, this book offers constructive insights into the long-standing question of how and why a society in late imperial China could maintain a well-functioning social system with few laws but many contracts, i.e., Hobbesian "e;words without sword."e; Three interrelated questions, what contracts were, how and why they worked, are explained successively. Thus, this book presents a non-stereotypical "e;contract society"e; in southwest China, arguing that the social order which provides predictability and regularity for economic prosperity could be formed and maintained through contracts even under the condition of relatively weak influence of governmental and legal authorities.This book benefits readers who are interested in law, society, and history. While presenting the socio-legal landscape of a frontier area in late imperial China for historians, this book provides a novel and empirical interpretation of the supposedly well-known contract device for legal researchers, thereby proposing materials for an integrated theoretical explanatory framework of contracts in general. By employing the innovative theory of blockchain in its key argumentation, the book offers a creative interpretation of historical and social phenomena.