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

Ceci n'est pas un chameau

In writing my book Fluid Jurisdictions: Arabs and Colonial Law in Southeast Asia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020), I approach legal history as a series of ‘portals.’ Each legal system and each legal device opened up a world of possibilities. The more a legal system is used, the deeper the sovereign ruler’s jurisdictions and vice versa. Likewise, each legal device such as a power of attorney echoes other similar or commensurable devices such as a wakala across legal systems and cultures further extending its utility across different jurisdictions. A series of portals connected the western end of the Indian Ocean to the eastern end allowing users to jump across huge spaces to enact various actions ranging from transferring economic power to granting a divorce. By generating links tied to institutional legal bureaucracies between otherwise disjointed points, they broadened the orbits of economic production and family responsibility. The use of colonial legal portals in particular came at high cost for most people because colonial legal systems tend to hold people captive. Before going through a portal, one had options, but once one passed through a door to colonial jurisdictions, it was hard to leave for myriad reasons.

 

I marvel at how little was opaque when it came to law in the eyes of my historical actors - the diasporic Arabs who originated from Hadhramaut in Yemen who seemed to adeptly navigate English common law, Dutch civil law and colonial reformulations of Islamic law in Southeast Asia. They created a scattered accumulation of legal documentation which we inherit today that reveal new-fangled colonial legal systems at every turn that because laws differed from island to island even as they came under a single jurisdiction at times in the vast archipelago in Southeast Asia. Colonial subjects legal practitioners were creating and discovering their own legal systems in ‘real time.’ Just like how I dwell on laws, legal classifications, legal documents, these people in the past also took time to dwell on the same things in multiple languages and idioms with higher stakes of course. To dwell is the first step towards a commitment, a willingness to engage with something strange.

 

Although I eventually turned to legal history as the main framework for my book, my original question focuses on the spaces in Southeast Asia to illuminate what truly happened in specific locations with particular jurisdictions. My starting question a decade ago was “why did Southeast Asian port-cities whose histories are often exalted for being mixed remain ethnically and socio-economically so divisive?” For example, Muslim subjects (later citizens) were divided ethnically even when classified as one community by colonial and national bureaucracies. It is tempting perhaps to merely blame European colonialism for deepening societal rifts in many ways but this is inadequate. I became intent on discovering the exact contours of the relationship amongst colonial subjects within the new colonial environments in the nineteenth century. As I dug further in the archives, I found that the diasporic peoples I was tracing were rooting themselves in Southeast Asia, intertwining their roots with that of colonial jurisdictions which deepened over time with the added weight of subjects’ expectations. Territorial jurisdictions within maritime Southeast Asia became paramount in the stories I tell although personal jurisdictions tied to older forms of sovereignty still traveled within individuals who continued to make unexpected connections across vast geographical expanses under oppressive rule.

 

To open a door, to dwell, to take root – that is the history of law in the colonies.

In the photograph on the cover of my book is a life-sized camel with a jubilant expression made out of wood, cloth and possibly metal on wheels accompanying a procession of Arabs in Surabaya located in Java who were commemorating the inauguration of Dutch Queen Wilhelmina in 1898 whose portrait is on the left. The Arabs in the foreground had their swords drawn as was customary at parades, weddings and special occasions. Amongst them, I spotted one of my main historical actors, the Kapitan Arab (head of the Arabs) of the Surabaya Arab community from the Bobsaid clan, a name I have encountered only in Surabaya. Sech Hasan bin Abdulla Bobsaid stood apart from his community slightly in front of them with his face to the camera. Clearly, he was the one who led the Arab delegation at this parade, flanked by members of his community, and the ecstatic camel and more subdued elephant replicas. The camel embodies this new creature in town – colonial legal forms which were mobile, tractable, reimagined versions of older laws moving forward into the twentieth century. My blog posts this month will focus on other aspects of this phenomenon.

 --Nurfadzilah Yahaya

Klaaren on Citizenship & Nationality in South Africa

Jonathan Klaaren, University of the Witwatersrand published From Prohibited Immigrants to Citizens: The Origins of Citizenship and Nationality in South Africa with Sandy Shepherd in 2017. From the press:

Jonathan Klaaren blends legal and social history in this engaging account of early conceptions of South African citizenship.  He argues that distinctively South African notions of citizenship and nationality come out of the period 1897 to 1937, through legislation and official practices employing the key concept of ‘prohibited immigrant’ and seeking to regulate the mobility of three population groups:  African, Asian and European.   Further, he makes the case that the regulation and administration of immigrants from the Indian sub-continent, in particular, provided the basis for the vision and eventual reality of a unified, although structurally unequal, South African population.

This book fits into the growing field of Mobility Studies, which seeks to understand and document the migration of people both within and across national borders, while exploring the origins of those borders.  In addition to nationality and citizenship, it touches on African pass laws, the origins of the Public Protector, the scheme importing Chinese labour to the gold mines, the development of internal bureaucratic legality, and India-South Africa intra-imperial relations. 

With its attention to the role of law in state-building and its understanding of the central place of implementation and administrative law in migration policy, this book offers a distinctive focus on the relationship between migration and citizenship.

Praise for the book:

"While historical attention to the pre-apartheid era migration concentrates on Africans, especially miners, this book offers a compelling reminder of the interconnections between Asian and African mobility." –Audie Klotz

Here is the Table of Contents:
 

Chapter 1 -- South African citizenship in context

Chapter 2 – Early practices of regulating mobility

Chapter 3 – The rise of borders

Chapter 4 -- Union, the Act and the Registrar of Asiatics, 1907-1914

Chapter 5 – Nationalisation of the immigration bureaucracy, 1914-1927

Chapter 6 -- African mobility and bureaucracy, 1911-1927

Chapter 7 -- The Commissioner’s population, 1927-1937

Chapter 8 – One official South Africa

Chapter 9 – Enacting nationality, 1927-1937

Chapter 10 – South African citizenship and the way forward

Further information is available here.

Weekend Roundup

• The latest op-eds in the Washington Post's Made by History series includes one by Christopher W. Schmidt, Chicago-Kent Law, on civil rights and the Department of Health and Human Services' initiative to "protect people who refuse to perform certain medical procedures that conflict with their religious commitments, such as abortions, sterilization or assisted suicide." 

• In DC Theatre Scene, Kate Colwell reviews the play Sovereignty, written by Mary Kathryn Nagle and performed at Washington’s Arena Stage theater.  "The story follows the present-day efforts of Sarah Polson (Kyla Garcia), a fiercely intelligent Cherokee lawyer, to restore Cherokee Nation jurisdictional rights to prosecute non-Native abusers of Cherokee women on ancestral lands through Cherokee Law. In parallel with her story, the audience follows the legal efforts of Sarah’s ancestor, John Ridge, in the 1830s to defend the sovereignty of his people to uphold their laws and Constitution.”  More. 

• The Journal of American History Podcast returns with a special pod devoted to Puerto Rico and the Puerto Rican diaspora. 

• Michael Meltsner, Northeastern University School of Law, has posted a short chapter from his memoir recounting a consultation with the stand-up comedian Lenny Bruce.

• And, speaking of comedy, as much as we enjoy the political humor of late-night talk show hosts, the most incisive satirists are still editorial cartoonists.
  

• ICYMI: LHB Guest Blogger Mary Ziegler, professor of law at Florida State University, had an op-ed in the New York Times, Roe v. Wade Was About More Than Abortion.  Retired Tasmanian Supreme Court librarian Dorothy Shea has been preserving an invaluable cache of that Australian state’s early legislation.  Donald A. Ritchie discussed Historians and Government Shutdowns.  (Which reminds me: thank you, Patrick Kerwin of the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress for hosting my New Deal Legal History Seminar Thursday!  Harlan Stone's case file in Gobitis, rows upon rows of NAACP papers, Walt Whitman's walking stick, and Thomas Jefferson's hair!!  DRE)

• Emory Law's spring 2018 Faculty Colloquium Series includes legal history papers.

• A UK-based project on inheritance practices among Indian migrants to Britain includes a fully funded Master's and PhD studentship. Details here. 

• Over at JOTWELL, Rosalind Dixon (University of New South Wales) has posted an admiring review of K. Sabeel Rahman's Democracy Against Domination.

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