Strange Parallels: Volume 1, Integration on the Mainland
Southeast Asia in Global Context, c.800–1830

A novel analysis that looks at early Southeast Asian history in terms of integration and collapse.

Victor Lieberman (Author)

9780521804967, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 26 May 2003

510 pages, 8 b/w illus. 7 maps
22.8 x 16.4 x 3.1 cm, 0.68 kg

'Victor Lieberman's two-volume opus is the most important work of history produced so far this century … It is no exaggeration to say that Strange Parallels is a paradigmatic work. It will inform our understanding of human history for generations to come.' American Historical Review

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.

1. Introduction: the ends of the earth: Part A. Rethinking Southeast Asia
Part B. Implications for Eurasia
2. One basin, two poles: the western mainland and the formation of Burma
3. A stable, maritime consolidation: the central mainland
4. 'The least coherent territory in the world': Vietnam and the eastern mainland
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Asian history [HBJF]