Renisa Mawani



Q&A: Renisa Mawani’s Across Oceans of Law: The Komagata Maru and Jurisdiction in the Time of Empire (Duke University Press, 2018)

What are the major themes and takeaways in Across Oceans of Law?

Across Oceans of Law follows the voyage of the British-built and Japanese-owned steamship the Komagata Maru. It takes a well-known event – the 1914 arrival of a vessel chartered by railway contractor and purported rubber planter, Gurdit Singh, carrying 376 Punjabi migrants from Hong Kong to Vancouver – and situates it within maritime worlds. By centering the many lives of the ship and the ocean regions it crossed, the book reorients the Komagata Maru’s passage from the optics of landfall, immigration, and nationalism that have been so persistent in scholarly accounts, and retells the ship’s journey as a as maritime colonial legal history.

One of the book’s primary objectives is to critically examine the European myth of the “free sea,” a legal concept introduced by Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius in his 1609 text Mare Liberum. Over the course of the voyage, Gurdit Singh argued that as British subjects, he and the passengers had the right to travel freely across the empire. While many scholars have made this point, Across Oceans of Law examines his claims to mobility not only across land but also sea. By crossing the Pacific, Gurdit Singh and the passengers challenged European legal conceptions of the sea, intensifying border controls in Canada and India, and all at great personal costs.

By tracing the movements of a single ship, the book brings the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic Oceans into conversation with the Mediterranean Sea. In so doing, it opens opportunities to explore interconnections between these ocean regions and their respective histories of colonial dispossession, racial violence, and anticolonial struggle.

Where would you situate Across Oceans of Law in the larger field of Migration Studies? How do you see it contributing to contemporary debates?

Across Oceans of Law is set in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, it is very much a reflection on present conditions, especially the escalation of racial violence directed at migrants in the Mediterranean. Oceans have long been central to patterns of mobility and to border control practices. Yet, they are not often foregrounded in studies of migration. Though not all migrant routes are maritime routes, what western states call “migrant crises” are unfolding in several ocean arenas. Today, these are most visible in the Mediterranean and the (South) Pacific, in Australia’s off shore detention facilities.

In the past two decades, it is estimated that more than 20,000 people have died in the Mediterranean while trying to reach Europe from North Africa and the Middle East. According to the Missing Migrants Project, 3,139 migrant deaths were reported in 2017 alone. Given the problems with data collection, these numbers are surely underestimates. In my book I argue that these contemporary conditions of maritime violence must be situated historically within jurisdictional struggles over land, sea, and territorial waters, lines that were legally formalized in the European imagination during the early seventeenth century. The deaths along the Mediterranean, as I read them, are part of a much longer colonial history of maritime security aimed at protecting the freedom of (European) trade and mobility.

What was the research process like for Across Oceans of Law? Were there any methodological challenges?

The book took nearly a decade to research and write. It is a multi-sited study that draws from libraries and archives in Vancouver, Ottawa, London, Glasgow, and Delhi. The book’s conceptual frame is inspired by historical details of the vessel and its many owners; the radical imaginaries of key figures on the ship and on shore; the legal and jurisdictional disputes that the Komagata Maru’s voyage engendered; and the role of maritime law in regulating Indian migration.

Drawing on what I term “oceans as method,” I ask how we might think with the sea, both materially and metaphorically, and in ways that bring multiple histories of racial and colonial violence together within the same analytic frame. My method draws on historical description to develop analytic arguments that also carry ethical and political implications. Through close narration, I hope readers will visualize other spaces of empire (oceans and ships) and the struggles and solidarities they produced.

As I researched the book, I was stunned by how much knowledge Indians in India and the diaspora had of British colonial rule in other historical periods and places. Some were familiar with the horrors of transatlantic slavery and connected it to Indian indenture while others were attentive to the ongoing efforts to deterritorialize Indigenous peoples in Canada, Australia, and South Africa. These are significant and inspiring historical, analytical, and political connections that many of us are still struggling to make today, especially in the field of migration studies.

Do you have any future plans to continue this research project?

My current book, Enemies of Empire, is a sequel to Across Oceans of Law. This new project focuses on two figures, Gurdit Singh and Marcus Garvey. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, these men initiated shipping lines – the Guru Nanak Steamship Company and the Black Star Line, respectively. Focused on different ocean regions, Singh and Garvey viewed trade, commerce, and migration as ways to mobilize against Anglo-imperial rule. Whereas Singh sought to transport Indian goods and passengers from Bombay to Brazil and Calcutta to Canada, Garvey’s ambitions were to use ships to trade, transport, and to create a global black economy. Enemies of Empire will trace the maritime ambitions of Gurdit Singh and Marcus Garvey, examining why their projects failed, what their initiatives can tell us about the European myth of the free sea, and how their activities might elucidate the relationship between capitalism and anticolonialism. Ultimately, the book will bring histories of Indian radicalism into conversation with the radical Black Atlantic.



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