Maria Adele Carrai is currently a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and a Fellow at Harvard University Asia Center. She completed a Ph.D. in Law at the University of Hong Kong in 2016, where she received the Award for Outstanding Postgraduate Research Student for 2015–16, the Hong Kong Ph.D. Fellowship and the Swire Scholarship. Since she completed her Ph.D., she has been Princeton-Harvard China and the World Fellow (2017–18), New York University Global Hauser Fellow (2016–17), Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow at the European University Institute, Florence (2015–17). Her research has appeared in various peer-review journals and she has spoken in a variety of fora.

'The Confucian admonition that one needs to study the past to understand the present is especially apt when it comes to China and sovereignty. Fortunately, Dr Maria Adele Carrai's new book provides a superb genealogy of Chinese approaches to sovereignty over time, from historic times to the present, that will be a key departure point on this important topic for years to come.' William P. Alford, Jerome A. and Joan L. Cohen Professor of East Asian Legal Studies and Director of East Asian Legal Studies, Harvard University, Massachusetts

• Introduction; 1. International law and the sinocentric ritual system: a nineteenth-century clash of normative orders; 2. Secularizing a sacred empire: early translations and uses of international law; 3. China's struggle for survival and the new Darwinist conception of international society (1895–1911); 4. China rejoining the world and its fictional sovereignty, 1912–1949; 5. From Proletarian revolution to peaceful coexistence: sovereignty in the PRC, 1949–1989; Conclusion.