BOOK REVIEWS
213
we find, when he writes about family law, an attempt to describe the law in terms of formal (rather static) relationships. The dynamic element, how the law responds in practice to the needs and expectations of the people subject to it, is missing. Surprisingly, this element is also missing where one would most expect to find it in his consideration of commercial law as it was developed in the Mixed Court at Shanghai. Much of the book is concerned with Family Law and as such is still of interest though, consisting as it does largely of statement without exposition, it is of diminishing value in the light of modern anthropological techniques. But it is to the chapter on Commercial Law and to the Appendix of Mixed Court cases (at p. 142) that the reader will look forward most eagerly.
The Mixed Court at Shanghai developed over the years its own distinctive brand of law, not consciously but in consequence of the cultural and commercial interplay which was the hallmark of Shanghai. Though the law administered between Chinese parties may be Chinese, the context within which the disputes arose could not be called wholly Chinese and the Court's decisions themselves display a 'mixed' character. Shortly after the publication of Jamieson's book, A. M. Kotenev's much more considerable work, Shanghai: its Mixed Court and Council, was published1 and from it we may learn considerably more about the operations of that court. But, even so, many of the questions which arise in our minds are left unanswered and we are given, for example, little elucidation on the true legal position of the compradore, on his rights and his liabilities. Perhaps Jamieson was too close to events to be able to consider these wider conceptual (though, at the same time, essentially practical) matters but, nevertheless, he fails to point out the basic principles behind the decisions to which he refers and the reader is left unenlightened. He confines himself to description and, in so doing, wrote a less valuable book than he might otherwise have done.
3
Looking at this book through the eyes of the nineteen-seventies, it appears disappointing. But, though it does not really live up to the enthusiasm of its re-publishers, at a time when interest in the formal study of Chinese Law is waxing fast, it is most valuable to have available once more a work which is part of the history of the development of Chinese law from its earlier ‘feudal' stage