All The Seas Were Ink tells its story from the perspective of Abu Bakar of Johor at sea. Johor provides a sweeping view of Asia, from Asia: comparative political thought in practice, and in motion. We observe the evolving international order as it was made sense of, and renegotiated: in ships, ports, court rooms, world exhibitions, marriages. We revisit the history of Islamic constitutionalism, the modern Muslim state, and its entanglements in the international, through encounters, from Johor to Constantinople, Tokyo, Hawaii, London, Chicago. We do this in order to: draw the Malay world into conversation with scholarship on global Islam, its interconnections and exchanges, its expansion and limits; place the making of Islamic law in the entanglements of an evolving international sphere, and the international into its imperial hierarchies; and to approach law’s mobility as a puzzle, rather than an assumption. An early example of a modern Muslim constitution, the Johor Constitution was experimental and many-voiced, elaborating tensions among ideas of rule as dynastic, monarchical, Islamic, and representative. Islamic constitutionalism thus emerges as a global genre of law in motion.

Chapter Four reads the multiplicity of texts of the Johor Constitution as part of a textual repertoire for navigating empire, Islam, and a newly circulating Asian and global lexicon of sovereignty. It traces the ways in which the mutability of legal texts functioned to court recognition, build alliances and bridge hierarchies of empire, region, and state. A focus on an original, unitary constitution does political work for the nation state, emphasising a linear national story while erasing a longer global genealogy of borrowings, resonance, and circulations. The multiple versions of the Constitution of Johor at the moment of its introduction show how textual polyphony and ambiguity made political opportunities, and reflected political and social realities. The mobility of law depends upon its ability to shift between the universal and the particular: the archives of the Constitution of Johor provides a clear sense of how this shift was achieved through language and translation. The chapter illustrates that moments of constitutional origin are multiple, and details the function of textual polyphony and ambiguity as translational dynamics in law’s onward travels.

To conclude, we trace the trajectory of legal imaginaries of Islam as the religion of the state into the present. Johor was one of the first states in the world to declare Islam the religion of the state; through the Johor constitution, the Malay states, and then the Federation of Malaysia, adopted this formulation. It is here that the formula “Islam shall be the religion of the state,” in legal effect since 1895, has had the longest life. When we re-place Johor into timelines of Islamic constitutionalism, an early and durable adopter of Islamic constitutional language, we gain new understandings of how Muslim legal imaginaries of the nineteenth century worked to make sense of the imperial international, beyond pan-Islamic modernism or decolonial worldmaking. Law’s travels, through cartographic and translational strategies, continued to draw elements of the international and imperial into the making of the Federal Constitution of Malaysia, with important consequences for race, religion, and belonging. The case of Johor shows how the global spread of constitutional thought and the history of Islamic states have been intertwined, and continue to intertwine, into the post-colonial period.

Chapter Three traces the Sultan of Johor’s trajectory alongside other Asian rulers, performing sovereignty and courting recognition in the shadow of global imperial orders. His travels provide a unique vantage point from which to observe a ‘princely international’ in the nineteenth century, in which Asian rulers played a central role. In encounters with the rulers of Hawaii and Japan, we see elaborations of ideas of Asian sovereignty as a counter to Western imperialism; in Chicago and London, we see these ideas play out against the backdrop of the racial and imperial hierarchies of the international. In Constantinople, the Sultan of Johor’s encounter with the Ottoman Sultan required recalibrations of status against ideas of global Islamic empire. Each served as a lesson in international and domestic politics for others, consolidating a language and repertoire for the international anchored in translation and retranslation, recognition and misrecognition. Chapter Three argues that princely repertoires for performing and representing Asian sovereignty were learned through the material experience of global encounter, and made in between empires: a nested sovereignty.

We broaden the scope of discussion, drawing from post-colonial and socio-legal studies, legal history, and the study of Indian Ocean Islam, to explore travelling Muslim legal imaginaries. The book closes with polyphony’s epistemic and political possibilities: a method for reading law, and a response to monist narratives of law and its authority, under empire and in its aftermath. A method attendant to the travels of law is therefore also an approach attentive to the operations of institutional memory and institutional forgetting.The Epilogue brings us into the present, to indicate how a renewed attention to polyphony as method, and as political approach, may be generative of ways to reconsider travelling legal imaginaries in the contemporary Muslim world: their maps and networks, misreadings and translations, and their nested sovereignties.

Here at the end of Part II (Chapters 4-5), we discuss the ubiquity of translation across the broad theatre of Muslim constitutional and legal thought as a provocation for Islamic legal studies, comparative law, and comparative political theory. Translation provides a point of engagement for two broad avenues of engagement among these fields: firstly, in reading Islamic constitutionalism as a global genre of law in motion; and secondly, in critical rereadings of how histories of empire and the international matter for circulating legal imaginaries of Islam.