Across Oceans of Law

Klappentext 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. Zusammenfassung Renisa Mawani charts the story of the Komagata Maru-a steamship that left Hong Kong for Vancouver in 1914 carrying 376 Punjabi immigrants who were denied entry into Canada-to illustrate imperialism's racial! legal! spatial! and temporal dynamics and how oceans operate as sites of jurisdictional and colonial contest.

Autorentext

Renisa Mawani

Zusammenfassung
Renisa Mawani charts the story of the Komagata Maru-a steamship that left Hong Kong for Vancouver in 1914 carrying 376 Punjabi immigrants who were denied entry into Canada-to illustrate imperialism's racial, legal, spatial, and temporal dynamics and how oceans operate as sites of jurisdictional and colonial contest.

Inhalt

List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction. Currents and Countercurrents of Law and Radicalism 1

1. The Free Sea: A Juridical Space 35
2. The Ship as Legal Person 73
3. Land, Sea, and Subjecthood 115
4. Anticolonial Vernaculars of Indigeneity 152
5. The Fugitive Sojourns of Gurdit Singh 188
   Epilogue. Race, Jurisdiction, and the Free Sea Reconsidered 231
   Notes 241
   Bibliography 293
   Index 319