Waves Across the South

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A sweeping history and major reassessment of how Britain came to rule the waves - told from the forgotten quarter of the world. It is difficult now to imagine a time when Britain stood as the world's supreme power, much less to imagine how that came to be. It was certainly not the product of calculated planning or superlative naval power, as often as that story is told. Turning this story inside out, Cambridge historian Sujit Sivasundaram places what he terms 'the forgotten quarter' - the peoples and places of the Pacific and Indian Oceans to give a bold reinterpretation of how the British Empire was formed - and how it couldn't have happened without a backdrop of global turmoil. The decades from 1780 to 1830 were tumultuous, including for the British. America had recently made its break for independence, and following the French, a wave of revolution was coursing south across the globe. In countries around the Pacific and Indian oceans, the seeds of rebellion grew fast, becoming local and then national r