Strange Parallels

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.