With Waves across the South: A New History of Revolution and Empire, Sujit Sivasundaram has written a big history: big in geographical and temporal scope and in ambition. Calling his work a new history of revolution and empire, he carries forward this promise by, in effect, going small. He focuses on islands and ports, webs of engagements, and the radiating effects of overlapping and interconnected locales from the Indian Ocean and Tasman Sea to Mauritius, Tonga, Aotearoa New Zealand, the Sri Lankan and Burmese coastal kingdoms, Chinese and Chilean ports, and the Cape of South Africa. It is these places, he says, in a tilt against more conventional historiographies, that shaped—and sometimes led—upheavals against colonial orders and the generation of political modernity, long a foundation of Atlantic histories in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
It is a bracing, convincing narrative, though not a neat one—the many illustrations and elegant maps upfront are necessary, and readers must patiently work to assemble fragments and artifacts. The rewards are tales of ceremonial boats, revolts and petitions, scientific experiments, packets of letters, treaties, spiritual declarations, political tracts, and chiefly alliances in dozens of locales across generations. This requires focused attention, and much will be new to many readers. Whatever else it is, this is a book about a traditional subject: British Empire. Yet, as one does a plank boat, Sivasundaram disassembles his objects of study and puts them back together in new configurations.
Still, empire remains his keel and rudder. Within empire, Sivasundaram argues for a new tradition in historiography, cutting into “Britain's supposedly revolution-less, pragmatic and ordered past,” to generate narratives looking toward “small seas in the Indian and Pacific Oceans . . . obliterated by narrators who focussed on colonial units in a network of relations with a centre, London” (332).
Sivasundaram underscores Indigenous perspectives through readings of written evidence, maps, and material culture issuing from colonial encounters. This is not bottom-up cultural history—sources are largely formal archival collections, and European accounts and memoirs—but it is an against-the-grain reading of what stories can and should be told. Some of the claims about excavating the unheard appear to draw on traditions from subaltern studies and postcolonialism, resituating them into broad European historical contexts. For example, the Napoleonic invasions of Europe loom large, setting the stage for destabilizing effects on crowned heads and new ideas of governance around the world—and in the Pacific and Indian Oceans.
As such, classic European navigational adventures by the Count of La Pérouse or Matthew Flinders are paired against the ways Taufa‘ahau in Tonga asserted his own ideas of kingship by claiming himself to be George I in alliance with local Christian missions and the implied legitimacy of British influence. Likewise, in Aotearoa New Zealand, the chief Hongi Hika traveled the seas to Britain and back, understanding that local wars were part of global revolutionary contests about rule that involved the acquisition of armaments, political consolidation, and new experiences of community (73).
In parallel ways, Tipu Sultan of Mysore, in the French Indian Ocean world, pitted a French alliance against that of the British, fashioning his own sense of royal familial connections and asserting who could make a revolutionary claim (109). In Cape Town, the Boer revolution paved openings for both British intervention and Indigenous warfare at the end of the eighteenth century. Entangled interests between the British and Wahhabi abetted revolt against Ottoman rule (130).
However, this age of revolution also contained its dialectical partner: conservative reaction. In Mauritius, the British abolitionist John Jeremie met a cold reception from colonists for whom the end of formal slavery meant being deprived of slaves—what they saw as an offense against law, labor, and their own liberty, leading to agitation for self-rule and representative government (313). Throughout the Indian Ocean, the empire's commercialism meant Oman's port in Muscat developed a sea-facing policy, based on a dream of being an entrepôt for maritime trade. In India, Parsi shipbuilders were one of the successful “comprador classes,” building the famed “country ships” for trade and profit (151).
Such transformations were also embodied in intimate relations. Through recounting the entwined stories of the Aboriginal couple Cora and Bungaree, Sivasundaram traces race separation under settler colonialism and liberal empires in Tasmania, where exploitation and violence evolved into imperialist notions of protecting Aboriginal communities from marauding sealers in the name of humanitarianism, premised on rescuing Indigenous women from archaic societies.
Militarily, the British continued to seize maritime frontiers and ports—the Opium Wars are noted here—through controlling waterways from Canton to Java and Ceylon (243). Away from the gunboats and battlefields, though, empire was built on information. It was incarnated in the Bay of Bengal Madras Observatory, where science, navigation, calibration points, instruments, Indigenous informants, and technicians created a privileged knowledge, coopting individuals and data collection in a matrix of power to discover monsoons and weather patterns or navigational routes protected by lighthouses (260, 278).
Sivasundaram closes with a meditation on Robert Montgomery Martin's 1830s multivolume studies of statistics, data, and survey information of colonies under British rule (The History of the British Colonies, 5 vols. [1834]; The British Colonial Library, 10 vols. [1837]). It is a deceptive picture of an orderly, growing empire. Sivasundaram takes that representation of history as progress through reform toward liberty and blows it up. That vision was only ever a flat imperial world, dominated by Europeans.
Rather, Sivasundaram argues, revolution and persistence grew from very local contests. The British—for a time—attempted to neutralize those traditions, coopted liberty and trade, and transformed Indigenous peoples into the uncivilized. But, as he points out, the traditions of palm-leaf histories continued (347), simultaneously undoing those narratives. Though this is steadfastly imperial history, Waves across the South is Sivasundaram's contribution to the often unknown, smaller—and interconnected—stories that compose and fracture the empire. After traveling the world to learn and try to understand them, in the end he realizes that most of all, we are local and we are islanders.
