Legal Pluralism in and between Early Modern Macau and South China

Principal Investigator

Stuart MCMANUS

Total Fund Awarded

HK$499,408

Funding Source

RGC General Research Fund
(2025/2026)

Abstract of Project

The Pearl River Delta region has long attracted merchants from the rest of Asia and beyond. This is documented from almost the very beginning of Chinese dynastic history, but took on particular significance in the late-Ming and early-Qing periods when Portuguese and other European merchants (as well as missionaries and various hangers-on) were permitted to set up shop in Macau. This resulted in several centuries of cross-cultural interactions that inevitably touched on questions of law. While there are scattered articles on the constitutional status of early modern Macau and its sources of law, we know almost nothing about the overlaps and interactions between the different legal systems that existed in Macau itself and bridged the Ming and Qing states’ equivalent of the Macau-Mainland boundary. In addition, the scholarship that exists is divided between Chinese and Portuguese traditions that rarely interact. Finally, any endeavour to understand the legal landscape of Macau and its environs is complicated by the fact that globally pre-modern law was more capacious than its modern equivalents embracing universalizing cosmovisions, law-adjacent systems of rules, religious ideas and local customs. This project will offer the first detailed study of cross-boundary law (i.e. the interactions of different legal systems without necessarily crossing sovereign borders) in sixteenth- to eighteenth-century Macau that takes these various complicating factors into account, and argues that the framework of legal pluralism can help us comprehend the complex historical reality. To achieve its aim, the project will treat the most important legal domains in early modern Macau. This includes the interactions between the Portuguese and Chinese systems of contracts and dispute resolution. One hitherto unstudied aspect of this project centres on cross-boundary crime, including human trafficking and the smuggling of valuable commodities, e.g. crocodile skins. As the surviving official correspondence shows, both Chinese and the Portuguese authorities took such infractions seriously, although their success in suppressing cross-boundary crime was ultimately limited. These efforts at enforcement are documented in printed, archival and manuscript sources in Chinese, Portuguese and Latin. The project will result in three articles to be submitted to major Anglophone historical journals, one article to a leading Sinophone historical journal as well as four conference presentations.