Review of Waves Across the South, by Sujit Sivasundaram, pub. William Collins 2020

This is a history of the “age of revolutions”, ie from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, but centred on events around the Indian and Pacific oceans. “By looking to the forgotten quarter of the Indian and Pacific oceans, the intent is to turn the story of the dawn of our times inside out. It is to insist on the critical significance of the peoples and places in this oceanic tract in shaping the age of revolutions and so our present”.

It follows that the book deals with many events and places which get at best cursory treatment in Western-centric studies of the time, and this in itself cannot fail to be absorbing. His account of the enthusiasm with which most of the population of Mauritius embraced the news of the French Revolution is most enlightening. The colonists were all for the abolition of the monarchy: Henri de Macnémara, the Irish commander of the French fleet in the Indian Ocean (!), made the mistake of sticking to his royalist beliefs and was beheaded. But local enthusiasm waned considerably when they heard the new French government had abolished slavery, which they decided wouldn’t do at all.

He is also good on the way different cultures fail to understand each other. There is somehow a grim inevitability about how, wishing to teach convicts on Norfolk Island how to process flax, the British authorities imported two Māori men to teach them the art, unaware that it was Māori women who worked flax. In Tonga, Europeans were puzzled by a difference in value systems; “objects were not sold and did not retain a value on the basis of the work that had been put into making them. Rather, value was determined primarily by the rank and status of the creator of the object.”

Perhaps most informative of all are the late chapters on how mapping, surveying and other forms of measurement relate to empire-building, and how looking at things from the perspective of the sea rather than the land changes one’s view of what is going on. There is in fact much to be learned from this book, both in the way of new facts and new perspectives on facts we thought we knew.

Now and again, I feel his interpretation of the tone of some of his sources is awry. He accuses the explorer D’Entrecasteaux of describing the women of Tonga in “heavily patronising terms” on the basis of this passage:

 “Most of the women of the class in which the chiefs belong have very good looks; their aspect is interesting, they are expressive without being flirtatious. They usually have beautiful hands, and their fingers could easily be used as models.”

 For the life of me, I see nothing patronising in these words: the language is restrained and respectful. I also think he sometimes misses tones of humour, especially in his grumpy account of how the statue of Matthew Flinders in Sydney comes to be accompanied by a model of his cat Trim: “It is partly as a result of a tribute penned by Flinders […] that his cat has been raised to this pedestal. Flinders’ tribute bears the marks of someone with too much time on his hands and is ironic and overly affected in turn. Trim appears as an astronomer and practical seaman and is said to be a cat of Indian origin. Flinders proposes that Trim is related to a cat who entered Noah’s Ark”. Yes, well, Flinders is having a laugh, isn’t he? Like many a happy ailurophile – the owners of Pangur Ban and Jeoffrey come to mind – he extols his companion in affectionate hyperbole. Quite apart from the irony of a writer who uses the overly affected word “penned” accusing another of affectation, this seems an awfully stuffy reaction. It also seems slightly unfair to accuse the municipality of Port Louis (Mauritius) of concerning itself with “mere trifles, like the case of a Mr Rendle, whose carts knocked against a suspension bridge due to bad driving”. If the safety of the bridge was being compromised, it was anything but a trifle.

As an artefact, this book shows some signs of cheeseparing (I am reading the paperback; I don’t know if there was a hardback or if it was any different). The illustrations are black and white, small and blurry; I can’t get much out of them, especially those which are poor reproductions of colour paintings. Even more seriously, the book is hard to hold or read with any comfort. Like so many modern paperbacks, it refuses to open enough to make the text on the inside of the pages easy to read, and if one tried to yank it further open, I don’t doubt, from the alarming creaking of the pages, that the binding would crack. It needs to be held open (or as open as it gets) with both hands all the time and is quite heavy, which discourages long spells of reading.

This necessarily stop-start method of reading may be why, by the end, I was not sure I had altogether followed his central argument.  He demonstrates, certainly, how the ripples of revolution, particularly that in France, spread outwards to places like Mauritius and the Cape, how authority, particularly in the person of the British, took anti-revolutionary counter-measures, and shows events and persons from an unaccustomed angle, all of which is welcome and of interest. But I’m not sure any of this amounts to “turning the story of the dawn of our times inside out”.