Global and Insurgent Legalities. Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2018. xv, 336 pp. (Figures, maps, B&W photos, illustrations.) US$27.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8223-7035-2.
Across Oceans of Law describes itself as tracing “the currents and countercurrents of British and colonial law and Indian radicalism along multiple ocean arenas” (6). As a point of entry, the book uses the 1914 voyage of the Komagata Maru, chartered by the Indian merchant Gurdit Singh to sail from Hong Kong to Vancouver, carrying 376 Indian passengers seeking entry into Canada. The passengers, with the exception of 20 or 22 (the record is unclear), were denied entry. In Canada, the event has long been seen as exemplary of unjustifiable race-based exclusion, leading, in 2008, to a controversial apology by then-prime minister Stephen Harper to the Indian community in Surrey, British Columbia. In India, it has been viewed as emblematic of a concerted challenge to the racial order that organized the British Empire. Over the years, multiple aspects of the voyage of the Komagata Maru, including the complex legal issues at stake, its place within racialized global migration regimes, the transformations it initiated in Indian surveillance structures, and its linkages to anticolonial Indian radicalism have been the subject of extensive scholarly attention detailed in numerous essays, book chapters, monographs, edited volumes, at least two plays, and a film. What more could there be left to say? This is where Mawani gives us a startling and wonderful surprise, with a book that enriches not only how we think of the 1914 voyage of the Komagata Maru, but invites, indeed mandates, a thorough reappraisal of our conceptual and methodological frames, broadly conceived.
We are all familiar with the often-invoked phrase “the law of the land.” Typically understood as configured only against the law of “other lands,” only rarely does this phrase provoke a consideration of its perhaps more salient other: “the law of the sea.” (I note, in passing, that while one might also counterpose and connect “the law of the land” to, among others, “the law of the air,” “the law of space,” or “the law of the cosmos,” there is no doubt that the “law of the land” gains its meaning not only from “other lands” but, perhaps most importantly, from the “law of the sea.”) Elaborating on this absent presence is at the heart of Mawani’s imaginative and original book that elucidates and advocates for what she calls “oceans as method.” Several scholars have centred the sea and ocean arenas to develop new analytic modalities and chart fresh or long-buried histories. While incorporating a deep engagement with this scholarship (particularly in the introduction), Mawani’s intervention is distinctive not only in the architecture of the book and in the multiple lines of analysis it pursues. Most importantly, it is distinctive in refusing the bordering of oceans, that incline us to think of the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans as divided and distinct entities, rather than as a connected, aqueous whole. By refusing the bordering of aqueous worlds and, instead, deploying their interconnections and constant motion as a methodological device, Across Oceans of Law gives us a stunning explication of precisely that which its title promises: how law travels, across oceans, and how the law of the land/other lands is connected to the law of the sea. This perspective allows Mawani to move across and link several ocean and terrestrial arenas and traverse a diverse array of interconnected issues. These include the early seventeenth-century foundations of the juridical distinction between land and sea (via an explication of Grotius and his interlocutors, chapter 1), an engrossing discussion of the nineteenth-century formation of longitude, Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), and standardized global time (introduction and chapter 1), a sustained attention, throughout, to the uneven racial ordering of the British Empire and its (internally and externally) hierarchically arranged dominions, colonies, and territories, as well as the intimate and violent entanglements between Atlantic slavery, (Indian) indenture, and indigenous dispossession (especially, chapters 2, 4, and 5). Threaded through these seemingly disparate considerations, and holding the analysis together, is the voyage of the Komagata Maru. Moreover, the book draws on and develops two abiding, and unique, concerns that have characterized Mawani’s earlier scholarship: first, foregrounding how various legal forms that initially emerged with regulating maritime worlds found their way to informing and structuring land-based regimes and, second, a consistent effort to address and integrate indigenous histories—ranging, in the book, from those indigenous to Canada to those indigenous to South Africa and India—into colonial legal history (chapter 3 and, especially, chapter 4).
Moving between the literal, the metaphoric, the figural (and, one might add, the speculative), with “oceans as method,” Mawani mobilizes the tropes of the ocean, the ship, and ocean currents to propose a number of recalibrations to our conceptual frames and our analytical vocabulary. She asks us, most centrally, to refuse the terracentric (51) view we so unthinkingly, and routinely, adopt. But beyond that, she also asks us to re-evaluate, if with mixed success, the efficacy of such academically popular terms as “sovereignty,” favouring, instead, “jurisdiction” (24, 48) and provides us with an exemplar of writing histories across scales, deftly combining micro histories, such as biography—most notably of Gurdit Singh and of the Komagata Maru itself (particularly chapters 5 and 2, respectively)—and macro histories, such as the making of maritime law and new standardized global temporalities (chapter 1 and introduction). The five main chapters of the book are broadly organized, in turn, around the notions of the sea, the ship, the ship’s manifest, indigeneity, and the fugitive. A ship’s manifest (that shapes the discussion of chapter 3), writes Mawani, “functioned as a jurisdictional hinge between ‘firm land’ and ‘free sea’” (123). And this chapter also serves as such a hinge in the book, with chapters 1 and 2 detailing the riveting debates and intricacies of maritime law, and chapters 4 and 5 turning more to legal regimes and events on land.
Many historians are reluctant to cede Hayden White’s argument that the work of the imagination is central to historical writing. For White, the selection of conceptual grids that organize historical narration are not much different from the work of the imagination that structures literature, or fiction—thereby rendering their distinction ambiguous, at best. Across Oceans of Law: The Komagata Maru and Jurisdiction in the Time of Empire is something of a case study in validating White’s argument. It is the work of the imagination, combined with patient elaboration, that enables Mawani to produce an elegant tour de force, offering profoundly novel and generative frames through which to produce renovated global histories, histories of migration, and colonial legal history. But though these are the fields to which the book speaks most directly and explicitly, its greater achievement is the creative, yet careful, meticulous, and rigorous scholarship it embodies, thereby serving as a resource for outside-the-box thinking. For these reasons, it should be widely read, far beyond the fields of its more immediate engagements.
Radhika Mongia
York University, Toronto