In late 1805, Napoleon Bonaparte scored his famous victory over the Austrian and Russian armies on the wintertime battlefield of Austerlitz. At almost the same time half a world away, courtiers in the Sri Lankan kingdom of Kandy were celebrating their recent triumph over Anglo-Indian forces with an epic poem, the “Ingrisi Hatana” (“English Battle”), set down on palm leaves.
Austerlitz has long been seen as a turning point in the age of revolutions, roughly 1770 to 1850, that ushered in the modern world. Napoleon’s victory dealt a body blow to a European old regime already tottering from the spread of republicanism and popular sovereignty. But historians have given far less attention to Britain’s nearly simultaneous defeat by Kandy. It hardly rates a mention in the many histories of the revolutionary era, which tend to focus on Europe and the Americas.
In “Waves Across the South: A New History of Revolution and Empire,” Sujit Sivasundaram turns this perspective on its head by looking at the age of revolutions from the Indian and Pacific Oceans.
