India, Aug. 30 -- For more than a century before World War 2, traders, financiers and labourers moved between places on the Indian Ocean. All that changed with the war, and as India, Burma, Ceylon and Malaya wrested independence from the British empire. Set amid the tumult of the post-war years, Boats in a Storm centres on the legal struggles of migrants to retain their traditional patterns of life, illustrating how they experienced citizenship and decolonisation. Even as nascent citizenship regimes and the divergent political trajectories of decolonisation papered over migrations between South and South-East Asia, migrants continued to recount cross-border histories in encounters with the law. Drawing on archival materials from India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, the UK and Singapore, Kalyani Ramnath shows how decolonisation was marked by stories of wartime displacement, its unintended consequences, and its long afterlife....