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Read in the August issue of the IJMH (requires subscription) the review by Wouter Raaijmakers of An Empire of Laws: Legal Pluralism in British Colonial Policy by Christian R. Burset

For many years, Britain tried to impose its own laws on the peoples it conquered, and English common law usually followed the Union Jack. But the common law became less common after Britain emerged from the Seven Years’ War (1754–63) as the world’s most powerful empire. At that point, imperial policymakers adopted a strategy of legal pluralism: some colonies remained under English law, while others, including parts of India and former French territories in North America, retained much of their previous legal regimes.

As legal historian Christian R. Burset argues, determining how much English law a colony received depended on what kind of colony Britain wanted to create. Policymakers thought English law could turn any territory into an anglicized, commercial colony; legal pluralism, in contrast, would ensure a colony’s economic and political subordination. Britain’s turn to legal pluralism thus reflected the victory of a new vision of empire—authoritarian, extractive, and tolerant—over more assimilationist and egalitarian alternatives. Among other implications, this helps explain American colonists’ reverence for the common law: it expressed and preserved their equal status in the empire. This book, the first empire-wide overview of law as an instrument of policy in the eighteenth-century British Empire, offers an imaginative rethinking of the relationship between tolerance and empire.

Book Details

Book Review: An Empire of Laws: Legal Pluralism in British Colonial Policy by Christian R. Burset – Wouter Raaijmakers, 2025

Read in the August issue of the IJMH (requires subscription) the review by Gianamar Giovannetti-Singh of “Reimagining the Globe and Cultural Exchange: The East Asian Legacies of Matteo Ricci’s World Map” by Laura Hostetler, ed.

How did Asia come to be represented on European World maps? When and how did Asian Countries adopt a continental system for understanding the world? How did countries with disparate mapping traditions come to share a basic understanding and vision of the globe?

This series of essays organized into sections on Jesuit Circuits of Communication and Publication; Jesuit World Maps in Chinese; Reverberations of Matteo Ricci’s Maps in East Asia; and Reflections on the Curation of Cartographic Knowledge, go a long way toward answering these questions about the shaping of our modern understandings of the world.

https://brill.com/edcollbook-oa/title/68461

https://journals.sagepub.com/…/10.1177/08438714251355546

Read in the August issue of the IJMH (requires subscription) the text by T. Anas Babu: “When imārat and tijārat combined: The varied career of Taqī al-Dīn al-Tibi on the Coromandel Coast”

Arab and Persian merchants were actors in the lucrative Indian Ocean trade, at least from the twelfth century until their expulsion by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century. They did not remain as mere itinerant traders; instead, they incorporated themselves into state-building and faith-related networks. This article investigates Arab and Persian engagements on India’s Coromandel Coast, highlighting the varied career of a renowned expatriate Muslim merchant, Taqī al-Dīn al-Tibi, in ‘trade’ (tijārat) and ‘administration’ (imārat) during the early medieval period. It argues that the Muslim merchants who settled along the Coromandel Coast wielded substantial influence in the Indian Ocean trade, and that the notion of trade and administration was well established on the early medieval Coromandel Coast.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/08438714251353485

Read in the May 2025 issue of the IJMH (requires subscription) the review by Nathan Richards of “Ready to Dive: Five Decades of Adventure in the Abyss” by Curt Newport

https://doi.org/10.1177/08438714251331864

In Ready to Dive, Curt Newport describes his role in some of the most daring and consequential deep ocean search and recovery operations of our time. Newport was there on the front lines and in the trenches, rigging lift lines, piloting underwater vehicles, and dealing with the carnage following both military and civilian plane crashes. Starting with his life as the son of a US Army aviator during various international postings before covering his conflicts with his father during the turbulent 1960s, the book details how he got into the subsea field. In a career lasting nearly fifty years, probing waters deeper than three miles, Newport describes unwinding passenger clothing from submersible propellers during the Air India salvage, recovering tons of volatile fuel–laden solid rocket motor parts from the Space Shuttle Challenger, thumbing through the wallet of a young girl lost during the crash of TWA Flight 800, and deciphering the navigational mystery of the USS Indianapolis. Ready to Dive is a gritty, blunt, and real firsthand subsea account unlike any other.

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Read in the May 2025 issue of the IJMH (requires subscription) the review by Amy Parsons of “Coral Lives: Literature, Labor, and the Making of America” by Michele Currie Navakas

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/08438714251331889

Today, coral and the human-caused threats to coral reef ecosystems symbolize our ongoing planetary crisis. In the nineteenth century, coral represented something else; as a recurring motif in American literature and culture, it shaped popular ideas about human society and politics. In Coral Lives, Michele Currie Navakas tells the story of coral as an essential element of the marine ecosystem, a cherished personal ornament, a global commodity, and a powerful political metaphor. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including works by such writers as Sarah Josepha Hale, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and George Washington Cable, Navakas shows how coral once helped Americans to recognize both the potential and the limits of interdependence—to imagine that their society could grow, like a coral reef, by sustaining rather than displacing others.

Navakas shows how coral became deeply entwined with the histories of slavery, wage labor, and women’s reproductive and domestic work. If coral seemed to some nineteenth-century American writers to be a metaphor for a truly just collective society, it also showed them, by analogy, that society can seem most robust precisely when it is in fact most unfree for the laborers sustaining it. Navakas’s trailblazing cultural history reveals that coral has long been conceptually indispensable to humans, and its loss is more than biological. Without it, we lose some of our most complex political imaginings, recognitions, reckonings, and longings.

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691240114/coral-lives

Read in the May 2025 issue of the IJMH (requires subscription) the review by Joel J. Sokolsky of “Spy Ships: One Hundred Years of Intelligence Collection by Ships and Submarines” by Norman Polmar and Lee J. Mathers

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/08438714251331891

Almost from the first days of seafaring, men have used ships for “spying” and intelligence collection. Since early in the twentieth century, with the technological advancements of radio and radar, the U.S. Navy and other government agencies and many other navies have used increasingly specialized ships and submarines to ferret out the secrets of other nations. The United States and the Soviet Union/Russia have been the leaders in those efforts, especially during the forty-five years of the Cold War. But, as Norman Polmar and Lee J. Mathers reveal, so has China, which has become a major maritime power in the twenty-first century, with special interests in the South China Sea and with increasing hostility toward the United States.

Through extensive, meticulous research and through the lens of such notorious spy ship events as the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty, the North Korean capture of the USS Pueblo, and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s success in clandestinely salvaging part of a Soviet submarine with the Hughes Glomar Explorer, Spy Ships is a fascinating and valuable resource for understanding maritime intelligence collection and what we have learned from it.

https://www.harvard.com/book/9781640124752

Read in the May 2025 issue of the IJMH (requires subscription) the article by Sabrina Hasan on “An insight on the role and response of International Maritime Organization and classification societies in regulating maritime autonomous surface ships”

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/08438714251325206

This paper explores the evolving dynamics between the International Maritime Organization (IMO) and classification societies in response to the challenges posed by Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships (MASS). The study highlights the IMO’s regulatory efforts, including the scoping exercises by the Maritime Safety Committee and Legal Committee, and navigates the complexities of amending conventions, particularly in response to Article 94 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea concerning the elimination of manning requirements for fully autonomous ships. Emphasising the adaptability of IMO regulations to MASS, the paper discusses potential conflicts and advocates for a comprehensive review to harmonise and comply with diverse impacts. In conclusion, the paper emphasises the crucial collaboration between IMO and Classification Societies in proactively regulating autonomous shipping.

Read in the May 2025 issue of the IJMH (requires subscription) the review by Diego Javier of “Piracy and the Making of the Spanish Pacific World” by Kristie Flannery

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/08438714251331828

Piracy and the Making of the Spanish Pacific World offers a new interpretation of Spanish colonial rule in the Philippine islands. Drawing on the rich archives of Spain’s Asian empire, Kristie Patricia Flannery reveals that Spanish colonial officials and Catholic missionaries forged alliances with Indigenous Filipinos and Chinese migrant settlers in the Southeast Asian archipelago to wage war against waves of pirates, including massive Chinese pirate fleets, Muslim pirates from the Sulu Zone, and even the British fleet that attacked at the height of the Seven Years’ War. Anti-piracy alliances made Spanish colonial rule resilient to both external shocks and internal revolts that shook the colony to its core.

This revisionist study complicates the assumption that empire was imposed on Filipinos with brute force alone. Rather, anti-piracy also shaped the politics of belonging in the colonial Philippines. Real and imagined pirate threats especially influenced the fate and fortunes of Chinese migrants in the islands. They triggered genocidal massacres of the Chinese at some junctures, and at others facilitated Chinese integration into the Catholic nation as loyal vassals.

Piracy and the Making of the Spanish Pacific World demonstrates that piracy is key to explaining the surprising longevity of Spain’s Asian empire, which, unlike Spanish colonial rule in the Americas, survived the Age of Revolutions and endured almost to the end of the nineteenth century. Moreover, it offers important new insight into piracy’s impact on the trajectory of globalization and European imperial expansion in maritime Asia.

Book Details

Read in the May 2025 issue of the IJMH (requires subscription) the review by Christos Giannatos of “Ordinary People, Extraordinary Times: Living the British Empire in Jamaica, 1756” by Sheryllyne Haggerty

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/08438714251331848

In October of 1756 Sarah Folkes wrote home to her children in London from Jamaica. Posted on the ship Europa, bound for London, her letter was one of around 350 that were never delivered due to an act of war; they remain together today in the National Archives in London.

In Ordinary People, Extraordinary Times Sheryllynne Haggerty closely reads and analyses this collection of correspondence, exploring the everyday lives of poor and middling whites, free people of colour, and the enslaved in mid-eighteenth-century Jamaica – Britain’s wealthiest colony of the time – at the start of the Seven Years’ War. This unique cache of letters brings to life both thoughts and behaviours that even today appear quite modern: concerns over money, surviving in a war-torn world, family squabbles, poor physical and mental health, and a desire to purchase fashionable consumer goods. The letters also offer a glimpse into the impact of British colonialism on the island; Jamaica was a violent, cruel, and deadly materialistic place dominated by slavery from which all free people benefited, and it is clear that the start of the Seven Years’ War heightened the precariousness of enslaved peoples’ lives. Jamaica may have been Britain’s Caribbean jewel, but its society was heterogeneous and fractured along racial and socioeconomic lines.
A rare study of microhistory, Ordinary People, Extraordinary Times paints a picture of daily life in Jamaica against the vast backdrop of transatlantic slavery, war, and the eighteenth-century British Empire.

https://www.mqup.ca/ordinary-people–extraordinary-times-products-9780228018513.php