212
BOOK REVIEWS
in China." As events have turned out, this work is of more use to us now, during the renaissance of interest in the study of the law of the mainland of China than it was in the education of practising lawyers. It came at an interesting period in Chinese legal history, at a time when the lawyers and politicians of the Republic were busy throwing off the shackles of the old imperial law and searching for new, modern concepts and a viable way in which to express them. Jamieson's work may, therefore, be viewed to a certain extent in the same light as the great pioneering textbooks on Anglo-American law of the nineteenth century in that the mode of classification and presentation might have influenced the thinking of generations of lawyers. But the history of China in the years following publication of his book excluded that possibility and we now approach it, not as a work of reference, but as a source of information on historical attitudes towards the modernisation of Chinese Law during the nineteenth century and on the fruits of the cultural interchange between Chinese and western law which occurred in Shanghai.
George Jamieson's career followed a well-known late nineteenth century pattern and his educational and intellectual limitations are apparent in his approach to his subject. Chinese Family and Commercial Law is, to our eyes, old-fashioned and didactic. He was a "scholar" of the old school and, though he acquired his knowledge and experience of Chinese law from the 'inside' in his involvement in dispute-settling processes, he followed the convention of nineteenth century jurisprudential thought in that he cast his work in a pre-conceived mould. Since the great Maine himself showed great skill in analysing legal systems in terms of concepts which enabled him to demonstrate similarities between those systems rather than to build up a set of concepts which worked adequately within any one system, we can scarcely criticise Jamieson when, in his introductory chapter, he sets out to discover to which legal system familiar in the west is the Chinese legal system most similar. That he should inevitably draw comparisons with the Roman legal system is both a commentary on the extent to which formal Legal education in the past depended overly on Roman Law and on the extent to which our approach to the comparative study of law has changed. Thus, by trying to be "scholarly," he appears to have eschewed the practicality which must have been familiar to him after a lifetime of activity in China. In consequence,
212
BOOK REVIEWS
in China." As events have turned out, this work is of more use to us now, during the renaissance of interest in the study of the law of the mainland of China than it was in the education of practising lawyers. It came at an interesting period in Chinese legal history, at a time when the lawyers and politicians of the Republic were busy throwing off the shackles of the old imperial law and searching for new, modern concepts and a viable way in which to express them. Jamieson's work may, therefore, be viewed to a certain extent in the same light as the great pioneering textbooks on Anglo-American law of the nineteenth century in that the mode of classification and presentation might have in- fluenced the thinking of generations of lawyers. But the history of China in the years following publication of his book excluded that possibility and we now approach it, not as a work of reference, but as a source of information on historical attitudes towards the modernisation of Chinese Law during the nineteenth century and on the fruits of the cultural interchange between Chinese and western law which occurred in Shanghai.
George Jamieson's career followed a well-known late nineteenth century pattern and his educational and intellectual limitations are apparent in his approach to his subject. Chinese Family and Commercial Law is, to our eyes, old-fashioned and didactic. He was a "scholar" of the old school and, though he acquired his knowledge and experience of Chinese law from the 'inside' in his involvement in dispute-settling processes, he followed the conven- tion of nineteenth century jurisprudential thought in that he cast his work in a pre-conceived mould. Since the great Maine himself showed great skill in analysing legal systems in terms of concepts which enabled him to demonstrate similarities between those systems rather than to build up a set of concepts which worked adequately within any one system, we can scarcely criticise Jamieson when, in his introductory chapter, he sets out to discover to which legal system familiar in the west is the Chinese legal system most similar. That he should inevitably draw comparisons with the Roman legal system is both a commentary on the extent to which formal Legal education in the past depended overly on Roman Law and on the extent to which our approach to the comparative study of law has changed. Thus, by trying to be "scholarly," he appears to have eschewed the practicality which must have been familiar to him after a lifetime of activity in China. In consequence,
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