Archiving Sovereignty: Law, History, Violence. By Stewart Motha. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018.

• Date: 01 June 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12404
• Published date: 01 June 2019

Book Reviews

Archiving Sovereignty: Law, History, Violence. By Stewart Motha.

Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018.

Reviewed by Christopher Tomlins, Berkeley Law, University of

California

Archiving Sovereignty has been maturing in Stewart Motha’s mind

for more than a decade. The book is the culmination of 20 years

of research—virtually his entire academic career, to date—but

took form primarily after a return visit in 2009 to Colombo, Sri

Lanka, where Motha was born and where he spent his childhood

before moving to Australia in 1984. The Sovereignty of the title is

the violent occidental sovereignty of British colonial dominion

(and of its postcolonial successors) over Australia, South Africa, Sri

Lanka, and the Chagos Islands—all spaces for Motha’s own life

and studies; the Archive is law—the incessant flux of case histories,

legal fictions, and metaphors, old and new, from which the “fact”

of sovereignty is constructed and by which it is sustained. The site

of the archive, its material substrate, is the Indian Ocean, the

locale of travel and traverse, willing and unwilling, that binds

islands and beaches, great and small, into one realm of research.

If all this is read to imply a peculiarly intimate connection

between the book and its author, that reading is entirely correct.

Archiving Sovereignty is built from the places, the impressions, and

the legalities experienced during the course of a life—Motha’s

own. Consider the following: “My early experience of the sea as a

site of playful freedom has transmogrified into a sense of the

Indian Ocean—its islands, continents, and contiguous zones—as

the space of sovereign violence and cruelty. This juxtaposition of

the freedom of the sea I experienced as a child growing up on an

island, and the fate of thousands either transported to island-

prisons or expelled from their island-homes is what Walter Benja-

min would have called a dialectical image. Constructing such

‘images’ is a central technique deployed in this book. The archive

of sovereign violence gathered here is informed by Benjamin’s

account of how the seemingly archaic past ‘juts into the pre-

sent’” (xi)

Jennifer Balint, Editor

Law & Society Review, Volume 53, Number 2 (2019): 611–634

©2019 Law and Society Association. All rights reserved.

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