Overview
This conversation, based around Professor Sujit Sivasundaram’s prize-winning book, shifts the narratives of the Age of Revolutions and the origins of the British Empire away from the northern hemisphere to the perspectives of Indigenous and non-European people in the Indian and Pacific Oceans.
After revolutions in America and France, a wave of tumult coursed the globe from 1790 to 1850. It was a moment of unprecedented change and violence especially for Indigenous peoples. By 1850 vibrant public debate between colonised communities had exploded in port cities. Amidst of all of this, Britain established its supremacy over the Indian and Pacific Oceans, overtaking the French and Dutch, as well as other rivals.
Too often, history is told from Western viewpoints, with modernity, knowledge, selfhood, and politics moving from Europe to influence the rest of the world. This talk will retell these histories by considering the roles of Indigenous creativity, agency, and resistance in the face of unprecedented globalization and violence. In our conversation, we will reflect on the consequences of historical violence, the legacies of empire, environmental history and resource extraction, and the Indigenous futures that Western imperialism cut short.
Speaker
Sujit Sivasundaram is Professor of World History at the University of Cambridge, Fellow and Director of Studies at Gonville and Caius College, and the Director of the Centre of South Asian Studies in Cambridge.
Professor Sivasundaram has worked primarily on the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, with a special emphasis on South and Southeast Asia and Polynesia. His latest book, Waves Across the South: A New History of Revolution and Empire (2020) won the British Academy Prize for Global Cultural Understanding 2021 and the Bentley Book Prize for World History and was shortlisted for the PEN-Hessell Tiltman Prize for History 2021.
Details
This is a hybrid event, which will take place in-person in the Gatsby Room (Chancellor's Centre) and also on Zoom.
If you would like to attend online, please register for the Zoom link.
For the in-person audience, drinks and snacks will be available after the talk.
The Humanities Society organises regular talks spanning a wide range of topics every Tuesday during term time.
Image: Landing horses from Australia: Catamarans and Masoolah boat, Madras [Chennai], c.1834 (State Library of New South Wales).