NAVIGATIONS

The title of my review draws inspiration from the Tongan writer and anthropologist Epeli Hau’ofa (Reference Hau’ofa1994). In his widely acclaimed “Our Sea of Islands,” Hau’ofa emphasizes the ontological significance of islands and seas to Indigenous peoples in Oceania. By drawing imaginary lines that separated land, sea, and sky and by privileging continents, he argues, European and American colonists sought to displace and undermine the cosmologies that guided Pacific peoples for millennia: “Nineteenth-century imperialism erected boundaries that led to the contraction of Oceania, transforming a once boundless world into the Pacific Island states and territories that we know today” (152, 155). These imaginary lines restricted the movements of Indigenous peoples, Hau’ofa contends, and invented a historical basis for imperial claims that Oceania was “small, poor, and isolated” (155).

To be clear, Hau’ofa is writing of the Indigenous Pacific and not the Indian Ocean world. Yet his insights offer a useful set of coordinates to navigate my reading and discussion of Yahaya’s book. European empires carved up the earth in ways that have been aimed at dispossessing Indigenous peoples from their lands and waterways, diminishing the significance of oceans, islands, and archipelagos. But “a sea of islands” differs from “islands in a far sea,” Hau’ofa reminds us. The latter views islands from a continental perspective while the former shifts attention from divided continents to interconnected oceans, thus, fundamentally altering conceptions of the world (Hau’ofa Reference Hau’ofa1994, 153). I return to this important distinction at the end of this review essay. As in Oceania, the tens of thousands of islands that comprise Southeast Asia have long been obscured by a European fixation on land. Fluid Jurisdictions challenges this terracentrism, and in so doing, reveals different patterns and intensities of colonial rule. From the nineteenth century onwards the lines imposed by British and Dutch authorities across the islands of Southeast Asia were not always clear, Yahaya explains. The uncertainties and ambiguities created opportunities for Arab men to navigate, appropriate, and exploit competing jurisdictions of colonial and Islamic law, often with long-standing effects mostly for Muslim women.

Fluid Jurisdictions draws on years of multi-sited archival research. Through close readings and lively interpretations of legal cases, petitions, and colonial newspapers, Yahaya explores the legal worlds that Arab men created for themselves and their communities. Originally from Hadramawt, present-day Yemen, many travelled to Southeast Asia primarily to trade. Some married local women and created interethnic and diasporic families. Arabs were not new to the eastern Indian Ocean arena, Yahaya observes. As far back as the seventh century, “Arab and Persian merchants and sailors had travelled across the Indian Ocean to the Malay Archipelago on their way to China” (Yahaya Reference Yahaya2020, 17). Given these longer histories of travel, many were already familiar with the overlaps of British, Dutch, and Islamic law and used these competing legal orders to their economic and political advantage. To track the movements and legal maneuvers of Arab men, Fluid Jurisdictions is loosely organized around a set of legal forms: marriage contracts, powers of attorney, techniques of colonial surveillance, and waqfs (trusts). Each chapter traces how Arab men strategically positioned themselves as intermediaries between colonial authorities and Indigenous peoples, thereby creating “their own jurisdictions across the Indian Ocean” (3). Their legal disputes extended the authority of colonial law, Yahaya highlights throughout, while (re)shaping British and Dutch interpretations of Islamic law.

JURISDICTION

As the title suggests, jurisdiction is one of the book’s organizing frames and its primary contributions. In recent years, a handful of legal historians and legal theorists have moved away from concepts such as sovereignty to explore questions of jurisdiction (Ford Reference Ford1999; Dorsett and McVeigh 2014; Mawani Reference Mawani2018). Whereas sovereignty implies empires and colonial states to be unified political and legal entities, jurisdiction problematizes legal authority by examining a plurality of laws, their ongoing tensions, and the limits they created for legal, political and imperial control (Mawani Reference Mawani2018, 118). Fluid Jurisdictions joins this conversation and takes it in new and exciting directions. To begin, Yahaya’s formulation of jurisdiction as fluid is clearly inspired by the aqueous landscape of Southeast Asia. The tens of thousands of islands in the Straits Settlements and Dutch Indies, she makes clear, exemplify the challenges that non-contiguous territories posed to colonial and imperial rule. At first glance, islands appear as bounded territories and as uncontested sites of sovereignty (Benton Reference Benton2009, 164). But, upon closer investigation, they emerge as spaces of multiple and often competing legal orders. As transit points of trade, migration, interracial encounters and diasporic communities, the islands in Southeast Asia posed problems for British and Dutch colonial and legal governance, as Yahaya demonstrates. Imperial archipelagos, she argues, demanded improvisational and coercive registers of colonial rule in which Arabs were entangled.

Jurisdiction, at its most basic level, signals the power and authority to speak in the name of law (Dorsett and McVeigh 2014, 4). In colonial contexts, however, legal authority was rarely straightforward, uniform or unilingual. One of the many strengths of Yahaya’s book is its emphasis on multiple legal orders. Her exploration of British and Dutch legal regimes—how colonial authorities borrowed legal concepts while also competing with one another—offers critical insights into the polyvocality of colonial law. Departing from conventional ideas of legal pluralism, Fluid Jurisdictions explores the entanglements, layers, and sedimentations of legal forms that traveled with British and Dutch imperial authorities and with colonial subjects in the eastern Indian Ocean world. Ryotwari, a land policy in Dutch Java, readers learn, originated in colonial Madras and was brought to the Straits Settlements and the Dutch Indies with the traveling career of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, the lieutenant governor of Java and later Bencoolen, who was famed as the “founder” of Singapore. Under the ryotwari system, as Yahaya (Reference Yahaya2020, 5) describes it, European colonists appointed themselves as the owners of the land and demanded that peasants pay rent. Cultuurstelsel, a taxation system introduced by Dutch authorities in the early nineteenth century and imposed on the Javanese, was inspired and influenced by the ryotwari system (5). Yahaya’s reading of these colonial policies offers a compelling illustration of the itinerancy of colonial law and a nuanced appreciation of legal pluralism as a process that demanded practices of linguistic and legal translation (Mawani and Hussin 2014). Whereas scholars have highlighted Anglo-Dutch legal encounters and overlaps in the Indian Ocean region, particularly the British inheritance of Dutch imperial policies (Ward Reference Ward2009), the ryotwari system suggests a multidirectional set of influences and effects. Dutch officials also borrowed from British laws that were inaugurated in colonial India.

Importantly, Yahaya’s investigation into British and Dutch colonial taxation and land reforms centers Indigenous peoples in Southeast Asia and reveals the violent legal tactics of territorial erasure and forced agriculture that were used to dispossess Indigenous Malays and Javanese from their lands. British authorities “erased the presence of indigenous populations in the Straits Settlements,” Yahaya argues (13). In the 1858 landmark case of Regina v. Willians, Penang was declared “terra nullius” or uninhabited. As a legal concept, terra nullius was instrumental to the deterritorialization of Indigenous peoples in British settler colonies, most notably in Australia, a process that remains deeply contested today (Watson Reference Watson2014). Similarly in the Straits Settlements, ideas of “vacancy” and “emptiness” justified the appropriation of Indigenous lands for British colonial resettlement (Yahaya Reference Yahaya2020, 10–11). In the Dutch Indies, by contrast, land ownership was based on a regime of cultivation and a politics of protection, Yahaya explains. Land could only be leased by Javanese “Natives” and not by those deemed to be “foreigners.”

British and Dutch officials in Southeast Asia did not encounter islands that were empty of people or of law. Colonial authorities were confronted with Islamic law, as Yahaya demonstrates throughout the book. Her careful and nuanced discussion of Muslims and Islamic law is another strength and contribution. “Muslim” has become a religious (and racial) category that is often portrayed in monolithic and one-dimensional ways. Fluid Jurisdictions introduces readers to a plurality of Muslim figures: qadis (judges) and muftis (legal experts), Arab Muslims classified as “foreigners,” Malay and Javanese Muslims designated as “Natives,” and Muslim women who appear in courts as legal subjects. By highlighting the heterogeneity of Muslims, Yahaya underscores a crucial point: not all Muslims were equally or evenly committed to Islamic law. In the Straits Settlements, Arabs criticized, disputed, and ultimately (re)shaped Islamic law through petitions and litigation. Arab merchants “continually tugged at the hem of colonial governments, asking them to take charge of Muslim lives” (Yahaya Reference Yahaya2020, 33). In so doing, Yahaya details how they altered interpretations of Islamic law, undermined Indigenous forms of authority, and strengthened British imperial legal power.

The influence of Arab merchants on interpretations of Islamic law, Yahaya argues, was especially evident in legal disputes initiated by Muslim women. In the nineteenth century, Arab elites routinely complained to British authorities about qadis. Keeping with conventions in Islamic legal traditions, qadis “relied solely on oral testimony” to solemnize Muslim marriages. But Arab men argued for greater consistency and centralization, claiming that these traditional practices “made it extremely difficult to prove the validity of marriages, legitimacy of progeny, and property titles” (Yahaya Reference Yahaya2020, 35). Their lamentations about qadis and of Islamic legal authority, Yahaya suggests, were motivated by larger political concerns. As qadis were from the region, Arab men feared their decisions might favour their own communities, which would place Arabs “without influential footing in the colony at a disadvantage,” particularly “against their wives who were mostly local women” (35).

The case of Fatimah bin Obudh bin Salleh bin Abdad, which Yahaya discusses in Chapter 1, is one of the many gems in the book. Yahaya’s reading of the case offers an illuminating example of how the complaints made by Arab men about qadis impacted Muslim women who appeared in colonial courts. Fatimah was a widow of the wealthy Shaikh Abdullah bin Sayeed bin Marie of Batavia. She, along with his second widow, inherited his estate in Singapore, over which Fatimah granted her father power of attorney. When she decided to remarry in 1922–23, Fatimah discovered a deed in the Registry of Deeds “purporting to be a gift from her to her father of her share in the property of her deceased husband” (Yahaya Reference Yahaya2020, 48). With the assistance of a male relative, Fatimah sued her father in a protracted legal battle that was heard over three separate trials. Despite Fatimah’s business perspicacity, Yahaya underscores the condescending remarks made by British lawyers and judges and to which she was subjected in court (49). The objections initiated by Arab men regarding the influence of qadis and muftis, Yahaya explains, led to their declining influence in colonial courts and ultimately shifted sources and interpretations of Islamic legal authority. As British judges responded to their complaints, paper gained prominence over oral testimony. The colonial judiciary newly appointed themselves as the guardians of Muslim women in the Straits Settlements and with longstanding effect (55).

In colonial contexts, jurisdiction was territorial and also racial, demarcating peoples and populations often with serious material consequences for identity, property, and mobility (Mawani Reference Mawani2018). Fluid Jurisdictions signals the significance of race in the organization of colonial life and imperial law. British and Dutch officials imposed racial and legal distinctions to distinguish and separate “foreigners” from “Natives” (see Day Reference Day2016; Mawani Reference Mawani2009). Although Arabs had a long presence in the Malay Archipelago and in the Dutch Indies, by the late nineteenth century, they were increasingly identified as “foreigners”. As the Arab population increased in the region, authorities feared that this merchant community would wield greater economic and political influence. These demographic changes, Yahaya suggests, amplified calls for greater Native protection, especially in terms of land ownership. In the Dutch Indies, “Foreign Orientals” were not allowed to own agrarian lands, which were explicitly reserved for “Natives” (Yahaya Reference Yahaya2020, 65). Land that was legally set aside by Dutch authorities for Indigenous Javanese could not be transferred to “foreigners.”

Arab men found creative legal strategies to circumvent these restrictions. Arab merchants long relied on powers of attorney to manage their wealth across the Indian Ocean. But powers of attorney, Yahaya (Reference Yahaya2020, 65) argues, also “provided a useful loophole” on land restrictions, “because transfer of power itself from one party to another was regarded as perfectly legitimate by Dutch authorities.” Dutch officials soon caught on. Arabs “often transferred powers of attorney to their ‘Native’ wives,” authorities charged, as a way “to manage their property, in order to escape the taxation and land ownership restrictions that were applied to Foreign Orientals.” The wives of Arab men, Yahaya explains, could also use powers of attorney to transfer property ownership to their husbands, thereby further undermining colonial restrictions imposed on Indigenous lands (65).

Powers of attorney generated fears among Dutch officials and intensified calls to further safeguard Indigenous peoples from foreign influences. Dutch colonial newspapers, as Yahaya (Reference Yahaya2020, 66) reads them, regularly published “stories of unfortunate Natives who fell prey to wily Arab creditors, handing over their property due to their inability to decipher legalese or ascertain what was their debt equivalent in terms of property.” Colonial authorities insisted that powers of attorney were routinely forged. Once again, Yahaya highlights the implications that these allegations had for Muslim women. In British-controlled Singapore, almost one-third of the powers of attorney were held by women, Yahaya notes. While these documents afforded Muslim women greater control over inheritance and property by allowing them to appoint male relatives to act in their financial interests, powers of attorney continued to remain open to betrayal and fraud by male relatives, as Fatimah’s case makes clear (76).

By the first two decades of the twentieth century, Yahaya argues, concerns of Arab “foreigners” in Southeast Asia escalated. As Arabs “were scattered over a huge geographical expanse across several thousand islands in the colony,” it was often “impossible for their movement to be tracked” (Yahaya Reference Yahaya2020, 85). In response, colonial officials introduced coercive forms of surveillance. Dutch authorities implemented a pass system that was aimed at restricting the mobility of “Foreign Orientals” (99, 101). In 1915, following the Sepoy Rebellion in Singapore, British authorities expressed growing concerns of mobile Arab as well as Indian men with their many ties across the Indian Ocean. Drawing on similar techniques of surveillance that they employed in colonial India, British officials compiled an “Index of Arabs,” which included the names and biographies of men residing in the Straits Settlements, especially those alleged to be harbouring anti-British and pan-Islamicist sentiments (125). This index, Yahaya points out, was widely circulated in the British Straits Settlements and beyond. Through repetition and dissemination, the index reinforced the supposed foreignness of Arabs and their dangerous influences on Indigenous Malays.

“A SEA OF ISLANDS”

Fluid Jurisdictions is a wonderful account of Arab merchants and their encounters with Islamic and colonial legal orders in the British Straits Settlements and the Dutch Indies. Like all good books, this one opens a series of questions that are not fully answered. Yahaya’s objectives, as she describes them, are aimed at documenting how the movements of Arab men troubled space, territory, and identity in the aqueous region of Southeast Asia. Despite the book’s emphasis on islands and archipelagos, the Indian Ocean is conspicuously absent. As a historian of the Indian Ocean world, Yahaya is well versed in the relevant oceanic literature. She offers some explanation and justification at the outset of the book as to why she does not fully or explicitly engage with this scholarship: “It is easy to romanticize the ocean and its attendant phenomena of diaspora, cosmopolitanism, and mobility, … especially when they are artificially unmoored from the institutions of power and class domination,” she writes (Yahaya Reference Yahaya2020, 20). Indeed, many scholars working in the Indian Ocean have emphasized plurality and cosmopolitanism at the expense of colonial and racial violence. But given the title and focus of Yahaya’s book, some readers might have expected more water. Centering the Indian Ocean may have opened different questions and perspectives. Recall for Hau‘ofa, what distinguishes a “sea of islands” from “islands in a distant sea” is precisely the oceanic. Foregrounding the Indian Ocean and thus approaching Southeast Asia as a “sea of islands” would have invited additional vantage points from which to explore space, territory, and movement, not only in the archipelago but also along the Indian Ocean, aboard the vessels that transported Arab merchants, powers of attorney, and waqfs between Hadramawt and Southeast Asia.

By choosing not to engage the Indian Ocean more fully, Fluid Jurisdictions misses an exciting opportunity to connect the legal struggles of Arab men to other long-standing imperial and maritime contests. Yahaya opens her book with the Geldria, a Dutch vessel that landed in the Banda Islands on 15 March 1599. The ship was sailing under the command of Jacob van Heemskerck, the famous Dutch captain who would go on to capture the Portuguese carrack Santa Catarina in 1603. Yahaya uses the Geldria to illustrate the uneasy position of Arab merchants in what became Southeast Asia. Whereas van Heemskerck remarked “on their ‘Oriental cunning,’” the Arab men he encountered “actively positioned themselves as intermediaries between the Bandanese and the Dutch,” Yahaya (Reference Yahaya2020, 2) explains. Fluid Jurisdictions follows these themes artfully from cover to cover. But if Yahaya introduced the Geldria through Dutch encroachment in the Indian Ocean, she could have underscored the legal significance of maritime Southeast Asia by linking the legal struggles of Arab men with contests over the making of a European international legal order. Jacob van Heemskerck’s capture of the Santa Catarina, as some readers may be well-aware is the event that inspired Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius to write Mare Liberum (Free Sea), a text that remains vital to the law of the sea today (Armitage Reference Armitage2004). As I read Yahaya’s book, I was left wondering how Arab merchants encountered the so-called freedom of the sea in their travels from Hadramawt to Southeast Asia. What was their relationship to the Asian rulers who held alternative conceptions of the free sea? Did the Dutch pass system and the British “Index of Arabs” extend imperial surveillance onto ships and further into the Indian Ocean and to what effect? These questions notwithstanding, Fluid Jurisdictions is a remarkable accomplishment and an illustrious example of how a turn to islands, archipelagos, and aqueous regions might reenergize the field of colonial legal history.