Gonville & Caius Fellow Professor Sujit Sivasundaram has thanked the College community for supporting him after his book Waves Across the South: A New History of Revolution and Empire was shortlisted for another prize.

Waves Across the South is one of seven shortlisted titles for the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize for History 2021, which celebrates the best non-fiction on any historical subject. The winner will be announced on December 7.

Of Professor Sivasundaram’s book, the judges said: “This is a daring new history of empire that asks us to better understand how the world we live in now came to be. Sujit Sivasundaram tells the story of the sea: the trade and commerce it enabled and the colonial violence it wrought on southern shores. It’s a convincing and illuminating read, full of unheard voices.”

The Professor of World History and Director of the Centre of South Asian Studies at the University of Cambridge said: “Waves Across the South arose out of so much conversation, including with scholars and writers in places like Mauritius or Burma/Myanmar.

“It was fundamentally shaped by the nature of the community of historians in Caius and Cambridge, from undergraduates who heard snippets about it in supervisions and responded helpfully and critically, to graduate students who read drafts and challenged me and colleagues who are Fellows at Caius who critiqued it and provided feedback.

“I could not have written it without all these interlocutors and so any recognition of the book is collective.”

Waves Across the South was longlisted for the 2021 Cundill History Prize, and has been shortlisted for the British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding. The British Academy prize announcement is on October 26.

Professor Patrick Wright, chair of the jurors of the British Academy Book Prize notes: “Sivasundaram uses archives, and also objects and images, with great flair. He manages to recover the material for an extraordinary collection of stories, and he does so in a vivid way, while also placing a new and transforming emphasis on the resourcefulness, intelligence and enduring agency of the indigenous peoples drawn into this previously under-regarded theatre of empire.”

Helen McCarthy (History 1998) and the book cover of Double Lives (Credit: Jonathan Ring)

In an additional indication of the strengths of Caius History, another shortlisted author for the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize is Professor Helen McCarthy (History 1998). Now a Fellow of St John’s College, Professor McCarthy was shortlisted for her book, ‘Double Lives: A History of Working Motherhood.’

She said: “It's a great honour to see Double Lives shortlisted for the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize, especially at a time when understanding the entangled histories of work, parenting and care seem more urgent than ever. I hope that my book contributes something to that task, building on the transformative scholarship produced by feminist historians over many decades.”

Main photo: Professor Sujit Sivasundaram in the Caius Library (Credit: Lloyd Mann)