A New History of Revolution and Empire
by Sujit Sivasundaram, August 2020
Sujit Sivasundaram was born and educated in Sri Lanka (in ‘Sinhala medium’ until 1992) and came to Cambridge in 1994 to study engineering and then natural sciences and history and philosophy of science. In 2012 he was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize for History. He has been a Visiting Professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris; a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at both the Asia Research Institute of the National University of Singapore and the University of Sydney. He was the Sackler Caird Fellow, 2015-7, at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. Professor Sujit Sivasundaram | Faculty of History, University of Cambridge
—————
Book launch — Dec. 17, 2020, 16:30 BST at Royal Historical Society Waves Across the South: A New History of Revolution & Empire | RHS (royalhistsoc.org)
Book launch and panel discussion: Sujit Sivasundaram’s ‘Waves Across the South: A New History of Revolution and Empire‘ (William Collins, 2020), Thursday 17 December 2020 16:30–18:00 GMT
Hosted by UCL Anthropocene and the UCL Centre for the Study of South Asia and the Indian Ocean World.
Sujit Sivasundaram’s ‘Waves Across the South’ is a wide-ranging and far-reaching new history of the origins of the British empire c.1790–1850. Inverting the usual northern focus on the ‘age of revolution’ it shows how empire, war, and counter-revolt were shaped by southern geographies and environments while being contested by indigenous communities. It does so by stressing the physical setting of the oceans as highways for mobile indigenous peoples who were independently exploring ideas of liberty and progress even while the British violently appropriated both peoples and ideas for themselves. ‘Waves Across the South’ offers an integration of environmental, global, imperial, material, and southern histories. As Sivasundaram suggests, in our age of rising sea levels reflecting on how this global imperialism failed to flatten ocean-facing communities can help us ‘while the clock ticks for what can be done to turn around the environmental impact of globalisation and imperialism’.
Sujit will be discussing ‘Waves Across the South’ with the leading historians of empire, environment, material culture, and Asia with: Sunil Amrith (Yale), Debjani Bhattacharyya (Drexel), Margot Finn (UCL), Jagjeet Lally (UCL).
Sujit Sivasundaram is Professor of Professor of World History and Director of the Centre of South Asian Studies at the University of Cambridge.
Sign up for the discussion on Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/book-launch-sujit-sivasundarams-waves-across-the-south-tickets-130590007227