ABSTRACT

This article investigates the journey of the Komagata Maru in 1914, and the multiple exclusions of its primarily Sikh passengers from various colonial jurisdictions, through the lenses of global and local legitimacy contestations across the British Empire at the beginning of the twentieth century. The paradox of its subjects’ mobility (i.e. accommodating the aspirations of ‘white-only’ self-governing colonies and disapproving the race-based exclusion of its ‘non-white’ subjects) had consumed the Empire for almost two decades. This contradiction necessitated justifications of exclusion that would be compatible with the liberal ideology of all subjects having equal rights and palatable to the political expediency considerations of different colonies. The transformation of the legal identities of the ship’s passengers from ‘farmers’ to ‘labourers’ to ‘seditionists’ during a short span of five months facilitated the institutionalisation of alternative logics of exclusion based on class and loyalty to the Empire. Through an in-depth study of an important episode in colonial history, this article attempts to foreground how intricate linkages among law, legitimacy and identity played out during a critical juncture for the British Empire.

摘要

这篇文章调查了驹形丸的旅程1914 年，以及通过 20 世纪初整个大英帝国的全球和地方合法性争论的镜头，其主要是锡克教徒的乘客被多次排除在不同的殖民管辖区之外。其臣民流动性的悖论（即适应“只有白人”自治殖民地的愿望，不赞成以种族为基础对其“非白人”臣民的排斥）已经消耗了帝国近二十年。这种矛盾需要排除的理由，这将与所有拥有平等权利的主体的自由意识形态相容，并适合不同殖民地的政治权宜考虑。在短短五个月的时间里，船上乘客的合法身份从“农民”到“劳工”再到“煽动叛乱分子”，促进了基于阶级和对帝国忠诚的替代性排斥逻辑的制度化。通过对殖民历史上一个重要事件的深入研究，本文试图突出大英帝国在关键时刻如何发挥法律、合法性和身份之间错综复杂的联系。