Q&A: Age of Empire turned on its head

Sujit Sivasundaram revisits the age of the British Empire through the eyes of the indigenous people of the Pacific and Indian oceans

The World Today
3 minute READ

Waves Across the South, by Sujit Sivasundaram, won the 2021 British Academy Prize for Global Cultural Understanding. Here, he tells Mariana Vieira about the stories behind today’s culture wars and environmental crisis.

Your book explores the age of revolutions from an unlikely perspective. What inspired you?

When we think about the ‘age of revolutions’ we think about the American Revolution, the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. The term was used in the period itself in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and carries on being used to refer to a set of events which helped consolidate a system of nation states and rights, reason and belonging among other themes.

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