Strange Parallels: Volume 2, Mainland Mirrors: Europe, Japan, China, South Asia, and the Islands: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c.800–1830

Victor Lieberman

oct 2009 · Cambridge University Press

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Blending fine-grained case studies with overarching theory, this book seeks both to integrate Southeast Asia into world history and to rethink much of Eurasia's premodern past. It argues that Southeast Asia, Europe, Japan, China, and South Asia all embodied idiosyncratic versions of a Eurasian-wide pattern whereby local isolates cohered to form ever larger, more stable, more complex political and cultural systems. With accelerating force, climatic, commercial, and military stimuli joined to produce patterns of linear-cum-cyclic construction that became remarkably synchronized even between regions that had no contact with one another. Yet this study also distinguishes between two zones of integration, one where indigenous groups remained in control and a second where agency gravitated to external conquest elites. Here, then, is a fundamentally original view of Eurasia during a 1,000-year period that speaks to both historians of individual regions and those interested in global trends.

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Both a specialist in precolonial Burma and a comparativist interested in global patterns, Victor Lieberman graduated first in his class from Yale University and obtained his doctorate from the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London. His publications include Burmese Administrative Cycles: Anarchy and Conquest, c.1580–1760, which won the Harry J. Benda Prize from the Association for Asian Studies; Beyond Binary Histories: Re-Imagining Eurasia to c.1830, which he edited and an earlier version of which appeared as a special issue of Modern Asian Studies devoted to Lieberman's scholarship; and Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c.800-1830, Volume 1: Integration on the Mainland, which won the World History Association Book Prize. He is the Marvin B. Becker Collegiate Professor of History and Professor of Southeast Asian History at the University of Michigan.