Bernard Cohn once called the imperial point of view the “view from the boat”. There were other boats as well.Footnote 1
In 1893, the sovereign state of Johor adopted the Ottoman Medjelle (Meḏj̱elle-yi Aḥkām-i˚ḥʿAdliyye, the civil code applied in the Ottoman Empire since 1877), being the only state among the Muslim sultanates of the Malay Peninsula to do so.Footnote 2 In 1895, Johor promulgated a Constitution (Undang-Undang Tubuh Kerajaan Johor), being the first state in Southeast Asia to do so.Footnote 3 This article takes this moment, of the intersection of two types of law from quite disparate sources, as a point of departure for tracing the pathways by which law made its way from one corner of the globe to another. Taking nineteenth century Johor as our vantage point provides a new optic for mapping law's geography and temporality and for exploring the logics of law's itinerancy and its locality. The travels of law were always material, and often embodied; on ships sailing the Indian Ocean between Johor and Cairo were diplomats, merchants, pilgrims, and lawyers faced with new pressures and new possibilities; in the growing traffic in letters and newspaper reports between London and New York, Tokyo and Constantinople, were debates about empire and culture, power and authenticity; in personal relationships made possible by the technologies of nineteenth century cosmopolitanism, were similarly worldly dramas of deception and demands for justice. In the 2 short years between the adoption of the Medjelle and the Constitution in Johor, the sultan of Johor, Abu Bakar (1833–1895), typified this mobility and interconnection. In his travels across the Indian Ocean to the Near East and Europe; in his appearance in diplomatic communiques in London, Constantinople and Washington D.C.; in his prominence as a figure of exoticism and intrigue in the newspapers and the courts of the English-speaking world, the sultan not only embodied law's movements in a figurative way, he was also himself a key carrier of the law, and one of its signal articulators.
As a sovereign whose position was dependent upon his ability to balance Malay politics and British imperial interests, Abu Bakar showed in his legislation and his politics a keen awareness of multiple constituencies and audiences. Within the context of his position as a participant in a new kind of cosmopolitan world, his legislative actions were part of a wide-ranging repertoire of symbols and languages, which included his portraiture, his court, his marriages, and his travel. Therefore, although we begin with the intersection of Medjelle and Constitution in Johor to discuss law as part of an improvisatory political repertoire, this article broadens its focus to discuss the circulation of legal ideas, institutions, and actors made visible by Abu Bakar's travels. Our analytic project, therefore, is not simply that law travels, but with whom; not just that it is carried, but alongside what other commodities and baggage; not just that it moves, but that it is transformed by its passage across borders and among localities.Footnote 4 The arrival of law in Johor did not spell the end of its journeys; we return at the end of the article to how travelling law found its vernacular accents in a local context, where complex processes of translation and localization were conditioned by nascent logics of state-building and imperialism.Footnote 5 In some ways, this article details a period of experimentation quite difficult to imagine in the context of the twentieth century; by 1913, the Medjelle and Constitution had been incorporated into a unified state hierarchy, in which Islamic legal content functioned as a limited domain within an overarching state system, a model that would soon become the standard for many Muslim states.
The aim of this article is to present a view of laws as varied repertoires for state-building and consolidation; of law's networks as intersecting circulations of legal agents, cosmopolitan elites and imperial officials; and of law's multiple meanings as opening up possibilities for interpretation, localization, and onward progression. To argue that rulers such as Abu Bakar used law in the late nineteenth century as part of a repertoire is to see a particular moment in the history of the modern state—in the Ottoman Empire, the Meiji Empire, Siam, Hawaii, and Malaya—as contingent and experimental, rather than teleological. To see law in circulation across these domains is not only to pay attention to its movement, but also to trace through time and space the work of many agents in the translation, repetition, reiteration, and transformation of law, its ideas, and its institutions. Together, the concepts of repertoire, circulation, and travel sketch out the global theater in which rulers facing European imperial pressure in the nineteenth century acted to preserve their power and articulate their jurisdiction and authority, drawing from particular local scripts as well as increasingly ubiquitous sources of law and institutionalization.
Law in Circulation: Regional and Global Cosmopolitanisms, 1862–1895
In the late nineteenth century, law moved across the Indian Ocean as books and letters on ships; was embodied in lawyers, merchants, and colonial officials; and was carried alongside ways of doing business, of thinking about politics, and of being family. To see law as part of a repertoire is to seek out the ways in which law's carriers used it as part of a toolkit, for solving problems in context, rather than adopting models wholesale, or through imperial inheritance, taking the agency of legal actors seriously but placing them within multiple orders of political dominance and cultural authority. This article's view of law asserts the mobility encapsulated in concepts of legal transmission, diffusion, and transplant,Footnote 6 but places critical emphasis on discovering the ways in which law was transformed by its movement.Footnote 7 In this, the language of circulation, which emphasizes reciprocity, reiteration, and reproduction; provides analytic traction; and returns to the fore the role of law's agents and agency: “Circulation is different from simple mobility, inasmuch as it implies a double movement of going forth and coming back, which can be repeated indefinitely. In circulating, things, men and notions often transform themselves. Circulation . . . therefore . . . implies an incremental aspect and not the simple reproduction across space of already formed structures and notions.”Footnote 8 Applied to law, this concept of circulation sees the movement of law through the world not as seamless and uniform, but as critically intertwined with the movement of people, goods, and ideas, and, therefore, as deeply implicated in networks of economy, politics, and society and their attendant inequalities.Footnote 9 As such, law in circulation is a global phenomenon, but can only be made legible through its localities: its nodes and contact zones, its ports of call. The Medjelle and Constitution were carried to Johor as part of ongoing strategies to bolster the authority and legitimacy of its ruler, and their arrival was conditioned by regional and local politics. As Renisa Mawani has argued (see the Introduction to this Forum), attention to law's spatiality requires awareness of its temporality as well, and as this section will elaborate, the chronology of law is not uniform either; the localization of Ottoman Medjelle and “Western-style” Constitution proceeded along different timelines and took different forms.
Scholars of the history of international and European law have recently argued for a rethinking of such law as it developed within both global and imperial contexts, beyond “European consolidation and…European exceptionalism.”Footnote 10 The nineteenth century itineraries explored subsequently trace not only a history of engagement of European law by non-European rulers, but also a history of engagements beyond Europe, among rulers for whom Europe was both a source of inspiration and of common concern. The analytic contribution of the concept of law in circulation is also to highlight the particularity of law's movements, and the need for further investigation of the ways in which these particulars may have been patterned. Different types of law, because they are carried at different times, by different networks, for diverse and often divergent purposes, neither circulate at the same rate, to the same extent, nor in the same directions. In this section, therefore, we begin by tracing circulations of law through Johor's local political context—the Malay world and the problem of British imperialism—and show how law became part of a repertoire for state consolidation. We then look to wider circulations that intersected over Johor in the late nineteenth century, in which Johor and its ruler themselves would play transformative roles for law in far-flung places.
Regional Networks: Malay World, Hadhrami Diaspora, British Imperial Hierarchies
The state of Johor, at the tip of the Malay peninsula between Singapore and Malacca (part of the Straits Settlements, a Crown Colony) and the Malay sultanates under British residency rule, was one of the most diversely constituted of the Malay states. Composed of multiple fiefdoms on the Malay Peninsula as well as in the Riau and Lingga islands, its polity combined elements from centers of power in Minangkabau, Bugis, and Malacca, as well as a long history of engagement with European imperialism.Footnote 11 Abu Bakar's education by British missionaries, his upbringing in Singapore, his early involvement in regional diplomacy, and his close personal and commercial relationships with the Arabs, Chinese, and English, all contributed to his regional cosmopolitanism.Footnote 12 The adoption of the Ottoman Medjelle and a “Western” Constitution was part of the sultan's symbolic and institutional repertoire; his rise through the gradations of Malay sovereignty was dependent upon his ability to project an image of authority and legitimacy in multiple languages, for the benefit of many audiences.Footnote 13 This ability to translate between codes of authority, British, Malay, and Arabic, was evident not only in his legislation, but in his public persona. Portraits of Abu Bakar produced during the course of his life show a figure who combined Malay, Ottoman, and British elements of dress, stance, and symbols; news reports portray a ruler adept at Malay politics despite a contested claim to sovereignty, a global traveler comfortable among European and imperial aristocrats despite nineteenth century European hierarchies of race and religion.
Abu Bakar's career charted the progress of a ruler who went from strength to strength by positioning himself within regional and imperial powers as a broker and facilitator. He inherited rulership of the state as Temenggong of Johor upon the death of his father in 1862, under the terms of a controversial arrangement with the British in Singapore; he had his title changed to Maharaja in 1868 and then to Sultan in 1885. These increments in status were made possible through his role as intermediary between the British and other Malay elites in the region, his economic and political ties to networks of Chinese commerce in the Straits, his marriage into multiple networks of imperial power (Malay, Anglo-Dutch, Chinese, and Ottoman), and extensive diplomacy and travel.
Abu Bakar's early career complicates his current image as an anglophile and modernizer, and suggests a number of different sources for his cosmopolitan worldview. Amongst his earliest advisors were Hadhrami Arabs, such as ‘Abd al-Rahman bin Muhammad al-Zahir al-Saqqaf (1833–1896, hereafter “al-Zahir”) and later the scholar and reformer Sayyid Abu Bakr b. Shihab al-Din (1846–1922).Footnote 14 Through these and other relationships with prominent Arab families, Abu Bakar drew upon Hadhrami networks for religious, mercantile, and social matters.Footnote 15 Of these advisors, al-Zahir was among the earliest and most prominent; al-Zahir served the new Temenggong of Johor from 1862 to 1864, before his world travels began in 1866, and served as one source of his knowledge of the wider world, in particular the world of the Indian Ocean.Footnote 16 Al-Zahir's “masterful command of a whole diasporic repertoire of constituting a persona—routes, relatives, and representations”Footnote 17 would not have been lost to Abu Bakar.
Al-Zahir's biography encapsulates Hadhrami mobility and networks at this time; born in Hadhramaut, raised in Malabar, and educated in the Islamic sciences in Egypt and Mecca, he traded between India and Arabia and traveled widely in Europe.Footnote 18 As Freitag puts it, for a while, Al-Zahir “became supercargo on one of his father's ships,”Footnote 19 moving with traded goods from India to Ceylon and Arabia. He served rulers in military and administrative capacities from Hyderabad to Calicut, leaving Johor to play a pivotal role in Aceh. Here, al-Zahir was an early model for developing state legal and administrative capacities in order to build state strength, and later took a leading role in the Acehnese revolt against the Dutch. His leadership involved diplomacy to the British in the Straits Settlements, the Ottoman Empire, and critical notables in the Muslim world, including the Sharif of Mecca; intermarriage with the ruling families of several key ports and states and the deployment of their wealth; and strategic use of the pan-Islamic press and the symbols of both Islamic and Western power and authority.
Abu Bakar's regional cosmopolitanism was conditioned always by his familiarity with, and recognition by, British imperial power. After a state visit to the United Kingdom in 1866 during which he was often referred to as “Maharaja,” the Temenggong requested that his title be changed to Maharaja. Prior to this, he had worked to establish his own genealogical claims with the help of various Malay notables such as Raja Ali Haji and the sultan of Lingga.Footnote 20 Dynastic succession had been a preoccupation since his father's rulership of Johor, and the title of Maharaja would locate Abu Bakar within the hierarchy of British India and further cement his claim to being sovereign over Johor. In this, Abu Bakar's reputation among British officials in the Straits as “in his tastes and habits...an English gentleman,” furthered his campaign for imperial recognition.Footnote 21 When he requested that he be recognized as sultan of Johor, his role as intermediary between the British and the Malay chiefs, his vast landholdings at the heart of the Malay peninsula, and his importance as a bulwark against Dutch and French interests in the region helped overcome the objections of local British officials.Footnote 22 When the increasing frustration of local British officials, such as Straits Settlements Governor Frederick Weld, with Abu Bakar's independence led them to contemplate placing a British resident in Johor, Abu Bakar went to London to broker a new agreement with the imperial center.Footnote 23 When the Maharaja was made a sultan, his treaty with the British was signed in London, not, as other treaties with Malay rulers had been, in the Malay states; Abu Bakar would thereafter be known within the empire as “Sultan Sir Abu Bakar,” a knight commander of the Order of St. Michael and St. George.
This treaty, signed in 1885, brought a new set of terms into the discourse of Abu Bakar's legitimacy and sovereignty, and linked Abu Bakar's status as a sovereign sultan to his standing within the British imperial imagination. In exchange for ceding foreign affairs to the British and noninterference in the Malay States, Abu Bakar and his successors would be recognized as sultans of Johor. The treaty emphasized consultative language that had not previously been part of the rationales used by Malay rulers to legitimize their positions: “His Highness the Maharajah of Johore has made known to the Governor of the Straits Settlements that it is the desire of his chiefs and people that he assume the title of Sultan.” The treaty further worked to legitimize an action that was far from customary, and then to insert it as a link into an assumed chain of tradition and law: “He and his heirs and successors, lawfully succeeding according to Malay custom, shall in future be acknowledged as His Highness the Sultan of the State and territory of Johore” (CO 882/4/22, 1885).Footnote 24
Global Theaters of Law: Chicago, Cairo, Constantinople, London, Hawaii
Having placed the sultan in his local context, and illustrated the manner in which law, symbols of rule, and local and imperial political imaginaries were entwined in nineteenth century Johor, we now turn briefly to the wider theater within which the sultan traveled, in order to further elucidate law's multiple circulations and transformations. In “Empire Through Diasporic Eyes,” Engseng Ho directs our attention to “other boats” sailing alongside “the imperial ship of state,”Footnote 25 from whose vantage point a different analytic of imperialism and colonialism might be constructed. This account of the sultan's travels, and the circulations of law, legal ideas, and agents that made these travels possible, contributes another “view of the imperial ship of state as seen from a smaller boat sailing the same seas.”Footnote 26 The sultan, by most accounts a marginal actor in a global context he did not make, nonetheless appeared across the globe in a number of moments between 1893 and 1895 that illustrate a global profusion of ideas about rulership and sovereignty in a still-imperial world. Between the adoption of the Majalla and the Constitution, he appeared in newspaper articles reporting the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago (1892–93); in the diaries of Wilfrid S. Blunt and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Sublime Porte in Constantinople (1893); in the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations’ report on the Hawaiian Islands (1894); and throughout the press, as well as in international law journals to the present day, when he was sued as “The Sultan of the State and Territory of Johore, otherwise known as Albert Baker,” for breach of promise by Miss Jenny Mighell of Brighton (1893–94). Through these, we see that the sultan's political and cultural world contained many empires and centers of power, and that he sailed between them in a concerted effort to place himself within multiple imperial and global hierarchies.
The earliest of these episodes illustrates Abu Bakar's efforts to locate Johor in a global context, within which he himself could be identified with the state's wealth and its exotic appeal in Western eyes: the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago (1893), popularly known as the “World's Fair.” Among a flurry of reports building up to the World's Fair were a number of articles in newspapers, on both sides of the Atlantic, anticipating the attendance of the sultan of Johor. On October 9, 1892, the New York Times reported: “The Sultan of Johore is coming to the fair and is going to bring with him three Malay bungalows constructed from the native nepah palm. In these bungalows the Sultan will exhibit agricultural products, embracing gambier, tapioca, tea, coffee, spices, &c. A superb exhibit of war implements and musical instruments from the Sultan's palace will be made. He will have also a half-dozen Malay women in their native costume and a number of dancing girls. His suite will comprise several Princes.”Footnote 27
The sultan was by this time a well-known figure in diplomatic circles and in London society. His wealth, his close friendships with European aristocracy, including Queen Victoria, and his combination of exotic ostentation and gentlemanly manners, were subjects of knowing comment in the English-language media of his day. For the reporters and other commentators, the sultan represented Johor: its wealth, its power, and its culture. As with the 1885 treaty that cemented his position as sovereign of Johor, Abu Bakar was adept at using these representations to consolidate the identification of the state of Johor with its ruler, not just to reporters and to mass audiences such as those in Chicago, but in photographs and portraits, in diplomacy and public speeches, and in his economic and political dealings.
The sultan did not, in the end, attend the World's Fair, sending instead one of his most senior advisors, Abdul Rahman Andak, in his stead.Footnote 28 In 1893, he was not in Chicago but in Cairo, where W.S. Blunt, British writer, anti-imperialist and sometime diplomat, noted a meeting with the Sultan of Johor in his diary. Blunt commented that the Sultan was: “a good old man of very simple manners and much bonhomie…he complained that though he had been a fortnight at Cairo, he had as yet seen none but English officials, and that Lord Cromer had not encouraged him in his desire to go into Egyptian society. I offered to put him in the way of this…I am to take him…to the Sheykh el Bekri and get Mohammad Abdu and other Sheykhs to call on him, and we will put him the right way to an introduction to Sultan Abdul Hamid when he goes to Constantinople.”Footnote 29
At the Sublime Porte, Abu Bakar's success would depend upon his ability to nest his hard-won sovereignty into the political and symbolic hierarchies of the Ottoman Empire, and of nascent pan-Islam. At the Ottoman Court, he found that his title was a liability rather than an asset: “the Court had refused from the first to acknowledge him as having any claim to calling himself a Sultan. Nevertheless he was credited by everyone with a very high position as a Mohammedan Prince in the Malay States.” (April 15, 1893). He was received with full honours and feted at a reception brokered by Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, the anti-imperialist, modernist, and pan-Islamist, in exile from Egypt and Iran. Despite reports that Abu Bakar appeared uninterested in pan-Islamism and could not be drawn out on matters of empire and state, it was after this visit that the Medjelle was introduced to Johor.
Perhaps the most prominent of the sultan's appearances on the global stage was in the London courts, in a case entitled “Mighell v. the Sultan of Johore” (1893–94). A woman named Jenny Mighell sued the Sultan for breach of promise, attesting that he had courted her under the name of Albert Baker, during which courtship she had discovered his true identity, and that he had failed to make good on his promise of marriage. The Court of Appeal summarized the case quite differently:
[In the Court of Appeal.] Mighell v. Sultan of Johore.
International Law—Foreign Sovereign, Immunity of—Extraterritoriality—Jurisdiction—Submission to Jurisdiction—Proof of Status of Sovereign—Certificate of Secretary of State.
The Courts of this country have no jurisdiction over an independent foreign sovereign, unless he submits to the jurisdiction. Such submission cannot take place until the jurisdiction is invoked.
Therefore, the fact that a foreign sovereign has been residing in this country, and has entered into a contract here, under an assumed name, as if a private individual, does not amount to a submission to the jurisdiction, or render him liable to be sued for breach of such contract.
A certificate from the Foreign or Colonial Office, as the case may be, is conclusive as to the status of such a sovereign. (Queen's Bench 1893, 149)Footnote 30
The case served to confirm a far-reaching principle of international law, that foreign sovereigns could not be tried in British courts. However, it also established that the sovereignty of such persons depended, as a matter of procedure if not more, upon the recognition of the British Empire. The case was reported and discussed extensively in journals of international, comparative, and imperial law, but it achieved its most widespread notoriety in the popular press of the English-speaking world, from London to New York to Auckland. In Singapore, the Straits Times reported an item from London (November 7): “The British public has been grievously disappointed of a sensation…The prospect of a reigning sovereign of an independent State sued by an English ‘Miss’ for breach of promise of marriage foreshadowed wonderful possibilities. These are now dissipated and destroyed through the interference of a theory of international law which deprives the disappointed maiden of her hearing and robs the British public of the spectacle of an oriental sovereign in the court.”Footnote 31
The legal journals were not immune to this drama:
Mr. Gilbert ought to search the law reports for motives for comic operas. The “Sultan of Johore” or “The Baker and the Sultan” would, to begin with, be a capital title for a musical performance at the Savoy Theatre. The Sultan's feats in the Law Courts would lend themselves admirably to the treatment in which Mr. Gilbert's genius excels. We have first the worthy and unpretending Albert Baker who sues for the hand of Miss Mighell, obtains her love, and promises her marriage. Then Mr. Baker is the gay deceiver who is pursued by the injured fair into the Law Courts. His triumph seems certain, when suddenly Albert Baker is transformed into the sovereign prince, the Sultan of Johore, and asserts his immunity from the laws of England. The lady produces the Queen's writ; the Sultan brings out of his pocket a certificate of sovereignty from the Foreign Office. A Court, amid the universal approval of international lawyers, pronounces that it has no jurisdiction over a sovereign. The Sultan is triumphant; the lady loses her case, and, we presume, pays costs. Surely Mr. Gilbert's genius can make something out of these suggestive incidents.Footnote 32
In this case, the performative aspects of law approached the conventions of theater to a comical degree, but the drama of these incidents helps highlight the ways in which law's mobility was—and continues to be—facilitated by its publicity, its spectacle, and its mass appeal. Further, this case serves to illustrate that law in circulation can take unexpected turns, and that what began as an intimate matter of tort served in the courts of empire to delineate a particular vision of the sovereign.Footnote 33
Johor's prominence in international circles also brought it to the attention of other monarchs facing unwanted imperial attention, including King Kalakaua of Hawaii, who visited Johor on a world tour in 1881. In 1894, this relationship attracted the attention of the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, which saw Johor as a model to be avoided: “King Kalakaua…seemed to be blind to the course of events and to the true interests of his people. His chief object appears to have been to change the system of government into an Asiatic despotism on the pattern of Johore, in which the white ‘invaders’, as they were called, should have no voice in its administration.”Footnote 34 For the report's writers, representing the interests of the United States and investigating the possibility of annexing Hawaii, the parallels between Kalakaua and Abu Bakar, Hawaii and Johor, and the United States and United Kingdom, were uncomfortably close.
These parallels seemed evident and relevant to Kalakaua and Abu Bakar in 1881 as well. One account of the royal meeting in 1881 noted, “Abubakr and his courtiers have marked Hawaiian types of features, and the Malay Prince was recognised as presenting a striking likeness to the late Hawaiian Prince Leleiohoku.”Footnote 35 William Armstrong, who accompanied King Kalakaua on his world tour, also observed that the rulers sought points of commonality in language, and “These ethnological ‘strawberry marks’ placed the rulers on good terms with each other, and they were not unwilling to assume that this meeting was one of ‘long-lost brothers.’”Footnote 36 At a banquet to honour Kalakaua
(t)he Maharajah, at the close of the banquet, rose…Turning to the King, he took his hand and said he would propose his health; he was glad to welcome a King from a land very distant, but one who ruled over the same kind of people as those ruled by himself; he was sorry that he did not speak the English language as well as the King of Hawaii; and he hoped that his royal guest would reach his home in safety and not forget the little kingdom of Johore. The royal Hawaiian replied that he had now discovered that his own people were Asiatics, and he hoped the Asiatic nations would become powerful and stand by one another.Footnote 37
What each of these moments of intersection serve to highlight is the complex geography of Johor's political landscape, and they make visible beyond that landscape a wider map of global political relationships. As this section has shown, just between 1893 and 1895, the “other boats” to which Ho refers made for a lively traffic: in world markets and entertainment; in communications and industry; in diaspora and religiosity; and in marriage, betrayal, and criminality. The view from these other boats, also carrying varied repertoires for lawmaking, layered conceptions of sovereignty and authority, and new perceptions of threat and modernity, seems always to have included an awareness of “the imperial ship of state.”Footnote 38
This map of political relationships also helps locate a number of unexpected audiences for what Tim Harper has called “Abu Bakar's…global performance of Malay sovereignty,”Footnote 39 a performance nested within a global drama of sovereignty politics. For Abu Bakar, as for the rulers of Hawaii, Siam, Japan,Footnote 40 and the Ottoman Empire, this global drama involved courts of law as well as newspaper reports, the World's Fair as well as royal reception halls, and, increasingly, a mutual awareness of each other. “This is to see the late 19th century belle epoque not merely as globalised by imperial networks, but as something much more complex than this…(i)t is into this kind of world of cross-cutting linkages; its sense of synchronicity—the multiple directions of syndication of images, techniques and ideas—that a specific experience of modernism could take hold.”Footnote 41 It was into this context that the Medjelle and Constitution came to Johor in the 1890s, and to which we now turn.
Law as Vernacular: Local Logics and Translated Juris-diction, 1893–1913
The Medjelle and Constitution arrived in Johor as part of the Sultan's repertoire for consolidating his authority and succession, forestalling British imperial encroachment, and developing an administration and bureaucracy through which the ruler would exercise power. These two sets of laws may have arrived approximately at the same time, but their unfolding in Johor and then into the Malay world around it followed different chronologies and geographies. Upon closer examination, their arrival in Johor was merely a beginning; both documents have complex histories of translation, institutionalization, and enforcement, and these histories allow a deeper exploration of how traveling law is made local, and what elements of law facilitate their onward movement from the port cities of their arrival, into state administrative hinterlands.
Recent work by legal historians and law and humanities scholars, building on Benveniste's concept of “juris-diction” as both law's speech and the speaking of law (1973), has drawn attention to the role of jurisdictional moments in producing law's power.Footnote 42 Tracing law at this level of detail makes clear that, in nineteenth century Johor at least, law's speech was polyphonous and polyglot from the start. Part of the work of juris-diction was to repeat, re-iterate, echo, parse and interpret law in its new context, but these translations were never complete, nor were they universally satisfactory.Footnote 43 The polyphony and dissonance of the law in this case was an expression of political realities in the Malay world, a site whose fluidity and cosmopolitanism is well known, but perhaps, what the case of the Johor Constitution should also provoke, is further exploration into the polyphony and dissonance of law itself. In this section, we trace the process of law's “localization” and translation, showing that the move from one language to another required complex political as well as linguistic work; that each document followed a different path to becoming local law, and a different timeline. In this process, however, law's ability to speak in many voices—its polyphony—and its tendency to allow for multiple meanings, some contradictory—its dissonance—were key elements of its mobility.
In Johor, the adoption of the Medjelle in 1893 was part of an overarching program of reform undertaken by the Sultan that had begun with broad changes to the administration of Islamic law in 1863. This program included the drafting of a constitutional document, the establishment of a hierarchy of state administration within which these laws would be applied, and the eventual promulgation of the Medjelle as the Undang–Undang Sivil Islam: Majalah Ahkam Johor (Code of Islamic Civil Law) in 1913. The adoption of the Medjelle sent a range of signals, echoing the reforms of the Ottoman Empire (itself under European pressure) while assigning Islam a formal legal space within the state. For the Ottomans, the Medjelle performed a number of functions: it represented reform of the law and the Empire at a time of great civilizational anxiety, and it did so in a way that worked to satisfy those who wanted Western-style codes and those who wished to maintain the shar'i (Islamic jurisprudential and Quranic) content of the law. Instead of the wholesale adoption of the French civil code, this was a codification of the jurisprudence of the Hanafi school in matters of contract, torts, and civil procedure. The Medjelle achieved uniformity and regularity across the Ottoman legal system by applying to all subjects of the Ottomans regardless of religion.Footnote 44
Importantly, it kept all powers of adjudication, interpretation, jurisdiction, and application of the law firmly in the hands of the Ottoman central state, affirming the power of the sultan as it radically altered the state over which he ruled. By codifying Islamic jurisprudence and delegating its application to judges and legal officials untrained in shari'a matters in all areas but that of the family, the Ottoman state erected an institutional partition around family and inheritance law that soon became more like a substantive wall.Footnote 45 The adoption of the Medjelle was an explicitly Islamizing move if Johor were to be compared to the Malay States under British rule, where the only category of law to be left to the shari'a was marriage and divorce. Unlike the practice in these other Malay states, such as Perak, in Johor “matters of religion and culture” referred to commercial transactions as well as to marriage, divorce, inheritance, and religious endowments.Footnote 46
The Constitution, adopted 2 years later in 1895, detailed Johor's autonomy and the duties of Cabinet and Legislative Council, established Islam as the state religion, and placed the sultan as head of state. The document was drafted by the sultan's personal legal advisors in Singapore (Charles Burton Buckley chief among them, from the firm Rodyk and Davidson) and his ministers (Chief Minister Dato Jaafar bin Haji Mohamad and Dato Abdul Rahman Andak, Setiausaha Kerajaan [State Secretary].) It comprised four parts: the position and powers of the sultan; the Council of Ministers; the State Council; and matters of justice, nomenclature, and Islam. In its structure and language, this Constitution loosely resembles the only other Asian constitution available at the time, the Meiji Constitution of 1890.Footnote 47 When the sultan visited Tokyo in 1883, this Constitution was already a topic of concern in Japan; the process of its drafting had begun, and a delegation sent to explore constitutional models in the United States, United Kingdom, and Europe was leaning toward the Prussian model.Footnote 48
The sultan would likely also have been aware of cautionary examples among his contemporaries, all rulers facing both European imperial pressure and pressures from competing elites in their state: King Chulalongkorn of Siam's rejection of an 1885 proposal, made by Siamese elites in Europe, that Siam too adopt a Constitution along the lines of that of Japan, and the earlier suspension of the Tanzimat Constitution (1876) by Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid in 1878.Footnote 49 The sultan's decision to promulgate a constitution 12 years after his visit to Tokyo and 5 years after the promulgation of the Meiji Constitution in Japan, had much to do with securing his succession; he was ill, and died shortly after. Unlike the Meiji Constitution, the Johor Constitution contains far fewer details on the structure of government and its administration; whereas the second section of the Meiji Constitution details the rights and duties of subjects, the Johor document contains no such provisions.
For both the Medjelle and Constitution, the process of translation from the original language of the text was critical, but by no means straightforward. Not only did the translation of the Constitution require the parsing of political concepts between languages, it is difficult to determine which the Constitution's “original” language might have been. That the Constitution was drafted by English lawyers in Singapore with the help of English-educated court officials such as Abdul Rahman Andak, that the Sultan may have held as models both the Meiji Constitution (1890) and Chulalongkorn of Siam's rejection of constitutional monarchy in 1885, and that Malay and English and Arabic all show their trace in the texts, all make the question of which—if any—of these was the original text, difficult to answer.Footnote 50
What is apparent from the archive of the Johor Constitution is that there were many constitutional texts: roughly contemporaneous versions in Malay, Jawi (Malay in Arabic script), and English. Although it may be understood that only one of these texts had legal force, the circulation of at least four identifiably distinct texts in the first few years of the Constitution's life—two in English and one in Malay—destabilizes the idea of a uniform and sacrosanct constitutional text and suggests that the Constitution was not one text but many, speaking not in one voice or language, but in a number of somewhat different voices: a polyphony (Hussin 2013). In archives and textbooks of law between 1895 and 1961, there are multiple versions of the Johore Constitution: the Jawi text in the Johor State Archives dates from an 1895 printing (Johor State Archive); a Malay typescript copy attributed to State Secretary Abdul Rahman Andak, dated 1898 (Basri 1988); an English text that was given to James A. Swettenham and the Johor Advisory Board in London (Allen et al 1981); and, finally, the Johor government printer later also issued an “official” English text, The Law of the Constitution of 1895, including amendments to 1961 (Johor State Archive) (Hussin 2013, 10–12). Multiple variations of the Johor constitutional text were in use at the same time by members of the legal profession, members of the Johor Advisory Board, British Residents, and court advisors.
Instead of struggling to decide on the accuracy of these texts as translated documents, or to assume their equivalence, this article treats each of these texts as part of the archive of the Johor Constitution. In doing so, it is possible to see that each text bears traces of the Constitution's multiple authorship and audiences; each text struggles to reconcile political concepts very much in flux. As such, the English versions give the impression of being hardly able to contain the requirements of Malay legal meaning, but the Malay texts do not themselves read like idiomatic originals.Footnote 51 Both texts translate Arabic and Quranic formulae in ways that indicate differing levels of familiarity with Muslim conventions of address.Footnote 52 The Preamble, present in all four texts, articulates the basis of the sultan's right to enact this law, and both English and Malay texts reverberate with imperfect synonyms, repetitions, and echoes: “We, in Our name, and on Our behalf, and for and on behalf of Our Heirs and Successors, the Sovereign Rulers or Sultans of Johore, should make, create, found and institute, and grant, give, bestow upon and present to and for the use of the Government, subjects, and inhabitants of Our Country, a Law and Regulation…” (Hussin 2013, 10–12). At times, the language of these texts serves to amplify through repetition and echoing; at other points in the texts, imperfect synonyms and concepts taken in from other legal lexicons strike a discordant note, providing a reading of the text that is dissonant and open to multiple meanings.
The ambiguity of the language of these constitutional documents marked not only a variety of sources and audiences, but an attempt to master a highly contingent and fluid political situation.Footnote 53 The Constitution was a document that presented many political interests on the part of the Johor elite, including the consolidation of the sultan's authority and greater openness to consultation with state elites, monarchical absolutism supported by stiff legal penalties, and the image of a monarch bound by principles of just and rational rule. The timing of the Constitution signals a clear need to cement the succession for Abu Bakar's dynasty with law rather than treaties signed with the British, and through the support of other power-holders within the Johor polity.Footnote 54 The short-lived Tanzimat Constitution (1876–78) and the Meiji Constitution both may have served as examples of monarchical attempts to answer the challenges of political instability and imperial pressure in broadening the base of political legitimacy, while maintaining a firm grip on authority over the state.
Given that the Johor Constitution became a model for other state constitutions in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and influenced a body of law that became understood as representative of the Malay states of the Peninsula near the time of their independence from the British, it will be important to remember that, from the beginnings of constitutional monarchy in Southeast Asia, Malay elites had a number of constitutional versions and texts from which to choose. This history is important for contemporary debates about race, ethnicity, and religion in Malaysia, because the Constitution of Johor is the first legal document of its kind in Malaya to define the relationship among these concepts for the purposes of ruling the state, and it is to this document that we may trace some of the origins of the Federation of Malaya Constitution of 1957. Included among these concepts is a clear concern in the Johor Constitution regarding the race and religion of the Ruler and Ministers: they must be Malay and Muslim. The religion of the state would be Islam, with an understanding that other religions should be allowed to be practiced in peace and harmony. These are concepts that remain in the current Malaysian constitution, and around which there has been much controversy. Although too large a task for this article, charting the genealogy of these concepts as they shifted in cast and meaning over more than a century of their use offers to shed light on the political productivity of law's ambiguity.Footnote 55
The Medjelle, in contrast to the Constitution, did have a clear language of origin: Arabic, a language that facilitated the movement of Ottoman law across its diverse empire through the assumption of a common vocabulary of Islamic legitimacy and learning. When the Medjelle arrived in the Malay world, however, it followed a different pattern and chronology than the Constitution. Whereas the Constitution was translated into many versions, for many audiences, the Medjelle remained in Arabic for two decades after it arrived in Johor. Here, the lack of translation of the Arabic Medjelle upon its arrival into Johor helped maintain the sense of an unbroken legacy of shari'a from the Caliphate and the center of Muslim empire, while also allowing Islamic elites in Johor, such as the Arab muftis appointed by the sultan, interpretive control over its application. The Johor Majalah was not translated into Malay until its status as state law within a state bureaucracy and hierarchy had been articulated, and the agents of its administration specified as state employees. In 1913, the Majalah was formally made a source of Islamic law for the state, subject to the Constitution.Footnote 56 The timing of this move was significant for other reasons as well, 1913 being the year before Johor finally conceded to British pressure for a resident (in Johor, titled “General Advisor”) to be installed (Nadarajah 2000, 51). The sultan's efforts to use a circulating language of sovereignty and legitimacy also put into place a codified Islamic law and a hierarchy and administrative bureaucracy within which it would function, more or less unquestioned, after the first decades of the twentieth century.Footnote 57 In the case of law's travels, the period of flux within which Abu Bakar of Johor lived was bounded, and he was both an exemplar of its dynamism and a harbinger of its end.
Conclusion: Maps for the Muslim State, c. 1913
Locating law's travels within local, regional, and global theaters of politics allows another dimension of the mobility of law to emerge: its patterns, its networks, and its conditions for locality and universality. Law circulated among its ports of call—in Johor, London, Constantinople, Cairo, Calcutta, Tokyo, Honolulu, and Washington—through newspaper reports of sensational trials; through lawyers, judges, merchants, scholars and pilgrims; and through networks of family and intermarriage; each translocation also requiring acts of translation. As travelling law, both Majalah and Constitution were implicated in larger projects of state and dynastic consolidation, and these legal instruments were harnessed to powerful interpretive regimes. These regimes of interpretation were neither solely European, nor were they all concerned with imperial threat; they also reflected an increasing recognition among rulers outside Europe of an “Asiatic” world of states. While there has been important recent discussion of pan-Islamism and pan-Asianism,Footnote 58 by considering these movements from Abu Bakar's vantage point, this article highlights that moments of recognition between particular Asian and Muslim rulers were also moments in which new hierarchies of the cosmopolitan and international were being articulated and consolidated.
To trace the chronologies, geographies, and mechanisms of these circulations helps us gain further analytic purchase on questions of legal diffusion and transplant, jurisdiction, and sovereignty, and to seek out patterns of globalism and locality within the transnational and cosmopolitan. To do so from the vantage point of what Tim Harper has called the “open horizon” of the Malay world in the nineteenth century, “perhaps allow(s) for the fact that there are many traditions of thinking and acting globally, and sets us to explore what they might really mean for people who inhabited these worlds. It is to ask: in a world of multiple connections and networks, which had particular saliency?”Footnote 59 Trying to answer this question in the case of Johor leads us back to the Constitution and Majalah, whose incorporation into the governance of the state represents a model that many Muslim states were beginning to follow. When taken together, whereas the Constitution made a formal space for Islam as the state religion, the Majalah helped locate that space within the areas of civil law and under the direct supervision of state administrators (Hussin, forthcoming). These were not simply transplants, but vehicles by which multiple visions of the state, some local and some imported, were institutionalized, and they represented an increasingly common pattern of legal transformation, not only in the Malay Peninsula, but across the Muslim world, in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Tracing their global itinerancy, as well as the work of many hands in their iteration, localization, and institutionalization at each site, may help further elucidate how these transformations occurred, and how they continue to be maintained into the contemporary period.
For the sultan of Johor and other independent sovereigns of the late nineteenth century, law served as part of a cosmopolitan repertoire whose object was to consolidate their local authority against political challenges, to forestall Western imperial intervention, and to elaborate a new state vision. Figures such as the sultan of Johor acted as law's agents in ways different from that of law merchants, forum shoppers, lawyers, or judges; they were carriers of law and among its most creative advocates because of its utility for their politics, their successions, and their visions of sovereignty in an imperial world. Then as now, domestic legislative choices were conditioned by a global gaze, an acute awareness of the need to balance local and foreign constituencies, and a heightened sensitivity to the potential of law as a tool both for the consolidation of their power and its dilution. Constitutions, in particular, were multivocal texts that played critical roles during this period to establish the content of sovereignty against imperialism. The ability of constitutional texts to be read in multiple languages—their polyphony—and at varied registers of political meaning—their dissonance—facilitated their mobility. The political context within which these travels occurred served to condition the cast and content of these laws, and as we enter another period of constitutional experimentation, law's polyphony and dissonance will continue to be crucial for the political futures constitutions describe.
