Reclamation

One thing peculiar about land is that we are predisposed to encounter it as if it was always there, seemingly naturalized from the outset without a beginning. Because histories are built upon land, its own history is obscured by later infrastructure, quickly escalating the complexity of the territory. My current book project tentatively titled Overflow - History of Land Reclamation in the British Empire focuses on the history of seaward land reclamation which entails the formation of artificial land surfaces that extend outwards over the sea using advanced geo-engineering techniques. I was motivated by the avid land reclamation that occurred in Singapore which increased in land size by 23% from 587 square kilometers in 1974 to 725 square kilometers today (slightly larger than DC metropolitan area). 

Intensive land reclamation transformed coastal areas from the late nineteenth century. Colonial governments were initially drawn to the supposed lack of ambiguity concerning the status of reclaimed land - there was little possibility of indigenous inhabitants or prior landowners of reclaimed territory so authorities were theoretically free to plan without any resistance. A territorial blank slate was the ultimate goal of colonial officials after all. But the prohibitive costs of land reclamation projects make it a last resort in expanding territory. While local colonial governments eagerly embarked on such projects, higher authorities within the imperial hierarchy based in London often asked “Is this really necessary? and “could something else be done instead?” to ensure that cheaper options were explored first. Land reclamation efforts were extremely expensive, and often completely debt-financed and thus formed risky undertakings involving huge volumes of sand, specialized equipment and vehicles, costly research into the suitability of soil and sand with its particular characteristics, labour, logistical coordination, and resettlement of people who lived in areas adjacent to reclamation sites. In Hong Kong, private enterprise was historically powerful and initiated reclamation projects. Armenian businessman Catchick Paul Chater founded property developer company Hong Kong Land which reclaimed 59 acres of land in the colony between 1889 and 1903 for example. The interests of long-established dock companies such as Butterfield and Swire, and Jardine and Matheson were aligned with that of the colonial government in the late nineteenth century although they drifted apart in the first half of the twentieth century. While businesses entrenched themselves in the area of the port, successive government administrations sometimes differed greatly from their predecessors to the extent of breaking ranks with previous policies. In addition, while the cost of reclamation was relatively low during the early years since landfill was made up of rock and soil found in abundance near sites, it became progressively expensive because fills are not easily available anymore and the sea to be reclaimed was deeper. The Admiralty too weighed in, anxious about encroachment to existing dockyard facilities. 

As land reclamation became popular throughout Empire, the coastal feature known as the foreshore which is neither wet nor always dry due to the ebb and flow of the incoming tide gained prominence. As a buffer zone, the foreshore was valuable because it provided entry to the sea. From 1830s onwards, the British government granted ownership rights to foreshores in parts of the British Isles opening them up further to construction and development but these rights were suspended in Empire. Historically, denizens of undeveloped waterfronts had survived and thrived on it because they occupied cheap land. Increasingly from the late nineteenth century onwards, the foreshore became more prized throughout Empire as a gateway to land reclamation which brought a new enemy on the horizon for residents in coastal regions - coastal development. Even when they were compensated by government authorities, rising land prices post-reclamation meant that they were unable to buy their own property back in order to live there again. Something about control over watery spaces, a relatively new form of domination, resists risk assessment necessary for compensation requests. This “hydroborder,” to borrow Isabel Hofmeyr’s term, “where the ‘normal’ anxieties of the boundary were exacerbated by ecological uncertainty” serves as the fulcrum for change.

Hofmeyr, Isabel. “Provisional Notes on Hydrocolonialism.” English Language Notes. 57, 1 (April 2019): 11-20.

--Nurfadzilah Yahaya

Dingle's Conversations with Prichard

Lesley Dingle, University of Cambridge, has posted Conversations with Michael J. Prichard: The Fun of Legal History and the Triumph of Research Over Administration:

Michael Prichard was born before the Second world war and lived through the bombing and destruction of much of London. When he entered university in 1945, King’s College London had reoccupied its old quarters in the badly-damaged Somerset House, and along with LSE and UCL had pooled teaching resources to overcome staff shortages and accommodation damage. This inadvertently gave Michael a rich pool of mentors upon which to found his career, and who served him well in later years. He entered Queens’ College Cambridge in 1948 and experienced the unique post-war phenomena of the “returning warriors”, which continued, along with the “weekenders”, when he became a fellow at Gonville & Caius in 1950. Here he has remained, and is still a Fellow, seventy years later.

Michael Prichard (Squire Law Library)

His legacy is a fund of memories of a life-long journey through changing landscapes of legal research, teaching, and college and faculty administration. I first interviewed Michael for the Eminent Scholars Archive in 2012, where his biography and general academic reminiscences are set forth. I now revisit aspects of these, following a conversation I had with David Yale for ESA in November 2019. David was Michael’s career-long colleague, and his interview shone new light on their decades of joint endeavour unravelling the development of maritime law in the British Isles. Shortly after David’s reminder of the magnitude of their project, an encounter with Professor David Ibbetson, and most-recently a meeting with Michael, now in his 93rd year, have spurred me to summarise particular aspects of Michael’s varied research projects. In the process, I shall emphasise the overall sense of adventure, and enjoyment - in short “fun”, with which he explored the history and jurisdictional intricacies of the Admiralty Court (jointly with David Yale), presented his enlightened insights into the evolution of aspects of tort law, and explained his research of the few esoteric conundrums in which a retiree was able to indulge.

--Dan Ernst

Mawani on Oceans of Law

Renisa Mawani, University of British Columbia, has published Across Oceans of Law: The Komagata Maru and Jurisdiction in the Time of Empire with Duke University Press. From the publisher: 

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.

Praise for the book:

“Charting the 1914 voyage of the SS Komagata Maru and focusing on the sea, the ship, the manifest, the indigenous, and the fugitive, Renisa Mawani makes a compelling case against the European myth of the ‘free sea.’ Arguing for a new ‘ocean as method’ and foregrounding the co-emergence of maritime law and the policing of immigration, this book will rightly be seen as a legal and historical tour de force.” -Gaurav Desai

“This beautifully written and richly illustrated book provides a new global and oceanic history perspective on the journey of the Komagata Maru. Ranging across theories of law, time, and space, Renisa Mawani places an event limited in time and scale into some of the large questions and themes of history: migration, mobility, maritime jurisdiction, race, legal rights, and anticolonial radicalism.”-Clare Anderson

Further information is available here.

A conversation between Bishara and Seng

In April, Comparative Studies in Society and History hosted an online exchange between two of its authors writing about law on opposite sides of the Indian Ocean. Here's the opening set-up for a conversation between Fahad Bishara, University of Virginia and Guo-Quan Seng, Cornell University:

LEGAL ANOMALY

FAHAD AHMAD BISHARA, “‘No country but the ocean”: Reading International Law from the Deck of an Indian Ocean Dhow, ca. 1900”

GUO-QUAN SENG, “The Gender Politics of Confucian Family Law: Contracts, Credit, and Creole Chinese Bilateral Kinship in Dutch Colonial Java (1850s–1900)”


In “No country but the ocean”: Reading International Law from the Deck of an Indian Ocean Dhow, ca. 1900,” Fahad Ahmad Bishara considers the legal imaginaries of Indian Ocean mariners sailing out of the port of Sur, on the Arabian Peninsula. Maritime legal culture entailed a domestication and vernacularization of international law, not least in the ways it was materially manifested in flags and, for these captains, efficacious French documents (titres). These objects-at-sea extended legal regimes of the land, but also refracted and transformed them to captains’ own idiosyncratic purposes. Flags and documents were used to foment exchanges far beyond what they actually secured or promised; for example, titres were freely transferred from one ship, and sailor, to another. Bishara recounts a microhistory of a 1905 court case of Muscat-based dhows suspected of slave-trading, arbitrated at the Hague. The essay reveals the affordances and limits presented to seafarers sailing under a French flag and bearing French papers, though on a mostly British sea. At the same time, it highlights the processes by which dhow captains from Sur appropriated these imperial technologies and grounded them in their own world, framing their encounter with the British navy as the latest in a long string of imperial entanglements at sea, and anchoring the French titres in a regional regime of safe-conduct passes.

Attending to a different form of legal anomaly, Guo-Quan Seng’s essay, “The Gender Politics of Confucian Family Law: Contracts, Credit, and Creole Chinese Bilateral Kinship in Dutch Colonial Java (1850s–1900)” documents the extraordinary economic power enjoyed by creole Chinese women in nineteenth-century Java. These women possessed inheritance rights and directed their household economies, often retaining substantial wealth independent from husbands’ debts or other family liabilities. Beginning in the 1860s, though, Dutch officials began to administer Chinese family law in the colonial courts, and they did so relying on abstract ideals of Confucianist ethics grounded in Sinological studies and formalist textual interpretations. Confucianist legal doctrines of the male as natural head of the household began to inform Dutch legal norms. As a result, by the 1880s women’s autonomous wealth was made vulnerable to husbands’ debt and obligations. Seng shows that Dutch Confucianism, installed in the name of Chinese “tradition,” deprived creole Chinese women of legal rights that they had long enjoyed in actual tradition and practice.

Follow the rest of the conversation here.

Margolies & McClure on Transnational Frontiers

Edited by Jaime Moreno Tejada (Chulalongkorn University, Thailand) and Bradley Tatar (UNIST, South Korea), Transnational Frontiers of Asia and Latin America since 1800 (Routledge, 2017) includes two articles of legal historical interest.

The first is by Daniel S. Margolies, Virginia Wesleyan College: "Spatiality, jurisdiction, and sovereignty in early Latin American approaches to the Law of the Sea," 85-97. An excerpt:

Jurisdictional claims over oceanic spaces in the immediate postwar period deserve close attention, since the oceanic spaces proximate to sovereign coastlines were a central focus of global competition for control of seabed resources and the ability to construct and regulate the overall jurisdictional order of the post-World War II world system. Latin American nations were at the center of this moment of political-economic competition and legal innovation, particularly Mexico, Argentina, Chile, and Peru. These nations individually and forcefully pursued expansive sovereignty and jurisdictional claims on the offshore continental shelf....The purpose of this chapter is to explore the contingent involvement of...Latin American states in this project of reconceptualizing and restructuring global ocean spaces as new varieties of sovereign and jurisdictional space, or what can be conceptualized as new or freshly expanded state space. 

The second article is by Alastair McClure, McGill University: "State building and problematic geopolitical spaces in South Asia: The Himalayas and the extradition treaty of 1855," 98-110. A passage from the opening:

In the midst of...state building drives of the nineteenth century, the Himalayan border between colonial India and Nepal...remained a relatively unmanageable terrain...[As] ruling powers began to take steps towards modern statehood, the protection of trade, control of movement, and concerns surrounding rebellious networks became increasingly important issues. Once it was clear that neat lines of sovereignty could not be drawn across the Himalayan border, the region became a site of power play between these emerging neighboring states and the individuals that transgressed the thresholds. These issues of security and power consistently spilled over ill-defined boundaries as criminals and men of "bad character" resided in or traveled through this borderland to escape punishment....Piecing together information from the correspondence between the Resident of Nepal and the British Government of India, this chapter seeks to offer insight into the "specific cultures of governance" possessed by these states...The chapter will seek to outline how the priorities of Nepal and colonial India converged and clashed through attempts to pacify this region, particularly in relation to the formation of laws of extradition and the policing and maintenance of their borders.

Further information on the book is available here and on Google Books here. 

Shammas and Mancall on the Sea

An edited volume by Peter C. Mancall and Carole Shammas (both of the University of Southern California), Governing the Sea in the Early Modern Era:Essays in Honor of Robert C. Ritchie (Huntington Library) came out last year. From the publisher:

Early modern European governments clashed over laws governing the sea—an environment that featured watery borders, rampant piracy, the threat of free trade, and the large-scale transportation of human cargo. The essays in this volume explore how the exploitation of the oceans changed the institution of slavery, long-distance trade, property crime, the environment, literature, and memory, from medieval times to the nineteenth century.

The Table of Contents is available here, and here is further information about the book.