Strange Parallels: Volume 1, Integration on the Mainland

Download or read book Strange Parallels: Volume 1, Integration on the Mainland written by Victor Lieberman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-05-26 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This ambitious work has two novel goals: to overcome the extreme fragmentation of early Southeast Asian historiography, and to connect Southeast Asian to world history. Combining careful local research with wide-ranging theory Lieberman argues that over a thousand years, each of mainland Southeast Asia's great lowland corridors experienced a pattern of accelerating integration punctuated by recurrent collapse. These trajectories were synchronized not only between corridors, but most curiously, between the mainland as a whole, much of Europe, and other sectors of Eurasia. He describes in detail the nature of mainland consolidation - which was simultaneously territorial, religious, ethnic, and commercial - and dissects the mix of endogenous and external factors responsible. Here, then, is a fundamentally original analysis not only of Southeast Asia, but of the pre-modern world.