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...