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Waves Across the South: A New History of Revolution and Empire
A sweeping history and major reassessment of how Britain came to rule the waves – told from the forgotten quarter of the world.
It is difficult now to imagine a time when Britain stood as the world’s supreme power, much less to imagine how that came to be. It was certainly not the product of calculated planning or superlative naval power, as often as that story is told. Turning this story inside out, Cambridge historian Sujit Sivasundaram places what he terms ‘the forgotten quarter’ – the peoples and places of the Pacific and Indian Oceans to give a bold reinterpretation of how the British Empire was formed – and how it couldn’t have happened without a backdrop of global turmoil.
The decades from 1780 to 1830 were tumultuous, including for the British. America had recently made its break for independence, and following the French, a wave of revolution was coursing south across the globe. In countries around the Pacific and Indian oceans, the seeds of rebellion grew fast, becoming local and then national revolution. From Oman to Tonga, Mauritius to Sri Lanka, The Forgotten Quarter gives voice to the many countries which were following and fighting over their own visions of modernity. Venerable Eurasian empires – Ottoman, Mughal and Qing – were transformed at their maritime frontiers. New political forces, including monarchies, inaugurated in the Pacific. The Forgotten Quarter gives those communities centre stage to tell the story of the British Empire from their neglected perspectives, and to show how in many places this moment of opportunity was seized to contemplate selves and futures in radically new ways.
Bringing unparalleled expertise and global thinking to bear, Sujit Sivasundaram delivers a ground-breaking account of a world in flux that will transform how we think of Britain’s colonial rule. Naval war, strategy and imperial trade had their parts to play, but so did hope, false promise, rebellion, and the pursuit of modernity.
It is difficult now to imagine a time when Britain stood as the world’s supreme power, much less to imagine how that came to be. It was certainly not the product of calculated planning or superlative naval power, as often as that story is told. Turning this story inside out, Cambridge historian Sujit Sivasundaram places what he terms ‘the forgotten quarter’ – the peoples and places of the Pacific and Indian Oceans to give a bold reinterpretation of how the British Empire was formed – and how it couldn’t have happened without a backdrop of global turmoil.
The decades from 1780 to 1830 were tumultuous, including for the British. America had recently made its break for independence, and following the French, a wave of revolution was coursing south across the globe. In countries around the Pacific and Indian oceans, the seeds of rebellion grew fast, becoming local and then national revolution. From Oman to Tonga, Mauritius to Sri Lanka, The Forgotten Quarter gives voice to the many countries which were following and fighting over their own visions of modernity. Venerable Eurasian empires – Ottoman, Mughal and Qing – were transformed at their maritime frontiers. New political forces, including monarchies, inaugurated in the Pacific. The Forgotten Quarter gives those communities centre stage to tell the story of the British Empire from their neglected perspectives, and to show how in many places this moment of opportunity was seized to contemplate selves and futures in radically new ways.
Bringing unparalleled expertise and global thinking to bear, Sujit Sivasundaram delivers a ground-breaking account of a world in flux that will transform how we think of Britain’s colonial rule. Naval war, strategy and imperial trade had their parts to play, but so did hope, false promise, rebellion, and the pursuit of modernity.
480 pages, Hardcover
First published June 11, 2020
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647 people want to read
About the author
Sujit Sivasundaram
12 books10 followersSujit Sivasundaram is a British Sri Lankan historian and academic. He is currently professor of world history at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge.
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
April 24, 2022
There are some books with rather unprepossessing subjects that are redeemed by their sparkling prose and brilliant arguments. This is the other kind. Its subject is extremely prepossessing, indeed fascinating: how the age of revolutions played out far from the European centres of power, down south in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. But the fascination is dampened by jargony writing and a central argument that's so loose as to be totally obscure.
There are definitely things to be learned in here. Sivasundaram doesn't use the usual stories from this time and place, but presents a range of intriguing new sidelights: his cast consists of ‘private traders, sailors, castaways, missionaries and so-called pirates’, and his narrative takes in rival explorers in Polynesia, uprisings in Cape Town and Mauritius, trade routes from Bombay to Muscat, Aboriginal seal-clubbers and scientific observations in Ceylon.
That's all great. The problem is that almost nothing links these disparate anecdotes, except for the most general fact that they're all happening at roughly the same time in the same wide area. The argument we're (repeatedly) told we're getting is that there was a surge of revolutionary activity in the area that was suppressed by the counter-revolutionary force of the British empire. It's a cool argument, but nothing in the book really bears it out, a problem Sivasundaram gets around by just restating it again and again in increasingly opaque prose.
We get, for instance, several pages on the First Anglo-Burmese War, which should be really interesting since it doesn't come up that often. But all we really learn is that the Burmese had some boats, and the British had some other boats, and this is used to support the grand conclusion that ‘In all these ways, both the British and the Burmese engaged with water [i.e. had some boats], for diplomacy and symbolism as well as for warfare’, a staggeringly banal conclusion which apparently ‘highlights the entanglement and symmetry between the British and the Burmese’. I mean…does it? Is he just saying that they both had some boats? Or is there any more surprising or complex argument? I couldn't see one, here or anywhere else.
If at any point any non-colonial nation or person does something – anything at all – Sivasundaram immediately proclaims that it is ‘in keeping with the non-European assertiveness which is a definitive feature of the age of revolutions in the Indian Ocean’, though it's not at all clear that merely doing stuff is not also a definitive feature of all other ages in all other places. The Wahhabi movement gets underway: ‘this is in keeping with the surge of indigenous agency in the age of revolutions’. Some islanders choose to sail in a British exploration ship: ‘This demonstrates the agency of the peoples of the Indian and Pacific Oceans’.
You have to work pretty hard sometimes to decode what is being said, and the results are not always worth the effort. Making the fairly obvious point that different places developed at different speeds, Sivasundaram writes that ‘Different sites were able to follow related but separate chronologies of change’. Coastal cities and peoples are referred to irritatingly as ‘sea-facing political units’. History here is said to be ‘determinedly plural by way of cultural heritage’, where there are ‘patterns of connection and divergence’, showing ‘the agency of communities in the midst of a multiplicity of political configurations’, and ‘intimate dimensions to the transformation afoot as colonial vocabulary dominated indigenous peoples’.
The depth of these ideas is in direct proportion to their clarity. Which is a shame, because the concept of this book is a wonderful one, and its places and people of interest have been sorely neglected. Hopefully this will spur further research, but as it is, I found it rather a frustrating read.
There are definitely things to be learned in here. Sivasundaram doesn't use the usual stories from this time and place, but presents a range of intriguing new sidelights: his cast consists of ‘private traders, sailors, castaways, missionaries and so-called pirates’, and his narrative takes in rival explorers in Polynesia, uprisings in Cape Town and Mauritius, trade routes from Bombay to Muscat, Aboriginal seal-clubbers and scientific observations in Ceylon.
That's all great. The problem is that almost nothing links these disparate anecdotes, except for the most general fact that they're all happening at roughly the same time in the same wide area. The argument we're (repeatedly) told we're getting is that there was a surge of revolutionary activity in the area that was suppressed by the counter-revolutionary force of the British empire. It's a cool argument, but nothing in the book really bears it out, a problem Sivasundaram gets around by just restating it again and again in increasingly opaque prose.
We get, for instance, several pages on the First Anglo-Burmese War, which should be really interesting since it doesn't come up that often. But all we really learn is that the Burmese had some boats, and the British had some other boats, and this is used to support the grand conclusion that ‘In all these ways, both the British and the Burmese engaged with water [i.e. had some boats], for diplomacy and symbolism as well as for warfare’, a staggeringly banal conclusion which apparently ‘highlights the entanglement and symmetry between the British and the Burmese’. I mean…does it? Is he just saying that they both had some boats? Or is there any more surprising or complex argument? I couldn't see one, here or anywhere else.
If at any point any non-colonial nation or person does something – anything at all – Sivasundaram immediately proclaims that it is ‘in keeping with the non-European assertiveness which is a definitive feature of the age of revolutions in the Indian Ocean’, though it's not at all clear that merely doing stuff is not also a definitive feature of all other ages in all other places. The Wahhabi movement gets underway: ‘this is in keeping with the surge of indigenous agency in the age of revolutions’. Some islanders choose to sail in a British exploration ship: ‘This demonstrates the agency of the peoples of the Indian and Pacific Oceans’.
You have to work pretty hard sometimes to decode what is being said, and the results are not always worth the effort. Making the fairly obvious point that different places developed at different speeds, Sivasundaram writes that ‘Different sites were able to follow related but separate chronologies of change’. Coastal cities and peoples are referred to irritatingly as ‘sea-facing political units’. History here is said to be ‘determinedly plural by way of cultural heritage’, where there are ‘patterns of connection and divergence’, showing ‘the agency of communities in the midst of a multiplicity of political configurations’, and ‘intimate dimensions to the transformation afoot as colonial vocabulary dominated indigenous peoples’.
The depth of these ideas is in direct proportion to their clarity. Which is a shame, because the concept of this book is a wonderful one, and its places and people of interest have been sorely neglected. Hopefully this will spur further research, but as it is, I found it rather a frustrating read.
December 2, 2021
I found this book very disappointing. Although Sivasundaram claims to be presenting the history of the Indo-Pacific region from a non-European perspective, much of the book still focuses on colonial officials and settler-colonists. (Also, on a more theoretical level, Sivasundaram's discussion of an the "Age of Revolutions" in the Indo-Pacific continues the trend of presenting non-European history in European terms). This could be overlooked if Waves Across the South, was a good history book. Unfortunately, it is largely a series of tenuously connected and poorly contextualised anecdotes with questionable analysis and a muddled theoretical framework. Some of these case studies do provide an interesting start point to look further into, but I couldn't really recommend reading this book to find them.
June 25, 2022
《南方浪潮》講述了在十八世紀晚期至十九世紀初期的「革命時代」，大英帝國在其殖民的南方世界（Global South，此處以印度洋與太平洋世界為主）所遭遇的原住民反抗革命及其反應，並且探討了被殖民的原住民與帝國殖民者之間在政治、社會、宗教、戰爭、抗議、知識和物品上的種種互動，以及原住民社會如何受到這些互動的影響而改變。在本書中，我們會看到過去被排斥在主流歷史之外的這些南方海洋上的殖民地屬民如何透過革命與反抗而發聲，而圍繞大英帝國及這些海上島民對手的革命、帝國及平叛行動的互動，則是理解這段海洋歷史的關鍵。
February 3, 2024
I admit I rushed this book so I'd have something to ask Sujit when I saw him at the Galle Literary Festival, but I ended up talking about myself instead. 😅 Now that I have a signed copy imma read it properly again, but overall, learned a lot about centering the indigenous in colonial history and understanding movements.
February 7, 2021
Waves Across the South certainly lives up to its subtitle of being "A New History of Revolution and Empire". It tells its history of the Age of Exploration, revolutionary period, and colonial period with a focus on the physical setting of the Indo-Pacific ocean. There were many events and stories that I was very unfamilar with or hadn't heard of before at all - the trekboers in the Patriot Revolt, the Anglo-Burmese war, Goldingham at Madras Observatory, and places like Mauritius, Bourbon, and Ras-al-Khaimah. And owing to this ignorance - this book felt like a pretty tedious and difficult read, taking me a long time.
Sivasundaram emphasises Indigenous agency and "revolutionary" in terms of their responses to being colonised and how these were co-opted by "counter-revolutionary" drive of the British Empire. There is a strong emphasis in the links throughout the Indo-Pacific for both Indigenous peoples and colonists, in terms of physically visiting or being transported around different regions or the spread of ideas. Although some links felt very contrived.
Although I suppose it is very important to read non-Euro/Anglo-centric histories and to appreciate history through different lenses - especially since Euro/Anglo-centric views dominate our cultural memory and fill up most of what is taught to us in school. Nevertheless, I'm glad to have made it through this book. It read quite analytically through the lens of its thesis of "revolution" vs. "counter-revolution" - and I probably would've gotten more out of it if I had a better grasp of the history it visits.
It does make me slightly more interested in the colonial period - a period and perspective that I've always conceived of as dry and evokes memories of the boring part of history class in school.
Sivasundaram emphasises Indigenous agency and "revolutionary" in terms of their responses to being colonised and how these were co-opted by "counter-revolutionary" drive of the British Empire. There is a strong emphasis in the links throughout the Indo-Pacific for both Indigenous peoples and colonists, in terms of physically visiting or being transported around different regions or the spread of ideas. Although some links felt very contrived.
Although I suppose it is very important to read non-Euro/Anglo-centric histories and to appreciate history through different lenses - especially since Euro/Anglo-centric views dominate our cultural memory and fill up most of what is taught to us in school. Nevertheless, I'm glad to have made it through this book. It read quite analytically through the lens of its thesis of "revolution" vs. "counter-revolution" - and I probably would've gotten more out of it if I had a better grasp of the history it visits.
It does make me slightly more interested in the colonial period - a period and perspective that I've always conceived of as dry and evokes memories of the boring part of history class in school.
August 11, 2025
This is such an admirable project in concept, so I was sad not to like it more. The question of what the age of revolutions looks like from the global south is so full of potential, and this was well articulated initially: how can we join the dots of revolutionary, Indigenous and anti-imperial movements as they take shape in the Indian and Pacific Oceans with the more familiar Atlantic world? And how would that change our understanding of the political subjectivity which emerged in that era? Exciting stuff!
But the substantive chapters were bewilderingly and meanderingly narrative, and the author’s argumentative idiom wasn’t enough to hold them together. Each had quite a tellingly formulaic conclusion to weave its content back into Sivasundaram’s thesis. There were some incredibly interesting strands: the emergence of Pacific island monarchies in tandem with, and in some ways emulation of, the founding of Black monarchy in Haiti; the sketch of the entanglements of whaling economies, trade and indigenous communities in New South Wales and Tasmania; and the interesting chapter on the professionalisation of cartography as an instantiation of a newly global imperial-governmental logic. But none of these really hung together - and each could have been the subject of its own monograph - beyond the framework provided by the anti-revolutionary expansion of empire.
I was excited to read a history which knitted together such a huge geography, and filled a very well-justified gap in the historiography. I left with a new appreciation of how hard that is to do. Equally, I’m sure/I hope this will be a useful tool for thinking about this period in new ways, in different geographies, and with more attention to Indigeneity.
But the substantive chapters were bewilderingly and meanderingly narrative, and the author’s argumentative idiom wasn’t enough to hold them together. Each had quite a tellingly formulaic conclusion to weave its content back into Sivasundaram’s thesis. There were some incredibly interesting strands: the emergence of Pacific island monarchies in tandem with, and in some ways emulation of, the founding of Black monarchy in Haiti; the sketch of the entanglements of whaling economies, trade and indigenous communities in New South Wales and Tasmania; and the interesting chapter on the professionalisation of cartography as an instantiation of a newly global imperial-governmental logic. But none of these really hung together - and each could have been the subject of its own monograph - beyond the framework provided by the anti-revolutionary expansion of empire.
I was excited to read a history which knitted together such a huge geography, and filled a very well-justified gap in the historiography. I left with a new appreciation of how hard that is to do. Equally, I’m sure/I hope this will be a useful tool for thinking about this period in new ways, in different geographies, and with more attention to Indigeneity.
February 6, 2022
Sujit Sivasundaram aims to tell a different story of the Age of Revolution in the late 18th to mid 19th centuries, when a wave of revolutions spread across Europe, and also in America and Haiti. Moving away from the West, he looks at what was happening in the areas surrounding the Indian and Pacific Oceans in the same period, where similar revolutionary desires spread but were quashed by an imperial counter-revolution. Chapters zoom into events on specific islands such as Tonga, Mauritius, New Zealand and Singapore, and step back to depict interactions between them and within larger regions like the Persian Gulf and the Bay of Bengal. The book is well-researched, but as I was not familiar with much of this history, it was slightly difficult to parse through the density of figures and events presented in quick succession. And though the intention of shifting perspectives is admirable, much of the story is still told through the lens of the colonial officials, perhaps due to the lack of records written from the other side. The book tries to do too much in both telling the history of a highly diverse part of the globe while also making a historiographical argument on how the Age of Revolution should be told. Still, I learnt a lot from reading it and would love to learn more about this period in history.
August 25, 2023
This book does not really deserve 2*, I only award it that for the amount of research that has been undertaken; which is clearly immense (it is clearly a subject dear to the author's heart; especially Mauritius about which he seems obsessed). I echo every word of the excellent review by Warwick; I commend it to you. The only thing that I would add is that I am so glad that I am not one of Mr. Sivasundaram students because if he lectures like he writes I can assure you that I would be changing course or university.
November 19, 2023
I recall the time when a primary school teacher asked us all to take a globe and view the northern hemisphere from the vantage point of the southern hemisphere. How different the Atlantic Ocean and the surrounding countries appear when looking up from the south towards the north.
This outstanding history adopts the same approach by examining episodes not from the traditional colonial / developed county perspective but instead from the local, colonized country point of view.
A wonderful read!!
This outstanding history adopts the same approach by examining episodes not from the traditional colonial / developed county perspective but instead from the local, colonized country point of view.
A wonderful read!!
September 19, 2021
Fascinating read. Needed a stronger edit. And it's partially a history but as much a historiography. The audience for it will be inherently more academic.
That said, based on the pitch -- great archival stuff, etc. -- I expected more archival material from Sri Lanka, Burma, and the Malay/Indonesian kingdoms. It still seemed like he was mostly working with European-language materials in Mauritius, Madagascar, South Africa, and to a lesser extent the Gulf region.
That said, based on the pitch -- great archival stuff, etc. -- I expected more archival material from Sri Lanka, Burma, and the Malay/Indonesian kingdoms. It still seemed like he was mostly working with European-language materials in Mauritius, Madagascar, South Africa, and to a lesser extent the Gulf region.
May 6, 2022
In Waves Across the South, Sujit Sivasundaram explores the histories of the Indian and Pacific Ocean peoples in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He’s exploring the ways in which indigenous peoples were responding to changing political dynamics and Europeans and how the British were able to put together a part of the British Empire by 1848. I really appreciated how Sivasundaram highlighted indigenous agency and showed the piecemeal and evolving nature of the British Empire.
September 6, 2021
This book is subtle in its thrust, and the length and detail of the accounts given can sometimes leave you adrift. I don't think it's any less valuable for that. I learnt a lot, though I think I might struggle to explain the key point to someone who hadn't read the book, but I also guess that part of the point is that history is more complex than previous narratives have implied.
February 19, 2022
The approach of covering this history via the sea is a novel but natural and fitting one. Hugely informative particularly on the complex interactions between the people of this part of the work and 'the West', in terms of revolution, empire, trade and thought. An important and groundbreaking book, and making impressive use of relevant and fascinating archives.
August 24, 2022
I very much enjoyed this, but it was hard work. It's dense and not always easy to follow, and there isn't always a clear point to it. However, the stories it tells are fascinating, and there is a careful excavation of the agency of colonised peoples which I really appreciated. Overall a worthwhile book.
October 11, 2022
did i learn the odd thing from this? i guess so
did i also think this was pretty disorganised and focussed way too much on random white europeans, when i bought this book to learn more about revolution from the POV of the southern hemisphere? absolutely
did i also think this was pretty disorganised and focussed way too much on random white europeans, when i bought this book to learn more about revolution from the POV of the southern hemisphere? absolutely
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October 25, 2024Absolutely magnificent.
August 22, 2021
Waves Across the South: A New History of Revolution and Empire by Sujit Sivasundaram is a fascinating new examination of the history of the 'Age of Revolutions', from the end of the 18th century to the mid-19th century. Looking at the concept of revolution not as an export from the West distributed around the globe, it instead shifts our gaze towards the different forces standing up to Western imperialism in that time, and specifically to the British Empire. It shows the other side of the expansion of the British Empire in the Indian Ocean, Pacific, and other seas and gulfs in between, and rather than looking at the Empire 'progressing ', this is seen as a counter-revolutionary force. Each chapter covers a different area and episode: travels across the Oceanic South, the South Pacific, the Southwest Indian Ocean, the Persian Gulf, the Tasman Sea, India's maritime frontier, the Bay of Bengal, and looking comparatively across the Indian Ocean.
I didn't know that much about this period and the regions described in the book, so I found it quite hard to read, as it felt quite dense with a lot of new information. Persevering paid off though, as I learned so much about this fascinating part of history and of the world and it whetted my appetite to learn more about each of the chapters' subjects.
I didn't know that much about this period and the regions described in the book, so I found it quite hard to read, as it felt quite dense with a lot of new information. Persevering paid off though, as I learned so much about this fascinating part of history and of the world and it whetted my appetite to learn more about each of the chapters' subjects.
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