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  1. Home
  2. Books
  3. Strange Parallels
  • Cited by 74
  • Volume 2: Mainland Mirrors: Europe, Japan, China, South Asia, and the Islands
  • Victor Lieberman, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
June 2012
Print publication year:
2009
Online ISBN:
9780511816000
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511816000
Subjects:
Area Studies, Regional and World History: General Interest, Asian Studies, History, South-East Asian History
Series:
Studies in Comparative World History
Information

Book description

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.

Reviews

'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.'

Source: The American Historical Review

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