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Renisa Mawani, Across Oceans of Law: The Komagata Maru and Jurisdiction in the Time of Empire (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018) pp 352. Paperback: $28.95

On May 23 1914, the steamship Komagata Maru arrived in Canadian waters, carrying 376 passengers from the Punjab province of British India. The aspiring migrants, who had endured an arduous journey across the Pacific Ocean (and had boarded from diverse ports such as Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Yokohama), quickly found that the British Dominion of Canada was not a very welcoming place. Only 24 passengers were admitted into Canada; the other 352, along with the ship they occupied, were forced to return to India, where a bloody homecoming awaited them. Renisa Mawani’s Across Oceans of Law is a masterful portrait of the Komagata Maru “incident,” which revolves around a Punjabi British subject called Gurdip Singh. Mawani uses the “ocean as method” – here, employed through a reading of sea space through the writings of Hugo Grotius and Carl Schmitt, ship logs and manifests, political commentary in newspapers of the time, and the memoirs of Singh himself – to chart the spatial and legal repercussions of Singh’s emancipatory desire to operate an Indian-owned steamship company. This desire resulted in an interrogation and disruption of the “imperial reach that imposed spatial, temporal, and racial inscriptions across the earth.” Although Mawani divides her book across five different aspects of the event, her book consistently engages with three themes as the narrative unfolds. The first involves contestations, of which the distinction between the sea as a “free space” (mare liberum) and a “closed space” (mare clausum) is central. In reading Grotius and Schmitt together, Mawani elides how the British Empire’s mastery of trans-oceanic trade – including a so-called “pivot” from slavery to indentured