Ignacio de laRasilla, JiangyuWang and CongyanCai (eds) , Histories of International Law in China: All Under Heaven?Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2026, 670 pp, hb £170.

International law scholarship increasingly portrays China as having shifted from a 'norm-taker' to a 'norm-maker' (Chen, 355).This transition raises a difficult question: whether China's growing influence offers an alternative to an international order historically shaped by imperialism and colonialism and still marked by profound inequalities (Antony Anghie, 'Rethinking International Law: A TWAIL Retrospective' (2023) 34 European Journal of International Law 7), or whether it risks reproducing a China-centred hierarchy.That question underlies contemporary debates over China's Belt and Road Initiative, the narrative of 'the Community of Shared Future of Mankind,' and renewed invocations of Tiānxià ( , 'All under Heaven').Historically associated with a Sinocentric worldview, the contemporary revival of Tiānxià has prompted concern about China's possible hegemonic ambitions.Against this backdrop, Histories of International Law in China: All Under Heaven? is a timely and ambitious intervention.The editors rightly argue that a historical perspective is 'imperative' for understanding China's current and future engagement with international law (3).The volume contains 33 chapters.After two introductory chapters, 19 chapters trace China's engagement with international law in broad chronological order, from ancient Chinese ideas of world order to present-day practices, with most of the focus on the period since the First Opium War (1839).The final 12 chapters comprise 11 intellectual biographies of twentieth-century Chinese international lawyers and a collective portrait of the long-neglected contributions of Chinese women to international law.The volume makes two major contributions.First, it recovers overlooked events and actors in the history of international law in China, showing that China neither passively accepted international law nor rejected it outright.Second, it traces how China's successive encounters with international law shaped its present legal positions.The first contribution specifically lies in chapters on two periods: the 'century of humiliation' , usually told as a history of passive adaptation under foreign domination, and the Cultural Revolution (1966)(1967)(1968)(1969)(1970)(1971)(1972)(1973)(1974)(1975)(1976), often treated as a decade of isolation and legal nihilism.Mégret and Cong show in Chapter 5 how Qing diplomats invoked reciprocity after the Rock Springs massacre of Chinese miners in 1885 and eventually obtained a payment from the United States.In Chapter 9, Li examines Qing participation in the Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907.Although the delegates failed to gain equal standing for China in the 'civilised'