In September 2018, Panama revoked the registration and flag of MV Aquarius 2, a ship that had been chartered and operated since 2016 by SOS Méditerranée and Médecins Sans Frontiéres as a rescue vessel for refugees and migrants crossing the Mediterranean. This revocation came after a protracted legal debate about statehood, personhood, jurisdiction of the ocean, and passage rights, which resurrected themes made famous following the interimperial ocean crossing by the Komagata Maru in 1914 leading to its detainment in Vancouver and eventual deportation to Calcutta. Renisa Mawani's timely work Across Oceans of Law: The Komagata Maru and Jurisdiction in Time of Empire offers an incisive and refreshing reading of the Komagata Maru’s voyage by resituating the ship in a dense history of racial and juridical contest over the ocean. Departing from any easy analysis of the incident as one of arrival and immigration, Across Oceans breaks new ground in studying the juridification of seas; first by focusing on the moving ship steered by Gurdit Singh, a colonized British subject tracing a decidedly anticolonial cartography, and second by placing the physico-material differences of the ocean, especially its “motion at the heart of colonial legal history” (7).
Expanding on the ideas in her 2016 field-defining essay on amphibian legalities, “Law, Settler Colonialism, and ‘The Forgotten Space’ of Maritime Worlds,” this book asks how might we rethink the legal geographies of the British Empire, anticolonialism, and Indian radicalism from the vantage point of the sea and ships. The methodological novelty of the book rests in what Mawani terms “oceans as methods” of doing legal history: a method that pays attention to the circulation of people, ideas, vessels, and law, while also disrupting those very histories of circulation by making, race, colonial dispossession, and violence equally central to the discussion. Through a brilliant genealogy of the ship in European legal thought from Hugo Grotius to Carl Schmitt, alongside the many journeys of the Komagata Maru, Mawani reorients dominant themes in legal and maritime histories. Oceanic struggles, Mawani argues, “especially the elemental, juridical and racial distinctions they inscribed between aqueous and terrestrial spaces, established a legal architecture for the Komagata Maru's failed journey and spawned a global and transoceanic vernacular of anticolonial critique” (40).
The organization of the book reflects Mawani's methodological originality. Although the chapters lead us chronologically through the history of the ship, they are also organized around the specific legal artifacts that surface in the various jurisdictional debates resulting from Singh's journey. Each chapter thus offers us a deep and innovative reading of the sea, the ship, the manifest, the indigenous, and the fugitive within legal histories of empire. Chapter 1 provincializes the juridical debates about the free seas from Grotius to Schmitt by grounding Singh's and Husain Rahim's anticolonial maritime imaginary. Moving ships, Mawani shows, created lines of “authority, dividing oceans into coastal waters and the high seas each with a distinct and corresponding legal status” (49), while creating contradictions between the common law's desire for a closed sea and admiralty law's jurisdiction of open seas. Reading these jurisprudential debates through the movement of the Komagata Maru reveals the asymmetries of global time and movement, and thus helps us recover alternative maritime cartographies and anticolonial ambitions. The ocean that emerges in this chapter is criss-crossed by three centuries of movements by European ships carrying transatlantic slaves and Indian indentured laborers across the globe producing a “counter-Nomos of the Earth” (60–61).
In Chapters 2 and 3, the Komagata Maru makes landfall in Vancouver and immediately becomes the epicenter of jurisdictional, racial, and legal controversies. These controversies become the backdrop to recovering a remarkable genealogy of the legal standing of maritime vessels through jurisdictional conflicts between British admiralty and common laws that connects the law of deodand (deodand often being animals and instruments forfeited to God, especially when they killed or injured someone) to the history of transatlantic slavery. Chapter 2 resituates Komagata Maru’s many journeys into longer histories of enslavement and indenture in the British Empire. Focusing on the law of deodand, which “animated a non-human thing and then reduced it to a financial value” (84), Mawani is able to show how such a mode of calculation became vital to the world of ship, slavery, and indenture. Turning to Komagata Maru's manifest, Mawani shows how these very financial instruments of credit and insurance that enabled European maritime expansion and transatlantic slavery became deterrents to free oceanic movement of the colonized. Singh's maritime ambitions therefore reveal a mare clausum (closed seas) and reinscribe debates about sovereignty, territoriality, and dominion in Chapter 3. Through a close analysis of the legal case of Re Munshi Singh, following Komagata Maru's arrival in Vancouver, Mawani documents how race was territorialized as Canadian courts redefined settler colonialism by invoking indigeneity and temporal originality in order to bar other colonized subjects (Asians) from the white dominions of British Empire.
Chapter 4 extends this discussion to show how concepts of indigeneity, race, and jurisdiction were reworked in the global response to the ship's detention in Vancouver and eventual deportation to Calcutta. Indian radicals and anticolonial writers drew on the indigenous peoples of Canada and elsewhere in British dominions to chart an anticolonial vernacular of indigeneity. Yet, as this chapter illuminates, invocations of indigeneity by subjugated Indians were marked by hierarchies: conflicts as well as uneasy solidarities. The final chapter follows the ship to Calcutta and the fugitive movements of Singh to document the changing intensities of racial power as Singh moved from land, sea, and littoral. Closing the book with Singh's unfinished testimonial Voyage opens new directions to study anticolonial conceptions of freedom, alternative narratives of self-determination and jurisdiction that locate the sea and maritime ambition at the heart of the story.
By proposing oceans as method, this book opens new directions and questions in legal and maritime history. How might the materiality of the oceans, its tides, waves, and currents make us rethink legal history, especially at a time when the globe was being covered by isolines representing pressure, temperature, and depth. How can we use ocean as method productively to narrate the juridification of sea as one that was equally entangled with the scientific discovery of the sea as its laboratory? Legal and maritime historians, as well as scholars working on the intersections of race, mobility, and colonialism will find a stimulating set of interventions in this book.
Across Oceans of Law follows a breathtaking scalar approach attentive to the hierarchies of race, time, and jurisdiction, while narrating a microhistorical story of Komagata Maru's transoceanic travel to recover oceans as “vibrant spaces of law, politics and poetics” (236). It is a beautifully written, richly documented, and theoretically sophisticated study that connects the dense imperial, legal, and maritime histories with global histories of time from the perspective of a ship steered by a colonial subject during the heyday of anticolonialism.
