91Ö±²¥

Gonville & 91Ö±²¥ College Fellow Professor Sujit Sivasundaram has spoken to This Cambridge Life about his life and work, in an interview published on the day his book Waves across the South: A New History of Revolution and Empire (William Collins) was shortlisted for the Here we publish an extract from the .

Photos: Lloyd Mann

The first thing Cambridge taught me was that it was important to follow my passions. What I really enjoyed was reading, writing and thinking – and studying history allowed me to do more of this. I changed degrees, first to the fascinating field of history and philosophy of science which introduced me to the way knowledge, including race, is constructed, and over time I became more and more caught up with my study of human beings and the natural world.

Curiosity and imagination are essential to being a historian. The people I find most interesting are those who are unlike me. When I do my research, I know I need to be open to that sense of surprise at the realisation of difference and to the power of understanding new ways of thought. Historical research also depends on being ingenious with evidence, working with fragments and going beyond the bulk of sources to get to the underside.

Global history is about reaching for places that are not at the forefront of historical narratives. It’s about continuously decentring the obvious, the familiar and the iconic in order to bring overlooked stories and processes of change to the light. I like to think of it as starting with an island like Sri Lanka which holds the world in it – to understand the world from that one small place far from the expected centres of historical change and innovation.

I’m interested in understanding the paths that were taken – and not taken – by our predecessors and how these pathways were constrained by larger structural forces, like the rise and fall of empires, ideas of race and gender, capitalism or nationalism. Even the environment we inhabit influences these paths. I’m especially interested in how oceans have shaped the human past over the long term and have written on this. I have recently written on COVID-19 by thinking about the rapidly changing relations of humans and animals in the modern era in Asia.

In Waves Across the South I had to exercise my imagination in reconstructing a rich range of lives. Among the most telling was the story of Tasmanian Aboriginal women involved in the seal trade alongside foreign men such as escaped convicts from New South Wales. What really struck me was how gender roles looked different in the sealing camp. But their story like so many in the book is utterly tragic: genocide driven in part by British abolitionist commitments to protecting these women saw rapid depopulation.

The pandemic has made me nostalgic about Sri Lanka and Colombo once again. While stuck in Cambridge, in my mind I walked the streets of Colombo, exploring the neighbourhoods and buying food from street markets.

Click to read the full interview with Professor Sujit Sivasundaram on This Cambridge Life: