Abstract

This chapter explores a legal manifestation of Asian regionalism, arguing that such a manifestation does indeed exist, and that it derives from Asia’s distinctive economie-monde, to use the terminology developed by Fernand Braudel (1992). This economie-monde has given rise to a correspondingly distinctive legal experience that M. B. Hooker (1975) famously termed ‘legal pluralism’ – a condition in which multiple legal systems inhabit a single political space. As we shall see, the experience of legal pluralism continues to resonate throughout Asia to this day, in the form of what Kanishka Jayasuriya (1998) has identified as ‘reactionary modernization’.