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"Per the UK publisher William Collins's promotional copy: "There is a quarter of this planet which is often forgotten in the histories that are told in the West. This quarter is an oceanic one, pulsating with winds and waves, tides and coastlines, islands and beaches. The Indian and Pacific Oceans constitute that forgotten quarter, brought together here for the first time in a sustained work of history." More specifically, Sivasundaram's aim in this book is to revisit the Age of Revolutions and Empire from the perspective of the Global South. Waves Across the South ranges from the Arabian Sea across the Indian Ocean to the Bay of Bengal, and onward to the South Pacific and Australia's Tasman Sea. As the Western empires (Dutch, French, but especially British) reached across these vast regions, echoes of the European revolutions rippled through them and encountered a host of indigenous political developments. Sivasundaram also opens the door to new and necessary conversations about environmental history in addition to the consequences of historical violence, the extraction of resources, and the indigenous futures that Western imperialism cut short"--

Introduction: paths through mountains and seas -- Peoples -- Trade -- Scholars -- Sites -- Gardens -- Land -- Medicine -- Publics -- Conclusion: convolutions of space and time

AbstractConnections, circuits, webs, and networks: these are concepts that are overused in today's world histories. Working from a commitment to reflexive historicization, this paper points to one moment in the consolidation of these terms: the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century visual politics of "new imperialism." Utilizing photographs, engravings, postcards, letters, and colonial documents, the paper argues that connection was mesmerizing and can still mesmerize the historian. Being connected became possible because of visual and infrastructural projects that allowed the production and consumption of lines that literally cut sea and land. At a time of high empire, and in accordance with the dictates of Imperial Geography, particular locales or "nodes" were thus positioned in the "global." To mount this critique of our language, the paper focuses on the infrastructural development of the port of Colombo, alongside the thinking of Halford Mackinder, the building of breakwaters in Colombo, the arrival of mass tourism, projections of capitalist improvement for the business of transshipment, and the use of the port by Indian laborers on their way to Ceylon's highland plantations. By attending to the place where connection is wrought, its material workings, and its traces in the visual, intellectual, and capitalist archive, it is argued that connectivity's forgettings and displacements come more forcefully into view. If connection had an evacuating character and could be so imperialist, what of its status in our writings?

By reconsidering how race operates at the intersection of the human-animal divide, this essay looks back on the paths that have been opened by the special section "Nonhuman Empires." Rather than interrogating the literary entanglement of animality and race, the argument considers the disciplinary and conceptual genealogies that stretch over these two alternative modes of differentiation. Starting with phrenology and comparative anatomy and moving toward anthropology and psychology, Sivasundaram argues that after ca. 1800, race and animality have had overlapping lives. This overlap was productive for Western empires, who were concerned with arbitrating the human in programs of war as much as settlement. The second part of the essay focuses on notions of descent from animals in South Asia with respect to how colonists studied alleged feral children, as much as the placement of accounts of animal descent in nationalist vocabularies. Transgressing and policing the human-nonhuman divide, Sivasundaram contends, was central to the project of empire; exposing empire's power requires a widening of critical attention so that nonhumans are worthy of serious postcolonial critique.

By using the case of the Baptist missionaries called the 'Serampore Trio'—Rev. William Carey, Rev. William Ward and Rev. Joshua Marshman—this article urges that science and Christianity were intimately related in early nineteenth-century north India. The Serampore Baptists practised a brand of Christian and constructive orientalism, devoting themselves to the recovery of Sanskrit science and the introduction of European science into India. Carey established an impressive private botanical garden and was instrumental in the formation of the Agricultural Society of India. Ward, in his important account of Hinduism, argued that true Hindu science had given way to empiricism, and that Hindus had confused nature with the divine. The Serampore College formed by the trio sought to educate Indians with respect to both Sanskrit and European science, and utilised a range of scientific instruments and texts on science published in India. The College aimed to change the way its pupils saw the material world by urging experimentation rather than reverence of nature. The style of science practised at Serampore operated outside the traditional framework of colonial science: it did not have London as its centre, and it sought to bring indigenous traditions into a dialogue with European science, so that the former would eventually give way to the latter.