I admit I rushed this book so I'd have something to ask Sujit when I saw him at the Galle Literary Festival, but I ended up talking about myself instead.

Sujit Sivasundaram aims to tell a different story of the Age of Revolution in the late 18th to mid 19th centuries, when a wave of revolutions spread across Europe, and also in America and Haiti. Moving away from the West, he looks at what was happening in the areas surrounding the Indian and Pacific Oceans in the same period, where similar revolutionary desires spread but were quashed by an imperial counter-revolution. Chapters zoom into events on specific islands such as Tonga, Mauritius, New Zealand and Singapore, and step back to depict interactions between them and within larger regions like the Persian Gulf and the Bay of Bengal. The book is well-researched, but as I was not familiar with much of this history, it was slightly difficult to parse through the density of figures and events presented in quick succession. And though the intention of shifting perspectives is admirable, much of the story is still told through the lens of the colonial officials, perhaps due to the lack of records written from the other side. The book tries to do too much in both telling the history of a highly diverse part of the globe while also making a historiographical argument on how the Age of Revolution should be told. Still, I learnt a lot from reading it and would love to learn more about this period in history.