SYSTEM ENCOUNTERS: RULES OF INTERSTATE CONDUCT IN EARLY MODERN SINO-EUROPEAN RELATIONS

How do polities embedded in distinct international orders manage their differences? Disputes over diplomatic practices in the context of growing interactions between different world regions during the early modern period as well as the ongoing fragmentation of the contemporary international order make this an important question. Yet, scholars have focused predominantly on the analysis of specific international orders or their comparative study. Drawing on historiography and published collections of primary sources, I examine Russian, Dutch, and British embassies to China during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as encounters between distinct international orders in East Asia and Europe. I propose that polities manage their differences in system encounters through a process of pragmatic reconstitution. I find that actors responded pragmatically to specific manifestations of differences by creating conditions under which established practices could be upheld, thereby contributing to the gradual stabilization of distinct international orders in East Asia and Europe. These findings have important implications for our understanding of system encounters in the historical evolution of international orders and the circumstances under which Sino-European relations in the early-nineteenth century became increasingly inflexible.