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.
This is a maritime history of empire rather than one of land and territorial battles. At the centre are not London or Paris but the Pacific and Indian oceans. This book will take you on a voyage from the Cape Colony in southern Africa all the way to New Zealand, with important stopovers in Mauritius, the Persian Gulf, Ceylon, Java and New South Wales. This is Big History. It tells the story of how the French Revolution set in motion a counter-revolution, which the British Empire used to expand and consolidate its power. But unlike a lot of macro histories, it does so by weaving together local drama and personal stories in a colourful canvas that lets us feel the texture of history in action ... one can only feel happy that Sivasundaram was able to pull in his impressive haul of sources from across the Pacific before the pandemic. If you happen to be bored with the home office and long for an intellectual journey, then you should go and ride these waves across the south and explore the making of the modern world.
A professor of world history at the University of Cambridge who has written well-received scholarly books on colonial science and early British Sri Lanka, Mr. Sivasundaram guides the reader smoothly through the expanses of the oceanic south. His account, enriched by deep archival research and the use of visual and material evidence, has a human scale and texture sometimes lacking in similar global histories. The book unfolds as an inward-spiraling tour of the region ... The great achievement of Waves Across the South is that its shift of perspective lets us reconsider the meaning of revolution in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Too often, the era’s rapid political change has been seen as synonymous with the democratic republicanism exemplified by the American and French revolutions. Mr. Sivasundaram shows, in line with recent scholarship on Latin America and the Caribbean, that this vision of revolution is too confining.
Scrupulously, Sivasundaram tells much of this history from the ground up, from the perspectives of the colonised, and for this purpose, he taps the archives of a cast of astonishing, enjoyable characters – not rulers or officials, but regular folk ... If we ignore the Buddhist koan-like question of whether a revolution that is never consummated is a revolution at all, Sivasundaram is largely persuasive in his demarcations of revolutionary sentiment. Not always, though ... And despite Sivasundaram’s provision of generous evidence for indigenous agency, it is occasionally difficult to shake the suspicion that the churn in local politics in one territory or another is best explained as a proxy conflict between France and Britain – that, as with so much else, even these tiny, nascent revolutions were planted and watered for the opportunistic purposes of European imperialism. Small wonder, then, that they could be uprooted swiftly and brutally as well.
