Waves Across the South: A New History of Revolution and Empire

"This book urges readers to take a new look at a period which has been well covered by historians from a European perspective. Generally known as the Age of Revolutions , it comes out of the late 18th century with the American Revolution , followed by the French Revolution , followed by the Haitian Revolution , and then moves into the early 19th, by which time the resurgence of counter-revolutionary tendencies in Britain and other centres of power may remind us that the Age of Revolutions took place in the high age of empire as well. Sujit Sivasundaram starts out by observing that most histories of this period tend to overlook the experience of a quarter of the world: the Indian oceans and the Pacific. It’s a story of water at least as much as land, and of a characteristically maritime version of imperialism, which is heavily shaped not just by tides, waves and monsoons, but by the fact that reliance on ships gave a basic instability to the imperial process, and also, as we see repeatedly in these pages, a dependence on more or less indigenous knowledge, methods and ingenuity. Sivasundaram traces many quite close-grained encounters happening in Australia, in the Bay of Bengal, in Cape Town or in Mauritius. Settlement may have been forceful and systematic in places but it is also about pirates and escaped convicts, people on the run who find themselves on a particular beach and improvise often brutal worlds for themselves. The colonial surveyors were inclined to treat all these territories, all these little islands they came to, as if they were totally separate worlds. They were doing early scientific observation. They were almost like anthropologists studying everything. As Sivasundaram shows, they had no idea that these islands had been interconnected and in communication for centuries before they got there. Repeatedly, you get this sense of the colonizers laying down their grids and the sand beneath just shifting or melting away in this constant return to liquidity and movement. That’s the sort of feeling you get from this illuminating book. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . For a reader, one of the virtues of this approach is to be found in the many vividly populated stories Sivasundaram has managed to bring to life through objects as well as more conventional archives. Some may already be well-known but others struck me as both arresting and novel. I think of the case of the building of the Horsburgh Lighthouse, which went into action in 1851, and still stands on its low and solitary rock offshore from Singapore and serves to guide ships heading towards the South China Sea. Carried out under a young Scottish surveyor called J.T. Thompson, this all but impossible project was carried out by a workforce of people who spoke eleven different languages – all at the mercy of the wildest winds, waves and mosquitoes. The project was an astonishing combination, as Sivasundaram notes, of European surveying and the Asian body, and it brought everyone involved face-to-face with the extremity of their situation. What you end up with, as you read on, is a greatly increased understanding of the continued power, knowledge and agency of the people who end up underneath the colonization process, and sometimes also of the indebtedness and even friendship that developed between the two worlds. That’s part of the creativity of the book, to find the evidence of this response and to amplify it in the reader’s mind. That too is about global cultural understanding. I am not sure that it changes the overall outline of the Age of Revolutions, or that it fundamentally shifts the centre of colonial power, but it certainly adds greatly to our picture of things. It’s a story of interrelatedness, which is not invariably a matter of rape and violence, although that was certainly a significant part of it. Those stories are in there, but there is also a lot of skillfulness, respect and curiosity, and a genuine exchange of ideas too. That’s right and of different types of waves, and of the ‘indigenous’ people’s skills at riding and even mastering them. Like last year’s shortlist, this book and Mamdani’s are on legacies of empire and part of our rethinking of that history. Sivasundaram isn’t looking to make it sound like a party at all, but he does insist on doing everything he can to reintroduce a sense of intelligence and creativity – ‘agency’ again – to the other side of the encounter. In that, the book is definitely very successful. This year’s winner will be announced on October 26th 2021 . In addition to Patrick Wright, the judges of the British Academy Book Prize are: * Madawi Al-Rasheed FBA , writer, academic and Visiting Professor at the Middle East Centre at the London School of Economics * Catherine Hall FBA, Professor Emerita of Modern British Social and Cultural History at University College London * Fatima Manji, Channel 4 News broadcaster and journalist * Philippe Sands QC FRSL, Lawyer, academic and writer, University College London and Matrix Chamber"