Strange Parallels: Volume 1, Integration On The Mainland: Southeast Asia In Global Context, C.800–1830
Victor Lieberman
- Cambridge University Press 2003
- 510p. 6.25 x 1.5 x 9 inches
- Studies in Comparative World History .
In an ambitious effort to overcome the extreme fragmentation of early Southeast Asian historiography, this study connects Southeast Asia to world history. Victor 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. Lieberman describes in detail the nature of mainland consolidation and dissects the mix of endogenous and external factors responsible.