Historical accounts of the 'age of revolution' between the 18th and 19th centuries and the expansion of the British empire often neglect crucial perspectives of indigenous people in the Indian and Pacific Oceans.
In this interview, Sujit Sivasundaram, Professor of World History, Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, and Director of Centre of South Asian Studies at the University of Cambridge, speaks to us about his latest book Waves Across the South: A New History of Revolution and Empire.
Drawing from important archival material and the perspectives of ocean-facing people from regions that have not been cast together by land-based cartographies, Sivasundaram tells us how Waves Across the South challenges this dominance of the West and Europe in the history of the 'age of revolution', and how empire, war, and counter-revolution were shaped by Southern geographies and contested by indigenous communities.
***