This chapter explains how sexual and domestic violence were understood according to elite norms that were codified in formal law in early modern China (1368-1800)1, with a focus on the judicial reforms of the eighteenth century.
As with other chapters in this volume, the point of departure for this one is the profound distance between present-day common-sense notions and those of the early modern era. Today, in much of the world, it is commonplace to assume a basic feminist perspective that values and prioritises individual consent, and that therefore understands sexual violence as a violation of an individual person's freedom of body and will.
But in many other societies, including imperial China, the legitimacy of both sexual acts and acts of violence has been understood in fundamentally different terms.For this reason, language is a key issue, and basic terms in original Chinese texts may defy easy or casual translation into contemporary English equivalents. We must remain sensitive to original context, however repugnant that may be to modern sensibilities, as well as to our own present-day priorities.
More on the topic This chapter explains how sexual and domestic violence were understood according to elite norms that were codified in formal law in early modern China (1368-1800)1, with a focus on the judicial reforms of the eighteenth century.:
- Legal Understandings of Sexual and Domestic Violence in Late Imperial China
- Any study of sexual and family violence in early modern Europe must first acknowledge and confront the problems of language and meaning.
- This chapter examines the diverse communities of Britain from the ninth century bce to the early fifth century ce, and uses a Web of Violence model to examine the archaeological and primary source evidence for violence in both periods.
- Over the last three decades a resurgence of interest in Chinese legal history and the opening of archives for the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) has contributed to an outpouring of scholarship on interpersonal violence, homicide and capital punishment in eighteenth-century China.
- Early modern European warfare features prominently in several important discussions of early modern violence, notably the debate on the Military Revolution and its variants,
- Homicide in Eighteenth-Century China
- “A Plague on Your Borders”: Disease Control and Administrative Reforms in Late Eighteenth-Century Ukraine
- Chapter 16 The Formal Validity, Efficacy, and Acceptability of Legal Norms
- This chapter examines robbery at sea as a long-standing global phenomenon, tracing patterns of waterborne violence as they developed in eastern and western seas from ancient to modern times, with an emphasis on the early modern period.
- Although Vietnamese have been fighting among themselvessince even before recorded history, the early modern period saw arguably the most significant levels of violence until the second half of the twentieth century.
- “Rulers of the Fatherland”: The Hetmanate's Cossack and Church Elite's Concepts of the Nature, Representation, and Obligations of Authority (Up to the Beginning of the Eighteenth Century)
- Family law concerns legal aspects of the domestic relationships between persons who are grouped together within a household understood as a social, political, and economic unit.
- Homicide and Punishment in Eighteenth-Century China
- Fatherland in Early Eighteenth-Century Ukrainian Political Culture
- China was no less violent than any other society in the early modern age. Like Europe, late imperial China had its fair share of wars of empire and peasant rebellions, as well as violent crimes of murder, assault, rape and robbery.
-
Conflictology -
Ecology -
Economy -
Finance -
History -
Law -
Medicine -
Philosophy -
Religious studies -