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

“Sujit Sivasundaram starts out by observing that most histories of this period (the 18th-19th century) 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.” Read more...

The 2021 British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding

Patrick Wright, Historian