MixedTimes Literary Supplement (UK)Weighing in at 1,300 pages, this rollicking, globetrotting \'biography of many people rather than one person\' spans the Akkadian empire and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It is almost unpickupable: whether you find it unputdownable may depend on your appetite for narrative and yearning for a thesis, as well as an iron stomach and sheer Sitzfleisch to match the author’s own ... A pandemic book. It might be the most ambitious product so far of that unsettling moment ... Ideas are not the book’s strong suit ... Still wildly entertaining ... As family history, at least, The World is not enough.
Sujit Sivasundaram
RaveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)Sujit Sivasundaram confidently surfs a dynamic wave of scholarship that has transformed the histories of the Indian Ocean and the South Pacific by looking from below – through the eyes of Indigenous peoples, the enslaved, the subjected and the global South, instead of those of the colonizers, the enslavers, the dominant or the global North ... by recasting empire – especially the British empire – as the countervailing force in this turbulent arena, he brilliantly restores counter-revolution to its proper place in the Age of Revolutions ... Sivasundaram’s history is resolutely non-teleological: for him, the counter-revolutionary machinery of empire foreshadows the future as much as any liberatory, let alone democratic, energy. Most importantly, his work stresses how peoples from the Arabian Peninsula to Oceania not only made their own history but still make it, and in doing so have remade the world’s history, too.
