Herman Melville is traditionally understood as a writer of the open seas, seeking freedom from the constraints of law, politics, and power. This book offers a transformative reading, revealing a different Melville – one who viewed the ocean as a theater of contested sovereignties and crumbling constitutions. Drawing on his experiences under sail and his reflections on whales and the life of the sea, Melville learned to read nature with distinctively political eyes; in each of these contexts and more, he told stories of people escaping from one legal order only to find another. His work illuminates entangled zones of multiple jurisdictions where discretionary powers of conscience and judgment remain vital means for finding justice, equity, and mercy in the tempestuous world in which we live.
‘How do we think together what Herman Melville memorably described as the world's bewildering inapprehensibility – a magisterial resistance to human-scaled acts of comprehension – and the grand supervisory edifice of law? In Even in the Lawless Seas, Matthew Crow brings us into the illuminating inner reaches of this crucial question.'
Peter Coviello - author of Make Yourselves Gods and Is There God After Prince?
‘Even in the Lawless Seas reminds us of the rich plurality of oceanic histories, legalities, and sovereignties that might be invisible in a terrestrial legal imaginary. Through close and detailed readings of Herman Melville placed into conversation with an extraordinary range of interlocutors, Crow blends the theoretical and literary with great skill and erudition. This is a fine example of interdisciplinary scholarship.'
Renisa Mawani - author of Across Oceans of Law: The Komagata Maru and jurisdiction in the time of Empire
‘So much scholarly writing on Melville loses the wildness of his thinking. But Matthew Crow's learned book risks sharing in Melville's wild, brilliant playfulness, and puts it to work making sense of our present moment, when the boundaries between law and prerogative are unraveling, and even the outlaw sovereigns of the lawless seas stand in judgment.'
Ted A. Smith - author of Weird John Brown: Divine Violence and the Limits of Ethics
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