Boats in a Storm: Law, Migration, and Decolonization in South and Southeast Asia, 1942-1962

Boats in a Storm explores the legal struggles of migrants to retain their traditional rhythms and patterns of life, illustrating how they experienced citizenship and decolonization. It challenges the notion that static national identities and loyalties had emerged, fully formed and unblemished by migrant pasts, in the aftermath of empires.

Format: Hardback
Length: 308 pages
Publication date: 22 August 2023
Publisher: Stanford University Press

Before World War II, traders, merchants, financiers, and laborers regularly traveled between locations on the Indian Ocean, exchanging goods, providing credit, and seeking employment. The war altered all of this, as India, Burma, Ceylon, and Malaya gained independence from the British empire. Boats in a Storm focuses on the legal battles of migrants to preserve their traditional rhythms and patterns of life, demonstrating 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.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781503632981