In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Waves across the South: A New History of Revolution and Empire by Sujit Sivasundaram
  • Swapna Gopinath
Sivasundaram, Sujit. Waves across the South: A New History of Revolution and Empire. London: William Collins, 2020.

Sujit Sivasundaram, professor of world history at Cambridge, writes extensively on the history of oceans and sea-facing lands, retelling global histories and initiating conversations around little narratives from the Global South. His latest work, Waves across the South, is a fascinating narrative that chronicles the maritime history of the Global South, using images and maps that guide the reader. The work traces the years from 1722 to 1853, which the author calls the "age of revolutions" (i), and reconstructs the dynamic interactions between the North and the South. He walks the reader through the revolutionary paradigm shifts in political social histories, through the lands, often the smaller territories, bordering the Indian and Pacific Oceans. This text can be called his contribution to the study of blue humanities, where he reconstructs the age and its encounters between imperial powers and native populations as a "contest between revolution and power" (5). The work analyzes the revolutions that define the history of the Global South, just prior to the colonization of these lands, and the counter-revolutionary measures by the imperial powers that altered the course of civilization.

Waves across the South adds to the existing collection of works that trace the history of the Global South from the perspective of the other. The book will assist any researcher working on alternate histories of the Global South and will provide a captivating reading experience for earnest readers of history. The work is unique for its epistemological framework, which emerges from close readings of personal stories, traveler's diaries, and similar texts that perpetually remind the reader of the presence of individual lives forgotten in the passage of time. Reading through the text, one might be tempted to call it a text on historiography rather than on history, but reading it is nonetheless extremely pleasurable.

The book is divided into eight chapters, and the author contextualizes each chapter around the seas that define the geographic regions that were vibrant spaces of contact among peoples and their cultures. The expansive tale of the Global South unfolds in bright hues in this book, history woven through [End Page 250] personal narratives and tales told by the others, in myriad ways, from varied lands bordering the seas. In this book, maritime history, once grand narratives told by empires, is narrated from a decolonial perspective by scripting the alternative histories of the colonial past, where oceanic people were active agents and maritime journeys initiated empire building. Archival material used is exhaustive, with cartographies described in detail. The writer narrates in a lucid style the history of revolutions, the maritime journeys, and globalization. The work challenges the European depictions of the Global South, which were primarily romanticized, idyllic versions of a premodern world. The history depicted in this text is the history of localized revolts that spread through the lands around Indian and Pacific Oceans.

Individuals and their personal plights, the micropolitics that define their relations with the world, and the changing relations based on gender and race: these are carefully delineated in the text and are vital clues that help the reader comprehend the larger political struggles of the times. Indigenous people with agency to be active components in the making of history, remain vital forces even as the larger counter-revolutionary imperial powers reign over regions, establishing the foundations of modern statehood. The author isolates three themes—"knowledge, technology and commerce" (244)—that have played crucial roles in these encounters. He focuses on these aspects in the last chapters, which I found to contribute significantly to contemporary discourses on the Global South. The paradigmatic shifts in fundamental structures of human societies are vividly brought out along with the human interventions and its repercussions on the seas and coasts. New knowledge was all about extending the frontiers, thereby ignoring natural barriers, reshaping the world.

This text is a reminder, a remembering of a version of the past, lost amid the metanarratives of the empire. It is a collection of narratives that establishes...

pdf

Share