Ramnath's "Boats in a Storm"

Kalyani Ramnath, University of Georgia, has published Boats in a Storm: Law, Migration, and Decolonization in South and Southeast Asia, 1942–1962 (Stanford University Press):

For more than century before World War II, traders, merchants, financiers, and laborers steadily moved between places on the Indian Ocean, trading goods, supplying credit, and seeking work. This all changed with the war and as India, Burma, Ceylon, and Malaya wrested independence from the British empire. Set against the tumult of the postwar period, Boats in a Storm centers on the legal struggles of migrants to retain their traditional rhythms and patterns of life, illustrating how they experienced citizenship and decolonization. Even as nascent citizenship regimes and divergent political trajectories of decolonization papered over migrations between South and Southeast Asia, migrants continued to recount cross-border histories in encounters with the law. These accounts, often obscured by national and international political developments, unsettle the notion that static national identities and loyalties had emerged, fully formed and unblemished by migrant pasts, in the aftermath of empires.

Drawing on archival materials from India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, London, and Singapore, Kalyani Ramnath narrates how former migrants battled legal requirements to revive prewar circulations of credit, capital, and labor, in a postwar context of rising ethno-nationalisms that accused migrants of stealing jobs and hoarding land. Ultimately, Ramnath shows how decolonization was marked not only by shipwrecked empires and nation-states assembled and ordered from the debris of imperial collapse, but also by these forgotten stories of wartime displacements, their unintended consequences, and long afterlives.

--Dan Ernst

Coffey on the Irish Influence on the Burmese Constitution

Donal K. Coffey, National University of Ireland Maynooth, has published The Drafting of the Constitution of the Union of Burma in 1947: Dominion Status, Indo-Burmese Relations, and the Irish Example online, open-access in the Law and History Review:

This paper aims to consider four elements of Burmese constitutional history between 1946 and 1948. The first section considers the negotiations between Burma and the United Kingdom and argues that the debate about whether Burma wanted Dominion status has overlooked the crucial transitional government period. The second section gives a brief overview of the drafting process, paying particular attention to the links between the Indian Constituent Assembly in Delhi and Rangoon. The third section outlines the comparative influences on the Burmese Constitution using the digital humanities and illustrates that the biggest foreign influence was the Irish Constitution of 1937. The final section looks at the Burmese political leadership after World War II along two dimensions—at a nationalist level and at an elite level—and traces some of the links between Burma and Ireland.

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• Over at Notice and Comment, Jed Shugerman, Fordham Law, has a very substantial post, A Reply to the Unitary Executive Theorists on the Misuse of Historical Materials. 
  

• In the Washington Post's "Made by History" section: Orville Burton (Clemson University/University of Illinois) and Armand Derfner (Charleston School of Law), "Biden’s pick won’t shift the Supreme Court, but here’s what might"; Tracy L. Barnett (University of Georgia), "The Sandy Hook settlement could transform the centuries-old marketing of guns"; Quinn Anex-Ries (University of Southern California), "A new push to censor Internet pornography could harm marginalized groups."

• Registration for the British Legal History Conference 2022 is now open.
  

• “The British Library’s Burmese collection holds some of the earliest extant dhammasattha manuscripts in the world. The dhammasattha, or “treatise on the law” is a genre of Buddhist literature prevalent in mainland Southeast Asia, written in Pali and in a range of vernacular languages including Burmese, Arakanese, Mon, Shan, Thai, Lao and Khmer.”  More.
  

• Two "SCOTUS Scoops": Clare Cushman on John Francis Nicholas Wilkinson: Remarkable Law Librarian (SCHS), and Todd C. Peppers on Justice Hugo L. Black, His Chambers Staff, and the Ku Klux Klan Controversy of 1937 (SCHS).
  

• ICYMI: The University of Mississippi opposes a CRT ban (Mississippi Free Press). Deschutes County [Oregon] Circuit Court honors Black History Month (ktvz.com).
  

• 
  Update: "This is a book about textiles and the people who owned them. It is also a book about rights and the people who lacked them. Sound intriguing? It is."  Laura F. Edwards’s Only the Clothes on Her Back: Clothing and the Hidden History of Power in the Nineteenth-Century United States is reviewed in WaPo.
  

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.

Empires of Vice: A First Book with Multiple Audiences

It is a pleasure to contribute to the Legal History Blog. My first book, entitled Empires of Vice: The Rise of Opium Prohibition across Southeast Asia was published recently. Throughout the month of June, I’ll be sharing a set of posts about this book, dwelling on the multiple audiences that I hope it may “speak” to.

As Dan Ernst mentioned in his kind introduction, I received my Ph.D. in political science, currently teach at an interdisciplinary school oriented toward international affairs and policy, and have written a book in the Histories of Economic Life series of Princeton University Press. Like many interdisciplinary creatures, I find it both exciting and challenging to articulate how and why my work matters to whom.

Empires of Vice is a book for political scientists, historians, specialists of Asian Studies, and policy makers, in overlapping but different ways. It is a book about the inner life of a bureaucratic state (that urges political scientists to be more curious about how the nitty-gritty ways that states actually govern). It is also a book about the anti-opium turn of multiple European empires across Southeast Asia during the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries (that gives reasons for historians to pay more attention to a place and process of change often run roughshod over in prevailing narratives about empires and opium that focus mainly on the British empire, India, and China). And Empires of Vice is also a book about how colonial legacies have shaped Southeast Asia's illicit economies and punitive drug laws today, which more broadly addresses normative challenges and policy implications for transnational problem-solving. 

Each of my posts will elaborate on these points. In addition, I plan to incorporate brief reflections on the practical aspects of “speaking” to different audiences in our current moment.

I write a time when the COVID-19 epidemic continues to unfold globally, making travel, in-person gatherings, conferences, and many conventional ways of presenting scholarship not possible. It is also an impassioned time in the United States where I live, with resounding calls for social change, anxious aspirations for and collective action aimed at profoundly refashioning the existing order. It thus feels like an especially difficult and selfish time to have a new book out. At the same time, it is also feels like an especially important time to think about alternative modes of virtual presentation that may very well become a new norm; to figure out ways to be clear about relevance, in the sense of being explicit about when and how one’s scholarship may (or may not) speak to ongoing events without detracting from its value. 

I have benefitted immensely from wonderful examples of scholars sharing their new books through podcasts (see Claire Edington’s Beyond the Asylum with the New Books Network), online interviews (see Durba Mitra’s Indian Sex Life with Notches), blogposts (see Jill Hasday’s Intimate Lies and the Law with the Legal History Blog) and other forms of virtual presentation (see this online book party for Arunabh Ghosh’s Making it Count). I hope to add to this growing digital archive, by sharing what I wish I had known in advance of some of the podcasts, interviews, short essays that I have done recently: seemingly mundane practical details that ended up mattering a lot for expressing ideas and communicating through different types of media (zoom, phone chats, written scripts), with different types of interlocutors (interviewers as my own students, colleagues, total strangers), and for different audiences (across disciplines and beyond the academy). I’ll also be linking to recently published books by people I admire, especially first-time authors in legal history, histories of empire, political science, and Southeast Asian studies.

I’ll wrap up this first post with an invitation. I’d love to learn from others with first books with multiple audiences, and also welcome suggestions from more seasoned authors and colleagues with more experience ushering their books into the virtual world. 

In my next post, I’ll be writing with legal historians in mind as an audience, highlighting how Empires of Vice explores the inner life of bureaucracies and its use of administrative archives for British and French colonial opium monopolies across Southeast Asia. I’ll also dwell on preparing for my interview with The Docket, the digital imprint of Law and History Review. 

—Diana Kim

Author’s Photograph.
Card Catalogue at Archives nationales d’outre-mer (Aix-en-Provence, France)

Cheesman on the Rule of Law & Burma

In 2016, Nick Cheesman, Australian National University published "Rule-of-law Lineages in Colonial and Early Post-colonial Burma" in Modern Asian Studies 50:2, 564-601. Here is the abstract:

These days the rule of law is often invoked in Burma. Although its contemporary
salience is partly a consequence of recent global trends, the rule of law also has
lineages in the country’s colonial and early post-colonial periods. To examine
these lineages, this article distinguishes between its procedural and substantive
conceptions. Whereas the latter conception recognizes the subjects of law as
freely associating equals, the former is compatible with a range of political
practices, including those that are undemocratic. The records of decisions in
criminal cases before Burma’s superior courts during the period of British
domination suggest that some semblance of procedural rule of law did exist, and
that it was compatible with the rule of colonial difference. Out of this procedural
rule of law a nascent, substantive type emerged during the early years of
democratic life in the post-colony, before the onset of military dictatorship. The
article concludes that more effort to structure interpretations of the rule of law in
history might better enable discussion about the concept’s continued relevance.