(Source: Duke University Press)
Next month, Duke University Press will
publish a book which looks at an early 20th century case (the
journey of the steamship Komagata Maru) in order to explore tensions between
the common law and admiralty law.
ABOUT
THE BOOK
In 1914 the British-built and
Japanese-owned steamship Komagata Maru left Hong Kong for
Vancouver carrying 376 Punjabi migrants. Chartered by railway contractor and
purported rubber planter Gurdit Singh, the ship and its passengers were denied
entry into Canada and two months later were deported to Calcutta. In Across
Oceans of Law Renisa Mawani retells this well-known story of the Komagata
Maru. Drawing on "oceans as method"—a mode of thinking and
writing that repositions land and sea—Mawani examines the historical and
conceptual stakes of situating histories of Indian migration within maritime
worlds. Through close readings of the ship, the manifest, the trial, and the
anticolonial writings of Singh and others, Mawani argues that the Komagata
Maru's landing raised urgent questions regarding the jurisdictional
tensions between the common law and admiralty law, and, ultimately, the legal
status of the sea. By following the movements of a single ship and bringing
oceans into sharper view, Mawani traces British imperial power through racial,
temporal, and legal contests and offers a novel method of writing colonial
legal history.
ABOUT
THE AUTHOR
Renisa Mawani is Professor of Sociology at
the University of British Columbia and author of Colonial Proximities:
Crossracial Encounters and Juridical Truths in British Columbia, 1871–1921.
TABLE
OF CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction. Currents and Countercurrents of Law and Radicalism
1. The Free Sea: A Juridical Space
2. The Ship as Legal Person
3. Land, Sea, and Subjecthood
4. Anticolonial Vernaculars of Indigeneity
5. The Fugitive Sojourns of Gurdit Singh
Epilogue. Race, Jurisdiction, and the Free Sea Reconsidered
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
Introduction. Currents and Countercurrents of Law and Radicalism
1. The Free Sea: A Juridical Space
2. The Ship as Legal Person
3. Land, Sea, and Subjecthood
4. Anticolonial Vernaculars of Indigeneity
5. The Fugitive Sojourns of Gurdit Singh
Epilogue. Race, Jurisdiction, and the Free Sea Reconsidered
Bibliography
Index
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