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

Blending fine-grained case studies with overarching theory, this book seeks to rethink 1,000 years of Eurasian history.

Victor Lieberman (Author)

9780521530361, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 30 October 2009

976 pages, 25 b/w illus. 10 maps 1 table
22.9 x 15.2 x 5.8 cm, 1.34 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.' The American Historical Review

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.

1. A far promontory: Southeast Asia and Eurasia
2. Varieties of European experience (I): the formation of Russia and France to c.1600
3. Varieties of European experience (II): a great acceleration, c.1600–1830
4. Creating Japan
5. Integration under expanding Inner Asian influence (I): China: a precocious and durable unity
6. Integration under expanding Inner Asian influence (II): South Asia: patterns intermediate between China and the protected zone
7. Locating the islands
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Asian history [HBJF], General & world history [HBG]