In this hugely ambitious book, Sujit Sivasundaram seeks to “turn the story of the dawn of our times inside out” (p. 1) by globalizing the history of the age of revolutions. He insists that the lands and peoples of the Global South were of critical significance to that age—roughly the period between 1776 and 1848, which many historians see as the dawn of modern history. The world was not remade simply by Atlantic-based revolutions, Sivasundaram argues; rather, the Global South witnessed “a surge of indigenous agency” (p. 131) during this period, as its people adopted new forms of order and organization and put them to their own use. At the same time, Sivasundaram casts the age as one of struggle between revolution and empire, in which empire emerged triumphant. The British Empire in particular “perverted the course of the revolution and constituted a counterrevolution” (p. 2).

Sivasundaram makes his case in eight chapters that attempt to relocate the age of revolutions to the Pacific and Indian Oceans and their littorals. He marshals an enormous amount of material to paint a vast panorama of political struggle in that space. The book is researched in multiple archives across the continents (and oceans), although the source base is predominantly in English. (This is a privilege of English-speaking scholars that we seldom acknowledge.) The action ranges from Tonga to Mauritius, from Tasmania to the Persian Gulf, with the Cape Colony on the Atlantic thrown in for good measure. It is hard not to feel envy for a project that encompasses such a dazzling array of research locations.

The structure of the book is episodic, with each chapter focusing on one set of entangled events in one part of the “waters of the South” (p. 291). Roughly chronological, the chapters present a tableau of interconnected events rather than a single narrative. Along the way, we meet an array of fascinating characters: European military officers, sailors, merchants, and scientists, many of whom were also agents of empire; local rulers across the two oceans; travelers, merchants, settlers, and the enslaved; Parsi shipbuilders in Bombay; Buddhist monks traveling between Sri Lanka and Burma; and many indigenous figures from Australia, Tasmania, Tonga, and the Cape. Sivasundaram quite successfully juxtaposes locations and events that normally do not appear together in historical accounts.

Throughout the book, Sivasundaram is keen to assert the “energetic indigenousness” (p. 3) of the period in order to argue that the peoples of the Global South were not passive actors in this age but were actively shaping it, and that their relationship with the Europeans was more symmetrical and equal than we like to think. Yet, we never get a very good sense of what was revolutionary in this oceanic world that empire “perverted.” Sivasundaram uses a very elastic definition of revolution, one that accommodates all political action and all manner of political opposition. Thus, settler revolts in the Cape and in Mauritius, Wahhabi raids in the Persian Gulf, and Buddhist reformers are all counted as part of the age of revolutions. Sivasundaram does not claim that these phenomena were interconnected or emanated from a common set of ideas, so what makes them part of a single phenomenon? Revolts, uprisings, and raiding are common features of all human history. We never find out what makes the phenomena discussed by Sivasundaram part of a single surge that might be connected and part of a global age of revolutions.

Sivasundaram does quite convincingly show “indigenous” agency, although the term “indigenous” gets stretched quite thin in the book. “Indigenous” actors undertook actions according to their own lights and, in the process, adopted (and, I would say, adapted and appropriated) new forms of organization for themselves. The age of empire saw the consolidation of centralized states in the Pacific (chieftains reimagined themselves as monarchs in Tonga, Tahiti, and Aotearoa [New Zealand]), and local actors across the space adopted new forms of communication and sociability, such as print and the press. But none of these claims is terribly original. We have long known that empire reshaped societies and that radical change unsettled the sense of the self for “indigenous” intellectuals and forced them to make sense of the world in new ways.

The argument for the rise of empire is easier to follow, and at times it is the main theme of the book. Yet again, the argument that empire was counterrevolutionary is hardly revelatory, nor is the fact that the British Empire adopted the language of freedom and the rule of law in its cause. And, alas, in its urge to encompass this great diversity, the prose is overwritten at times, and sloppy at others. Nevertheless, Waves across the South presents us with a new vision of a crucial period in global history, one that introduces new places and peoples and themes and destabilizes our sense of the normal.