Law’s terra, race, and the will to empire

Abstract

ABSTRACT Mawani has penned a breathtaking book that challenges the terra-centric understanding of modern (Western) law through an anti-colonial narrative of a ship, its passengers, and the ambitiously defiant journey they took together across the timespace of the erstwhile British Empire. Five years after its publication, this book review seeks to revisit this narrative and distinguish Mawani's work as pathbreaking for the theorisation of law at a planetary scale in ways that also account for the 'non-human' and 'more-than-human' relations. Unlike many newer strands of scholarship seeking to theorise more-than-human dimensions of law- be it in ecological or technological contexts- Mawani's novel 'oceans as method' approach refuses to erase the centrality of racialised violence to the legal empire, including in law's foundational concepts like time, jurisdiction, object and subject. The last section offers some reflections on how engagements with the contexts of caste could have rendered the work richer.