Waves Across the South: A New History of Revolution and Empire
The age of revolutions retold from the Indian and Pacific Oceans, not from Paris or Philadelphia.
Acheter : Amazon · Place des libraires · Fnac
Le mot de POP LIVRE
Most accounts of the revolutionary age move outward from Europe. Sivasundaram flips the map: he starts in the Indian and Pacific Oceans and watches empire arrive by sea, from the point of view of the people already there. What emerges is not a story of ideas travelling from north to south, but of arguments, revolts and negotiations happening everywhere at once. It is an academic book written to be read, and it changes the shape of a familiar century.
Présentation
Cambridge historian Sujit Sivasundaram begins where most histories of the revolutionary age end: at sea, among ocean-facing communities usually left at the margins. After the American and French revolutions, a wave of upheaval crossed the globe between 1790 and 1850 — a period of unprecedented change and violence, above all for indigenous peoples. By 1850 lively public debate among colonised communities had erupted in port cities across the southern hemisphere. It was in that turbulence that Britain established its supremacy over the Indian and Pacific Oceans, outpacing the French and Dutch. Drawing on archives scattered across the world, the book asks what the modern world looks like when the story starts in the South.