Unmooring the Komagata Maru

Unmooring the Komagata Maru
Author: Rita Dhamoon
Publisher: UBC Press
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2019-08-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0774860685

In 1914, the SS Komagata Maru crossed oceans and jurisdictions to arrive at the west coast of Canada. Canadian officials, calling on legislative acts designed to limit the immigration of Indians, detained the ship for two months in Vancouver Harbour. Most of the 376 passengers were then forcibly returned to India. Unmooring the Komagata Maru challenges conventional Canadian historical accounts by drawing from multiple disciplines and fields to consider the international and colonial dimensions of the voyage. By situating the history of South Asians in Canada in a global-imperial context, this volume emphasizes the ways in which the Komagata Maru incident is related to issues of colonialism more generally. The contributors offer a critical reading of Canadian multiculturalism through past events and their commemoration. Ultimately, they caution against narratives that present the ship’s journey as a dark moment in the history of a redeemed nation. Unmooring the Komagata Maru demonstrates that, a hundred years later, the voyage of the Komagata Maru has yet to reach its conclusion.

Across Oceans of Law

Across Oceans of Law
Author: Renisa Mawani
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2018-08-09
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0822372126

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.

The Voyage of the Komagata Maru

The Voyage of the Komagata Maru
Author: Hugh J. M. Johnston
Publisher: UBC Press
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2014-04-22
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0774825499

This new and expanded edition offers the most thoroughly researched account of the notorious Komagata Maru incident. The event centres on the ship's nearly four hundred Punjabi passengers, who sought entry into Canada at Vancouver in the summer of 1914, only to be chased away by a Canadian warship. This story became a symbol of prejudicial immigration policies, which Canadians today reject, and served to fuel the emerging anti-British movement in India. It deserves the careful re-examination it gets in this thoroughly updated edition that provides a contemporary perspective on a defining moment in Canadian, British Empire, and Indian history.

Mooring the Global Archive

Mooring the Global Archive
Author: Martin Dusinberre
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 327
Release: 2023-09-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1009346504

The first in-depth analysis of archival methodologies in the writing of global history, focused on a Japanese migrant steamship in the 1880s-90s. Tracing the ship's journeys between Japan, Hawai'i, Southeast Asia and Australia, Martin Dusinberre analyses labour migration, settler colonialism and resource extraction in the Asia-Pacific world.

Theorizing Local Migration Law and Governance

Theorizing Local Migration Law and Governance
Author: Moritz Baumgärtel
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 363
Release: 2022-09-22
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1316517845

In many regions around the world, the governance of migration increasingly involves local authorities and actors. This edited volume introduces theoretical contributions that, departing from the 'local turn' in migration studies, highlight the distinct role that legal processes, debates, and instruments play in driving this development. Drawing on historical and contemporary case studies, it demonstrates how paying closer analytical attention to legal questions reveals the inherent tensions and contradictions of migration governance. By investigating socio-legal phenomena such as sanctuary jurisdictions, it further explores how the law structures ongoing processes of (re)scaling in this domain. Beyond offering conceptual and empirical discussions of local migration governance, this volume also directly confronts the pressing normative questions that follow from the growing involvement of local authorities and actors. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Revolutionary Pasts

Revolutionary Pasts
Author: Ali Raza
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2020-04-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108481841

Raza traces the anti-colonial struggles of Indian revolutionaries in the context of Communist Internationalism during the last decades of the British Raj.

Viapolitics

Viapolitics
Author: William Walters
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 187
Release: 2021-11-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1478021594

Vehicles, their infrastructures, and the environments they traverse are fundamental to the movement of migrants and states' attempts to govern them. This volume's contributors use the concept of viapolitics to name and foreground this contested entanglement and examine the politics of migration and bordering across a range of sites. They show how these elements constitute a key site of knowledge and struggle in migratory processes and offer a privileged vantage point from which to interrogate practices of mobility and systems of control in their deeper histories and wider geographic connections. This transdisciplinary group of scholars explores a set of empirically rich and diverse cases: from the Spanish and European authorities' attempts to control migrants' entire trajectories to infrastructures of escort of Indonesian labor migrants; from deportation train cars in the 1920s United States to contemporary stowaways at sea; from illegalized migrants walking across treacherous Alpine mountain passes to aerial geographies of deportation. Throughout, Viapolitics interrogates anew the phenomenon called “migration,” questioning how different forms of contentious mobility are experienced, policed, and contested. Contributors. Ethan Blue, Maribel Casas-Cortes, Julie Y. Chu, Sebastian Cobarrubias, Glenda Garelli, Charles Heller, Sabine Hess, Bernd Kasparek, Clara Lecadet, Johan Lindquist, Renisa Mawani, Lorenzo Pezzani, Ranabir Samaddar, Amaha Senu, Martina Tazzioli, William Walters

Untied Kingdom

Untied Kingdom
Author: Stuart Ward
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 703
Release: 2023-02-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107145996

A panoramic history uncovering the demise of Britishness as a global civic idea since the Second World War.

Canada and Colonialism

Canada and Colonialism
Author: Jim Reynolds
Publisher: Purich Books
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2024-05-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0774880961

Colonialism endures in Canada today. Dismantling it requires an understanding of how colonialism operated across the British Empire and why Canada’s colonial experience was unique. Whereas colonies such as India were ruled through despotism and violence, Canada’s white settler population governed itself while oppressing the Indigenous peoples whose lands they were on. Canada and Colonialism shows that Canadians’ support for colonial rule – both at home and abroad – is the reason colonialism remains entrenched in Canadian law and society today. Author Jim Reynolds presents a truly compelling account of Canada’s colonial coming of age and its impacts on Indigenous peoples, including the settler-led internal colonialism behind the Indian Act and those who enforced it. As one of the nation’s leading experts in Aboriginal law, Reynolds provides a vital accounting of the historical underpinnings and contemporary challenges the nation must address to reconcile with Indigenous peoples and move toward decolonization.