Across Oceans of Law: The Komagata Maru and Jurisdiction in the Time of Empire by Renisa Mawani (review)

Mawani's Across Oceans of Law is an ambitious and sweeping look at South Asian migration and restriction that represents a critical intervention into historiographies of the British Empire and South Asian radicalism. It centers on the story of the Komagata Maru—a ship that carried 376 South Asian passengers into the Vancouver harbor in May 1914, determined to challenge their exclusion from Canada. It asks, first, how foregrounding the ship and the sea as juridical forms reshapes our understandings of immigration restrictions and South Asian radicalism and, second, what is at stake, historically and conceptually, when histories of South Asian migration are situated within maritime worlds.

Other scholars have highlighted how the Komagata Maru led to the expansion of immigration controls and unleashed a series of repressive laws in Canada, India, the United States, and British white-settler countries across the world. Mawani, however, demonstrates that this story was not just about a ship seeking entry into Canada; it was also about how Britain's "juridification of the sea" was advanced by legislation, treaties, agreements, and legal restrictions imposed on ships, passengers, and cargos. The book considers how a shift from the familiar narratives of arrival and territoriality to a maritime view of South Asian travel and migration opens additional vantage points from which to examine British and colonial law and anticolonialism.

One of Mawani's interventions is the development of the idea of "oceans as a method." Mawani's engagement with the vast, dynamic, and ungovernable force of oceans methodologically reorients histories of South Asian migration in a number of ways. Rather than writing of the land and sea as discrete categories, Mawani views them as interconnected spaces of colonial history and anticolonial struggle. In doing so, she challenges the historical accounts of South Asian migration that have long privileged land/territory and region/nation, thereby diminishing the oceanic imaginaries of South Asian radicals and their circuitous and multidirectional journeys. Indeed, Mawani's reading of the Komagata Maru through an oceanic framework challenges the nationalist and territorial focus of South Asian migration histories and even the ways in which transnational histories remain tied to borders and territoriality.

In centering oceans and ships as prominent sites of inquiry, Mawani rewrites the Komagata Maru's voyage as a global and maritime legal history shaped by long-standing legacies of transatlantic slavery and indigenous dispossession. In her telling, the ship's voyage exceeds the familiar narratives of immigration controls, dominion sovereignty, and white nationalism. As juridical formations, ships were embedded in wider structures of European conquest, territorial expansion, and resource/labor extraction and operated as technologies of British imperial rule.

One of Mawani's most important contributions is her engagement with indigeneity and transatlantic slavery to argue that the free sea "was a racial and legal space marked by overlapping histories of colonial and racial dispossession" (33). She offers a brilliant reading of how the territorial dispossession of indigenous peoples in Canada, South Africa, Australia, and elsewhere figured in jurisdictional struggles over the Komagata Maru by demonstrating how South Asians evoked indigeneity to reify racial hierarchies that differentiated "indigenous" from "migrant" and to utilize indigenous dispossession to challenge British domination. South Asian migrants and travelers thus deployed indigeneity in contradictory ways that could at times contest racial, temporal, and territorial divisions and at other times reproduce and reinforce them.

Across Oceans of Law is a capacious, global history that demonstrates how the construction of the "free sea" for Europeans depended upon the lack of freedom given to slaves, indentured laborers, indigenous peoples, and so-called free migrants. The Komagata Maru affords Mawani the opportunity to demonstrate how South Asian efforts to circumvent prohibitions to immigration posed a challenge not only to restrictive immigration laws but to Britain's global, imperial, and racial order. This impressively researched and theoretically sophisticated book will profoundly transform the...