Strange Parallels and the Big Picture: “Asia” Writ Large Over a Turbulent Millennium

Abstract

Every now and again a book comes along that “shakes foundations”, as it were. Such volumes let us know that something novel has appeared on the scene, in terms of new ways of knowing the shape and landscape of the past, the great “undiscovered country” of the proverb. Strange Parallels – not one book, but two – is this kind of project. In an age of hyperbole it is easy to believe the breathless hype of publishers when they tell us, the reading public, that such work has arrived. Many of us often end up feeling deflated, though, when the volume finally gets to our desks. On occasion, though, such books do live up to the praise, and happily this is the case with Victor Lieberman's absorbing two volumes. Lieberman is a well-respected historian of Burma; in recent years, his tastes have been ranging further afield, however, as he has sought to connect Burma to larger stories and themes. Strange Parallels is the result of that philandering eye, an occasion when infidelity of one's locus of choice cannot only be forgiven, but applauded because of the result. Lieberman did not just covet his neighbors in this exercise – Siam and Vietnam and the other polities of mainland Southeast Asia. He ended up coveting Eurasia, or the expanse of an entire continent. What happens when you marry a very specific area studies expertise to this kind of vastly expanded vision? What paradigms can be shifted, and what new patterns can be seen? Perhaps most importantly, what new things can be discerned about the “undiscovered country” of the past that previously were hidden, even to cognoscenti?

Every now and again a book comes along that “shakes foundations”, as it were. Such volumes let us know that something novel has appeared on the scene, in terms of new ways of knowing the shape and landscape of the past, the great “undiscovered country” of the proverb. Strange Parallels – not one book, but two – is this kind of project. In an age of hyperbole it is easy to believe the breathless hype of publishers when they tell us, the reading public, that such work has arrived. Many of us often end up feeling deflated, though, when the volume finally gets to our desks. On occasion, though, such books do live up to the praise, and happily this is the case with Victor Lieberman's absorbing two volumes. Lieberman is a well-respected historian of Burma; in recent years, his tastes have been ranging further afield, however, as he has sought to connect Burma to larger stories and themes. Strange Parallels is the result of that philandering eye, an occasion when infidelity of one's locus of choice cannot only be forgiven, but applauded because of the result. Lieberman did not just covet his neighbors in this exercise – Siam and Vietnam and the other polities of mainland Southeast Asia. He ended up coveting Eurasia, or the expanse of an entire continent. What happens when you marry a very specific area studies expertise to this kind of vastly expanded vision? What paradigms can be shifted, and what new patterns can be seen? Perhaps most importantly, what new things can be discerned about the “undiscovered country” of the past that previously were hidden, even to cognoscenti?

The main argument of the author in his intellectual peregrinations here is a deceptively simple one. By the late 1700s, polities in Vietnam, Siam and Burma all disintegrated and eventually were replaced by significantly more powerful ones. In all of these cases the disintegrations ended a third and started a fourth cycle of political consolidation that had been happening more or less independently in each of these realms over the course of a full millennium. The interregna between consolidations were getting temporally smaller and smaller over time; political consolidation, on the other hand, was becoming a more and more vital process. Lieberman tells us that Europe had many hundreds of political units by the mid fifteenth century, but only thirty by roughly 1900, while Mainland Southeast Asia moved from some two dozen to only three between the mid fourteenth and the early nineteenth centuries. Even more strangely, two countries to the north of this theater in eastern and central Eurasia, Japan and Russia, exhibited similarities in these cycles as well, in contrast to the countries of Island Southeast Asia, which were geographically proximate but which predominantly followed a different route into the future. (China, India, and West Asia exhibited a still different set of patterns). Why then the “strange parallels?” Lieberman wants to re-think the patterns of Mainland Southeast Asia over the thousand years between the ninth and nineteenth centuries CE, and does so very clearly with the scope and challenges of global history as part of his project. Though Strange Parallels is in many ways history at its best, Lieberman's aims are also very plainly historiographical. In this he is himself in the slip-stream of previous studies of the Southeast Asian past, including the earliest cadences toward a Sino-Indic perspective, later moves toward colonial history, and even later, counter-cultural vantages which stressed the need for an “autonomous history” paradigm almost fifty years ago now today.¹ Lieberman sees utility in many of these perspectives, but ultimately he sets off on his own unique path, taking a direction that has not yet been tried in the penning of Southeast Asian history as whole.

His principle goal in the two volumes has been to make sense of how political, cultural, and commercial integration on the mainland actually worked over the scope of a full millennium, and why it happened. Lieberman downplays the idea that the predominant mover of events during this time period was foreign contact. But he also is careful to integrate discussions of the “power of the local” with many nods toward larger, trans-regional historical patterns, which affected Southeast Asia just like other parts of the world as our modern (global) political economy was made. In his books he is first occupied with territorial evolutions, and a sequence of helpful maps of the mainland in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and sixteenth centuries in volume I illustrates nicely a few of these evolutions on the ground. Lieberman also plots out administrative centralization through a menu of potential models, ones he labels as self-standing patterns, each one of which unfolded over various geographies of the Southeast Asian mainland at divergent times, and in divergent locales. The mechanics of cultural subsumation via the spread of religion, the shifting demographics of ethnicity, as well as linguistic changes are discussed, and a template of longue durée integration is put forward, which shows how each of the major river civilizations of the mainland (Irrawaddy, Chao Phraya, and Mekong) centralized and ultimately grew over time. The author even posits a very utilitarian analysis of the cultural and political results of all of this growth, outlining that expansion usually seems to have been joined by an almost inevitable turbulence between “centers” and “margins”, as well as between aristocrats keen to claim their share of the new riches available in both land and commerce. In the 1300s, 1500s and 1700s collapses in centralized control often came on the heels of rapid territorial, commercial, and demographic expansion, as elites in each of the three river-system arenas grappled to try to control the new day-to-day realities of managing individual kingdoms.

Once he has laid out his claims vis-à-vis mainland Southeast Asia in volume I, he extends the argument across the rest of Eurasia – again, Europe, Russia, Japan, China, India, and Island Southeast Asia – in volume II. He examines this huge space with a comparativist's eye. Yet he always does so in relation to themes that he has already posited for the terra cognita he knows best – the compact, river-valley worlds of Burma, Siam, and Vietnam. In the pages that follow I will explore what I see as three main themes in Lieberman's magnum opus. First, I will look at how he deals with chronology over this vast expanse of Asian space over one thousand years. Second, I query Lieberman's position on state-formation, perhaps the most important driving force of his argument across these many disparate societies. And third, I analyze how the “foreign” and the “local” appear in his schema, especially in light of the author's world-history orientation which is so central to the two books. Throughout the essay I make use of scholarship of other authors on South, East, and Southeast Asia to reference the discussion.²Strange Parallels is going to be broadly considered a monument of the craft of history for decades to come; of this I think there can be little doubt. How does the architecture of this incredible project – the house that Lieberman built – hold together?

Chronologies in Collision: Seeing “Asia” Across the Grain

One of the most salient parts of the Lieberman opus is his calibrated use of a longue durée vantage in seeing “Asia” as a coherent subject of study. Lieberman ranges across centuries the way most of us range across a television on a Sunday afternoon: he is a channel-surfer of sorts, and he doesn't mind moving widely across the temporal panorama in front of him to prove his points (see Figure 1). In volume I of Strange Parallels he does this in a compact way, confining himself to essentially Burma, Siam, and Vietnam in three dense, more-or-less chronologically viable chapters. In Volume II, he takes an analogous turn, but the scale is altogether larger. First “Europe” (here France and Russia), then Japan, China, South Asia and Island Southeast Asia are all interrogated each in turn. Through each of these chapters, every one of them over one hundred pages long, he gives something of a narrative of development and historical evolution, yet he also tests his theories at the same time on integration, consolidation, and inclusion and/or marginality in the larger structures of human interaction. This is a thousand-year story. But in Lieberman's hands, the time is worn rather lightly, and one feels the passage of centuries as part of a current that has a specific direction. Does he capture the geist of epochs equally well all across the width and breadth of the project?

In explicating and utilizing the chronologies of pre-modern Southeast Asia, essentially all through volume I, and then again at the beginning and at the end of volume II, Lieberman is in his “home territory” of sorts – this is well-worn ground to the author. He is surest here, because this is the terrain he has known since graduate school – the era of “classical polities” in mainland Southeast Asia, a time of kings and temples and attempted political control over landed populations. Few people have the specific, in-depth knowledge of events on this period that Lieberman has, and it shows in his handling of historical detail in these sections of the volumes. Lieberman moves easily through a thousand years here, connecting dotted lines and drawing our attention to convergences between Burma, Siam and Vietnam (and to some extent, Cambodia and Laos too), without breaking much of a sweat.³ These sections of volume I are an impressive tour de force, and religion (mostly Buddhism), agriculture (mostly rice), environment, and politics are all linked seamlessly, sketching the outlines of a pattern that we have identified above. Chronology is very much Lieberman's friend in these sections. He knows the on-the-ground specifics so well that he is able to marshal up an impressive ream of statistics and facts on a large body of subjects to support his claims about statecraft and growth. It is fascinating to read all of this material too because only now are we getting our first in-depth treatments of early Southeast Asia as a whole in monograph form (see Hall, 2011, versus earlier, much more archaeological efforts such as Higham, 1996 and 1989; and Bellwood, 1978). Though the modern period has had several attempts at this over the years, this is altogether newer territory for the pre-modern period (for the former, two of the latest statements are Owen, 2005; and Ricklefs et al., 2010).

Lieberman's treatment of the end of his chosen time-frame (the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, many historians' choice for Southeast Asia's entrance into some sort of tenuous “modernity”) is also interesting. During this era the energy behind Southeast Asia's evolution, according to Lieberman, still came from primarily internal sources. This was a time when three great indigenous dynasties were formed on the mainland; the Konbaung in Burma (1752–1885); the Chakri in Siam (1782 to the present); and the Nguyen court in Vietnam (1802 to 1945) (Thant Myint-U, 2001; Wyatt, 2003; Woodside, 1971). It was only after 1820 or so, right at the end of Lieberman's temporal spectrum for the two books, that Europeans started to substantially effect these energies from outside Southeast Asia. 1819 can be highlighted as a watershed date with the founding of Singapore, while the First Anglo-Burmese War (1824) and the Burney Treaty in Siam (1826), both of which extracted concessions from Southeast Asian kingdoms, are also important signposts for this transitional decade. Indigenous polities started to formulate strategies for dealing with European intrusions during this time, as it became clearer and clearer that the latter were becoming dangerous as the decades wore on (Blusse and Gaastra; 1998). Lieberman's narrative, therefore, is one that suggests that local actors were as important in weaving the historical tapestry of this era as any agents or influences from without. The author is on fairly safe ground here, and he is not hugely concerned with calling for a new periodization vis-à-vis the end of this thousand-year epoch in any real way.

For South Asia, which Lieberman deals with in a long chapter deep into volume II, the chronology is bifurcated between a mostly conceptual first half of the chapter, where explanations are given about a number of mostly political issues, and a more linear, “phase”-driven second half. The author sees the rise and fall of early polities, from the Palas (750–1170), Yadavas (1000–1296), and Colas (900–1250) forward (II; 636 passim), but a strong thread of the narrative is also taken up by the evolution of trade relations between the sub-continent and the outside world. A feeling for commerce and interaction in the medieval and Early Modern period is sketched through several factors. The monsoons were of crucial importance to the international orbit of trade, dictating markets and opportunities based on the arrival and departure of ships (see Qasim, 2000). Multiculturalism was infused in the region, as might be seen by the demographics of ports on the Malabar and Coromandel coasts in the southern reaches of the sub-continent (Ray, 2000). India's place in regional commodity specialization was also crucial, with her textiles, spices, and luxuries traveling to various harbors ringing the shores of the Ocean. The cadence of India's coasts was therefore outward rather than inward: as with a number of the other parts of this vast marine region, Indian Ocean littorals might sometimes have more in common with each other than they did with their own immediate hinterlands. India's median geography at the “roof” of the ocean assured its geographic importance, as the confluence of winds and tides brought ships to her ports on stages of their trans-oceanic journeys. These conditions were fairly prevalent along the bounds of the sea; it was in the landed interior of the sub-continent, for the most part, that Lieberman says empires rose and fell.

Yet by the end of his South Asian narrative India's indigenous empires are in serious trouble. The Mughals, a people with an Inner Asian provenance, have taken over most of the sub-continent, and after them the English – who hail from even further away – eventually begin to do the same thing (for details on the arrival of the former, see Gordon, 2007). Lieberman sees a kind of exhaustion across the Indian landscape by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, his closing period of discussion. Yet to downgrade Indian ingenuity during this time period would likely be unwise, I think. The agency of Indian traders, for example, found new ways to survive, even in associations that are sometimes quite surprising. Faced with marginalization on a grand scale, Indians often attached themselves to the one constant they could find: private colonial greed. Paradoxically, the dictates, policies, and laws of the East India Company (1600 to 1858) were often as burdensome for English traders as they were suffocating for indigenous merchant classes.⁴ And in this unexpected state of affairs lay the seeds of a new partnership. English “country traders” often brought in Indians to maximize their profits against the Company they ostensibly served, for example, by colluding over price-fixing, under-reporting, bribery, and over-charging. Private traders also sold safe-conduct passes to Indian merchants on the sly so that they could evade their own rulers' taxes: as their goods were now headed for “Company” coffers, local nawabs could not enforce exactions. Cooperation in these ventures spread throughout British India, from the lowest district officers to the governors of the presidencies. It was in this new complexity of relations in the expanding imperial world of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Raj that Indian commercial agency, at least, found a revised niche (Prakash, 1988; Subrahmanyam and Bayly, 1990). Once partners, then competitors, and finally subordinates, the trade of indigenous India, at least, survived wholesale changes in the sub-continent's political economy by adapting (for better or for worse) to the exigencies of the times. Lieberman may be right that there was an “eclipse” of Indian political power over time, to use his term (II: 733–38), but in real ways many Indian capabilities survived, though in substantially altered forms.

In dealing with chronology in East Asia, Lieberman takes a two-pronged approach by country, again a different tack than what we have seen previously in the rest of volume II. For Japan, he moves almost wholly century by century in explaining the patterns that interest him, but in China, he chooses themes as his markers, and then moves (for the most part) chronologically within each of these rubrics. These are very different ways of presenting information, and the chapters “feel” remarkably different as a result to the reader. Japan is one of Lieberman's main case studies for the “protected zone” polities that are arguably his main interest in these books; these places are where the “strange parallels” of the title occur, after all. And the Japan presented by the author fits his template quite neatly under this approach, with the island-polity developing power-sources during certain periods, followed by collapses, followed by new power sources, and again new collapses. The interregna between the two diminish over time, and one sees the power of the “state” rising, as Kamakura becomes Ashikaga (1280–1467), Ashikaga becomes Warring States (1467–1603), and the Warring States becomes Tokugawa (1603–1854 CE). Lieberman “plays” a bit longer with the Tokugawa section than the others; one can almost sense him smiling as he wrote these pages (II: 438–93). The Tokugawa ascendancy in the early seventeenth century after all mirrors best many of the main patterns he wants to illustrate in these books.⁵ And yet there are real temporal “idiosyncrasies,” and he acknowledges them; a kind of laundry list of political, economic, and cultural factors that make the Japanese case special (Japanese cases often seem to be touted as “special”). What we miss a bit, perhaps, in this version of chronology adhering to Lieberman's historical vision, are the losers in this story – the ordinary Japanese who were pushed to the side by the march toward an ostensible modernity. The historian Mikiso Hane was among the first to suggest that this story should also be told, and I wondered if the early chapters in Hane's books might have found more expression here in making that explicit point (Hane; 1982).

For China, Lieberman is on more conceptual ground. He is covering the same huge sweep of history here as he does in Japan, but he sees this polity's chronology in a completely different way. After an initial sprint through Chinese dynastic history in seven very dense pages (II: 497–504), he focuses his lens downward on successive occasions, each time onto a notion that he feels needs explaining. Administrative integration, territorial expansion (a huge topic unto itself, considering the history of the Chinese polity's push north, south, and especially west), horizontal and vertical cultural integration and exchange, and economic and demographic cycles are all queried. Each of these rubrics is dealt with more or less chronologically over a thousand years, and the reading required to do this half of the chapter alone is nothing less than astounding. Yet it is the second half of the chapter where more of the heavy lifting is done, as it is here where Lieberman sketches out how China differs from the protected zone polities that are his primary interest. He sees distinctiveness in several areas, ranging from something he calls “civilizational precocity” (II: 576) (literacy and a number of other factors; China shares this trait with both South and West Asia), the constant threat from Inner Asian peoples, the burden of size, and the implications of the Pacific environment (for useful statements on each of these topics for comparison's sake, see Waley-Cohen, 1989; Perdue, 2005; Wills, 2001; Pomeranz, 2000; and Elvin, 2004). It was an interesting choice to order this huge chapter so differently from his section on Japan, but through the choice one sees how, in many respects, China does indeed appear to have a markedly different rhythm to its past than the Japanese islands next door. The meter and pace of absorption, exchange, and growth feels distinct, and the ability of the author to link this kind of staccato but recognizable template to regions far afield – on the Indian subcontinent, and at the other end of continental Asia in the Middle East – was a major leap in vision in these books. No one, to my knowledge, had made these specific connections before. Central to this vision is Lieberman's exegesis on the modalities of states and statecraft in Asia, and it is to this concept that we now turn.

The State of State Formation: “Bigger” is Not Necessarily “Better”

If Strange Parallels is inclusive and even sometimes innovative in dealing with the chronologies of the Asian past, then it is even more impressive in how it deals with state formation. In many ways this is the heart of Lieberman's project; very little escapes his vision in general in these books, but the primary locus of his attention, it seems to me, is his desire to explain how Asian polities got progressively smaller in number and yet stronger at the same time, with both processes occurring over the longue durée. Many of the avatars of these polities might not yet have been termed “states” in classical political science jargon, but that is essentially what they were becoming – bodies of self-governance, whose coercive force in turn was being extended over larger and larger swaths of territory, and the people who lived in these spaces. There were advantages and disadvantages to inclusion in such groupings. Some people fled, while others (who either couldn't, or who decided it was in their best interests not to do so), remained, in ways that have been recently outlined by James Scott (Scott, 2009). The latter were swallowed by these burgeoning amalgamations of people and territory. As an “historian's historian”,⁶ Lieberman is not overly concerned with dense statements of high theory on how this all happened on a global scale (see among others Migdal, 1988; Moore, 1967; Scott, 1998; Taussig, 1997). There are nods to such debates and to the wider literature on the evolution of statecraft, but as he tells us repeatedly in his introduction and in his conclusion, his is a comparativist's project. He is interested in the details and in the echoes across both time and space in Asia. How do these echoes sound across Lieberman's outstretched Eurasia?

As was the case in his conceptualizations of chronology, Lieberman is strongest when dealing with the various forms of what we might loosely term “state formation” in early Southeast Asia. He engages head-on with Anthony Reid's fine two volumes, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, in some of the strongest analytical parts of his writing, measuring his own vision against that of Reid's across a number of issues, including demographics, the imposition of royal will as a characteristic for area polities, and social and religious change across the region as a whole (Reid, 1988 and 1993). One of his main assertions in this historiographical grappling is that he feels that Reid's volumes – themselves very much game-changing, and worthy of a serious read by anyone interested in this part of the world – went too far in some places, and not far enough in others when it comes to state-formation. In a nutshell, Lieberman feels that Reid may have over-emphasized the importance of the outside world's influence on evolving statecraft in early modern Southeast Asia, while under-emphasizing a number of internal political characteristics which are particularly noticeable vis-à-vis the mainland polities of the region. Debates on religion and Confucian doctrine, both vis-à-vis statecraft, are part of this debate (for more details, see Rafael, 1988; Geertz, 1976; Tambiah, 1976; and Spiro, 1992 for the Philippines, Java, Siam and Burma, respectively, and on Confucianization in Vietnam, see Taylor, 1987; Whitmore, 1976; and Woodside, 1982). But the larger point is that for Lieberman, state-formation was evolving organically on the Southeast Asian mainland in a rhythm at once its own, and in step with other societies. Where Reid saw a certain amount of unity to Southeast Asia as a whole during this time, at least vis-à-vis the political, Lieberman sees more of a division between the mainland and the island word, and instead espies continuities of the former with regions further afield on the Eurasian continent.

When we get toward the end of Lieberman's thousand-year time period for these two books, an interesting thing happens with regard to Southeast Asian statecraft. “Burma”, “Siam” and “Vietnam” become strong, vital centers in the author's vision, and exemplars, in a way, of the possibilities of maturing states for this part of the state-formation cycle. An interregnum closes, and the new states begin their inexorable rise per the logic of the millennium-long argument. Yet I wondered here if some scholarship of recent years points to a more fluid understanding of this time, as trans-local migrations, trade, and even changes in the modalities of power-projection began to dilute the power of indigenous states, even in this “up” moment of the cycle. Indeed, one important aspect of the new(-ish) scholarship on this period is its attention to the notion of “overlapping spheres.” Because the construction of most historiography on the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has traditionally been drawn more or less along country lines, it seems important to heed studies that have bridged these lines, since the lines themselves didn't exist very strongly yet in historical time and space. One way that this is increasingly being done for this period is the explicit reference to arenas that do not currently conform to Southeast Asia's national political boundaries (Giersch, 2006, 2001; Wyatt, 1997). More and more there has been an attempt to analyze landscapes that were once closely-linked through trade or diplomacy, though these same landscapes now lie under the auspices of separate independent nation-states (as only one regional example, see Andaya, 2008, but also see earlier steps in this direction in Bassett, 1989, and Suwannathat-Pian, 1988). A second way is increasingly to take a theme – trans-regional agricultural regimes might be one useful one – and then to use this theme to suggest continuities over geography, as some scholars have done (Brocheuz; 1995; O'Connor, 1995; Elson, 1997). Both of these approaches have the advantage of linking regional energies to local ones, since the structure of the normative narrative of the Southeast Asia past during this period has favored the latter approach until only very recently. Lieberman does not much deal with this particular branch of historiography which pushes at the boundaries of his (re-) emerging polities, and his overall argument might be a bit stronger here if this scholarship was included.

In South Asia, Lieberman is very strong on the rise and fall of indigenous polities on the sub-continent. He has a real sense for this history, and perhaps his decades as a pre-modern Burma specialist conditioned this, as after all it is wise to know what is going on the house of your (larger) neighbor next door.⁷ His vision flows from the southern Deccan plateau and the apex of states such as Vijayanagar (1336–1646 CE) all the way up geographically to the petty principalities that occupied the foothills of the Himalayas. He seems particularly good on the Mughals, whom he deals with in a local, South Asian context but also as one of these interesting “conquest elites” that periodically have erupted out of Inner Asia, from Ellsworth Huntington's Huns all the way forward to the Manchus (Huntington, 1907; Golden, 2011). I think Lieberman spends less time than he might, perhaps, on the European gradient to state-formation in India, perhaps because these invaders seemed so much more “foreign” than others did who had preceded them from closer nearby in Eurasia. It is true that by the later eighteenth century, English pressure in the sub-continent was already meeting with seriously debilitated local competition. A prime example here were the new international handicaps experienced by Muslim Indian economic diasporas, as chaos in Middle Eastern polities forced huge exactions on traditional Gujarati networks, while many of the important ports of Southeast Asia came under Christian control (Risso, 1995). Funds and alliances could not be raised to resist Europeans as easily as they might have been in an earlier period. The fortunes of local English power through trade at that time, on the other hand, was increasing: concessions near Surat (1759), in Malabar (1790's), and elsewhere on the sub-continent were expanding English markets and English leverage, instead of causing contraction as per the Gujarati case. Indeed in India new arteries of trade were also being established between English possessions, as opportunities expanded for shipping grain, pulses, and even saltpeter and spirits to the burgeoning English armies (Bayly, 1997).

As was the case with the Portuguese before them, the English did not simply blast their way into dominance in India by way of their superior firepower and technology; this is important because later on these advantages truly did came to bear. Although Lieberman acknowledges the general tenets of Europe's “military revolution”, and he includes useful discourse on changes in armaments in particular (II: 697–98), the disequilibrium created by such advances really had little overall effect in India until the mid-eighteenth century (see Parker, 1996). There were simply too few Portuguese and Dutch soldiers in the sub-continent to ever force significant and widespread changes in trade, and when English armies did appear en masse it was primarily to counter the French (Prakash, 1984; Ray, 1999; Keay, 1991). This was the period, perhaps, when power and commerce more seriously began to fuse, as European rivals were ejected and England found itself in a position for the first time to enforce many of its evolving programs for trade. India's own actions – and responses – to these developments were neither static nor unimaginative. Armament design was incorporated and European mercenaries were also adopted, with period Englishmen observing that many Western ships passed through in the 1760s, selling Indians cannon or small arms (Scammell, 1995). Bloody battles fought by the British against the Nawab of Bengal and the Wazir of Oudh in the 1760s and against Mysore and the Marathas later in the eighteenth century were a testament to this lingering equilibrium. The balance did change, however, and English capabilities to enforce trade and structural adjustments to politics changed along with it. This happened in earnest by the start of the nineteenth century, at the very end of Lieberman's story, when arms production capabilities increased in Europe, and the costs of shipping troops out to the colonies began to diminish significantly. This was state-formation – albeit colonial state-formation – of a whole new order, in other words.

Finally, back in East Asia again, Lieberman once again takes great pains to deal with the rise of state formation as a coherent subject of the volumes. I have alluded already in the chronology section of this article to the crisp, linear quality of his Japanese argument, which is nuanced but presented in a way that is straightforward, it seems to me. The main onus of work here was not laying out the Japanese case, but allying it to other Asian examples, and this is a serious advance. China presents greater analytical challenges, perhaps. One of the thought-provoking parts of Lieberman's story is that China was plagued by its “territorial and demographic scale”, in the author's words. This is essentially shorthand of a sort for “China is huge, China is diverse. How did it hold together?” And of course, Lieberman is right in this, as one might suggest that there have been at least three overlapping Chinas: a predominantly agrarian north, a more mercantile south, and an increasingly Muslim west, the latter of which for periods of the past few centuries has looked toward Central Asia (and beyond). These occasionally de-facto “polities” have existed in uneasy juxtaposition under the same rubric of Chinese Empire for quite some time now (Skinner identifies more “macro-regions” of China [nine, in total] but I will grossly simplify here to these three only).⁸ Yet a tenuous and sometimes not so tenuous geopolitical unity remained possible despite these differences, stretching in Lieberman's period from roughly the after-effects of the T'ang Dynasty's An Lu Shan rebellion all the way up to the series of nineteenth century revolts that culminated in the Boxer uprisings of the fin de siècle (see Hansen, 2000; Esherick, 1987). China has known many periods of fragmentation in its four millennia of recorded history, from the Warring States Period in 400 B.C.E. to the chaos of competing warlords in the first half of the twentieth century. Yet regionalism survived even in the heart of centralization, with places like the southeastern coasts of Guangdong and Fujian recognizably different, in some ways – linguistically, culturally, and certainly economically – than large parts of the rest of the polity for much of Lieberman's millennial time-span. Marco Polo's medieval descriptions of Zaitun's (the contemporary Ch'uan-zhou) harbor are still a useful testament of this difference when compared with other period notices of the rest of the empire (Polo, 1975; see also Hirth and Rockhill, 1966, for an indigenous view).

And yet, the reach of the state during much of Ch'ing China at least was impressive, and enormous – and this despite the territorial and organizational challenges that Lieberman identifies as being fundamental to the “exposed zone” polities. We know from scholars such as Peter Perdue, Pierre Etienne-Will, and R. Bin Wong of the incredible measures enacted by the state to provide food for China's expanding population, both in staple-rich provinces such as Hunan, and in other parts of the empire which were on average much less fecund (Perdue, 1987; Will and Wong, 1991). We know from the oeuvre of Philip Kuhn's work over the last several decades how dissidents were dealt with by the state, through methodical and well-practiced circuits of enforcement, whether these dissidents were considered to be rebels or slightly more “colorful deviants” as explicated in Kuhn's famous soul-stealing episode – itself only one of many of these kinds of transgressions – of 1768 (see Kuhn, 1970 and 1990, respectively). And we also know from Skinner's classic schematics of market structures, and William Rowe's subsequent disentangling of urban economics in Late Imperial China, that the state was heavily implicated in the passage of commerce, too, not just salt on the grand canal, and not just the aforementioned shipments of rice and grain, but vis-à-vis many other commodities in transit (Skinner, 1965 and 1977; Rowe, 1984 and 1989). All of these activities fed into the power of the centralizing state because monies or allegiances were collected: the state was becoming an ever-more efficient octopus in some ways, though this was not true everywhere across the board, and there were undulations to the vitality to these powers as well. Lieberman talks about the “burdens of size” in China in one of his relevant subsections (II: 622–27), but that burden was worn fairly well in the Middle Kingdom for quite some time. And this was not just the case during the Ch'ing, prior to that dynasty's denouement years beginning just as “Lieberman's millennium” was ending circa 1830 CE. He does appear to be spot-on in pushing China away from Japan here conceptually, though, as increasingly both of these polities are been lumped together as part of an envisaged “East Asian” entrance into “modernity” vis-à-vis the state by some scholars.

“Foreign” and “Local”: Provenances and Motors of Change

A final major concern of these books as a collective of information and interpretation, it seems to me, is the dichotomy between “foreign” and “local.” How much of this thousand-year ride through Asian history can we attribute to indigenous influence, and how much of the energies unleashed between 800 and roughly 1800 should we see as causative of larger, exogenous factors? This is an almost impossible web to disentangle, of course, and Lieberman himself would likely be loath to even try. Yet he is certainly aware that this question ghosts through his narrative, and in places the ghost becomes manifest and we are confronted by the question less as an apparition and more as a matter of attribution (and sometimes even of blame). This may be the part of Lieberman's work that is most susceptible to critique; despite this being a comparativist's exercise, he is often concerned to show the indigenous quality of many energies he identifies as important. I am not always sure that a number of the ascribed sources of motion are so local. Indians and Arabs and Chinese and finally Europeans certainly pass through the Southeast Asian spaces of Strange Parallels with great regularity. Yet they sometimes feel apart from the core of the main narrative, as if they were bit players at the side of the show while the main protagonists – Southeast Asians themselves – claim the stage. There are of course very good reasons for writing in this way, and I don't at all differ with the notion that ethnic Southeast Asians should be at the heart of the story here, especially in volume I. But a closer examination of the circumstances of comparison here, and how “foreign” and “local” are juxtaposed in the books, may be worth a quick look.

In Lieberman's scheme for East Asia, as we have seen, China is part of the “exposed rimlands”, and Japan is part of the “protected rimlands.” These are two very different “types” when it comes to dealing with the outside world, in terms of how much influence washes over one's shores. And yet it seems fair perhaps to suggest that both China and Japan – and to some extent India too – shared a common aversion to foreigners for significant parts of Lieberman's time frame. Important cities like Suzhou and Hangzhou in medieval China, Kyoto in Japan, and even Delhi under the Mughals were, in essence, primarily domestic centers. Their economies and political lives flourished to be sure, and they all were certainly cosmopolitan places. But the great majority of these energies were domestically concerned and oriented, not usually straying too far into the international arena. One has only to look at late Ming and Early Ch'ing dynastic histories, or post-1600 documents in Tokugawa Japan, to find examples of the generally stern attitude toward foreigners that these cultures bore (Mungello, 1999; Smitka, 1998). In contrast to China, Japan, and (to some extent) the Indian sub-continent, which have always had large cities that were primarily inwardly-focused and self-supporting, Southeast Asian cities have far more often existed on a lifeblood of international commerce by comparison. Another important deviation here deals with functionality. It has been the case since at least the first millennium C.E. that both the administrative and economic heart of many traditional Southeast Asian polities has been fused into one city. This has been a functional union that is very different from what documents tell us about classical Chinese, Japanese, and Indian cities, for the most part. In the Tokugawa epoch, for example, while Edo (modern Tokyo) functioned as the political and to some-extent cultural center of the Japanese realm, commerce and trade with “outsiders” were left to secondary cities: ports such as Nagasaki, and what would later become Yokohama (Seidensticker, 1991). It was here that contacts were first made with the Western world, initially through Portuguese, Dutch, and Spanish traders (Hellyer, 2009; Chaiklin, 2003; Toby, 1984).⁹ Similarly the fulcrum of Chinese power and authority was kept in Beijing's Forbidden City, funneling trade from the southern coastal cities of Amoy and Canton, while an analogous situation developed with land-locked Delhi and the Indian seaboard cities of the Gulf of Cambay (Bharygaza [or Bharuch], Surat, and Bombay, in that order). (Ng, 1983; Keay, 1991).

Lieberman I think is more convincing on the notion of Inner Asians and the exposed zone, and how these “ethnic actors” fit into the warp and weft of East Asian (and particularly Chinese) history. Both the Mongols in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries and the Manchus during and after the seventeenth century are brought into the center of his narrative in Volume II's Chapter 5. The Yuan Dynasty (1279 to 1368 CE) is reckoned as part of the Chinese dynastic flow of the past, and the Mongols certainly did adapt to sedentary life to some extent as they entered into parts of the “home domains” of the Han peoples. They enacted some techniques of separation which kept them as a people apart as well, though they would have nothing on their fellow steppes-conquerors, the Manchus, from several centuries later in this regard. A significant body of scholarship has now shown how the Manchus domesticated China – and were in turn domesticated by China – as a foreign, military occupation of the world's most complex “state.” Some of this scholarship has centered on governance (Wakeman, 1997; Bartlett, 1991), some on language and culture (Crossley, 1990), and other parts of it have dealt with the very human parts of this transition, including during the conflagration of dynastic succession in the 1640s, and right after it (see Struve, 1993; and Spence, 1974). Lieberman is certainly alive to the thought that the “foreign” really could (and did) make a difference in these places, and indeed these Inner Asian peoples are part and parcel of the structure of his story in these landscapes. Some of the patterns he sees vis-à-vis the Manchus also are also usefully found in the Mughal situation in India, a theater we will return to in a moment.

The “foreign” and the “local” are also important in thinking through patterns and energies in Southeast Asia for this thousand year-long period. It might be prudent to re-visit some of the linking themes that were beginning to constitute Southeast Asia as a region before the age of high imperialism began at the end of Lieberman's temporal schema. One is the importance of “great families” in Southeast Asia, as the region moved from the eighteenth into the nineteenth century and into new forms of social and political organization (Day, 1996). Many of these families were local, but many of them also had Persian, Arab, and Chinese roots, among other foreign provenances (Tagliacozzo, 2009, Tagliacozzo and Chang 2011).¹⁰ Another theme is the changing role of the “geobody” in these equations, not just in Siam, where the most detailed work has been done on this question, but elsewhere in this diffuse patchwork of emerging states as well (Thongchai, 1994). Conceptions of the physical shape and make-up of a “state” changed markedly during this time, as foreign notions of “fixedness” replaced the overlapping concentric sphere of local mandala models in large parts of the region over time. Pan-Southeast Asian conceptions of gender were also malleable and changing during this epoch, as new forms of expectations for both females and males came to bear with the arrival of foreigners and foreign ideologies (such as Christianity and Islam, which together converted fully half of all Southeast Asians during the Early Modern period) (Andaya, 2006; Stoler, 1995; Reid, 1988). Lieberman is sensitive to all of these developments, and social mores, geo-bodies, and (to some extent) gender certainly find a place in his narrative, as well as all of these concepts' intersections with exogenous influences.

Yet one gets the sense that in the warp and weft of Strange Parallels that the foreign is still to some extent subservient to the local in the fifteen hundred pages that make up this story, at least when it comes to Southeast Asia's dynamics. Indeed, it would be very difficult to measure this equation, with all of the formal and informal arrangements of influence, sovereignty, and economic (as opposed to political) domination that were coming to bear at this time. But I think it may be fair to say that the thrust of Lieberman's argument rests more on the primacy of local engines of causality – even if this is a comparativist project. In terms of colonial influence, most of Burma was not yet British by the third or fourth decade of the nineteenth century, nor yet were any of Siam's border regions, as they would be later in the west and south. Cambodia and Laos were not yet controlled by the French. Vietnam was not yet under Gallic influence, and the southern extremes of the Philippines were only beginning to be incorporated by Spanish “gunboat diplomacy” around this time. In Malaya, the Pangkor Engagement, and with it the British Forward Movement, started only in 1874, even if a few ports and islands answered to Englishmen before this; the majority of the Indies' Outer Islands saw no Dutch flags until after 1873, when the initial defeat at Aceh pushed Dutch colonial pride into serious empire-building (see Charney, 2009; Loos, 2006; Edwards, 2007; Evans, 2002; Zinoman, 2001; Warren, 1981; Gullick, 1987; Locher-Scholten, 1994). On the face of it, therefore, 1830 – the end point of Lieberman's saga – does indeed seem to be too soon for the “foreign” to have equal weight with the “local” in his story. The author may be on stable ground then in adapting an occasionally local-centric cadence for his books. Yet one can still wonder if ideology perhaps trumps actuality on occasion, when local forces emerge so often as the origin and initiator of events and trends. The weave of the actual, lived history is so pregnant with both sides of this story that at times one can feel that exogenous forces are unduly minimized. It may be that Lieberman's story has needed this cadence in helping to push the notion of centuries-old cycles forward. Yet there is a palpable presence of this choice in the narrative, even if the books still very much hold together as works of argument and explication.

Finally, in South Asia, Lieberman is also very concerned with patterns of the indigenous and exogenous. To pick just one watershed era here as an example, we can look at the sixteenth-century, which has often been portrayed in older historiography as a time of frenzied Portuguese influence and aggression over much of the sub-continent. We now know this century was very much less than that in terms of the overall effect of the Portuguese in India (see Matthew, 1990; and Subrahmanyam, 1990). During this time period many patterns of South Asia's overall political economy did not radically alter from previous templates. When the Portuguese erected their cartaz (pass) system, the actual burden on local states was for the most part minimal: while many Indians did pay passage fees, those in areas under weaker Portuguese oversight simply avoided it altogether. The Zamorins of Calicut and the Rajas of Cochin, Cannanore, and Quilon, for example (all merchant polities on the southwestern Malabar coast) continued to trade effectively, for the most part. They incorporated themselves under the field of Portuguese “protection” when they had to, but they also paid little mind to the Portuguese at other times, and in other places. The majority of Early Modern Indians, especially under the Mughals, whose revenue came primarily from agriculture, and not from maritime trade, were unaffected by the patrolling Portuguese carracks. The renowned Muslim aphorism “wars by sea are merchants' affairs, and are of no concern to the prestige of kings” operated as a kind of dogma in the Mughal court (Gupta and Pearson, 1987: 79; Askarai, 1995). Despite concerted Portuguese efforts to the contrary, therefore, India's international shipping remained largely in indigenous hands in the early years of European arrival. Lieberman gives us a good feel for the continuity of some of these patterns, without being an alarmist or over-compensating to make this entrance more important than it likely was at the time.

Two centuries later, however, and nearing the end of the author's millennium-long time frame, the picture looks quite different. By this time elements in the relationship between India and the outside world really were forging large changes in the region's political economy. The eighteenth-century pushed change in a new direction, which from the standpoint of Indian choices was a negative one. Although Western trade did not initially hurt most Indian merchants, local shippers suffered a harder fate: as larger and larger portions of the carrying trade was dominated by foreign ships, India's fleets dwindled, diminishing in the contest with the new power of country-traders (private Anglo-Indian merchants). It was this latter group, very diverse in its own right, that pushed the once vibrant Gujarati fleets off many of the international trade routes, and into the more minor, subsidiary role of small coastal carriers (Chandra, 1990; Tirumalai, 1990). Yet it was also these Anglo/Indian country traders – some of whom worked for the Company, others of whom were “free traders” – who began to radically alter the “strange Mughal mix of despotism, traditional rights, and equally-traditional freedoms” that was the prevailing system of trade and production in the rural Indian countryside (Gupta and Pearson, 1987: 136). This constituted a commodity and labor chain of port merchants to brokers to sub-brokers to headmen to weavers to indigo-growers, and back the opposite way. Usually with the assistance of indigenous traders, Westerners were able to reorient some lines of production away from normative destinations and into channels of their own choosing (see Bose, 1993; Banerjee, 1990; Subramanian, 1992). Surat, for example, evolved from a cloth and indigo-exporting center primarily (to Muslim West Asia) into an East India Company harbor collecting exports for China (Singh and Rajshirke, 1992). The two centuries-old “Mughal ladder” of production in rural India was gradually made obsolete: local middlemen lost out to country traders, who in turn took on their own Indian facilitators now as salaried employees. As the eighteenth-century wore on, the English pushed further and further into the sub-continent's countryside, forging new links of economic and political dependency. Lieberman gives us the conceptual outline of some of this story, but it might have been told a bit more fully, perhaps, and integrated further into the long-term cycles of how the “local” and “foreign” have come into contact in the incredible patterns he has discovered.

Conclusion

The vast spectrum of issues covered in Lieberman's volumes, and at the same time, the incredible attention to historical minutiae, mark out these books as immediately singular. Volume I is instructive in this way. In Vietnam, for example, Lieberman queries how the Chinese examination system was used, and the development of the cadastral survey as it was set up in Vietnamese villages for the first time; by the late eighteenth century literally scores of rice-strains are also in use by the peasantry, including drought-resistant species, which ripen quickly and which offer favorable protection against natural disaster. By the mid 1600s, Lieberman tells us, the Vietnamese are also using firearms as they espy the new geopolitics of the region, and as they grasp the necessity of learning a facility with guns. In Siam his panorama is also eclectic: Lieberman focuses down on the destruction of neighboring Angkor and the result of this on the emerging Siamese geo-body; he also notes that Siamese trade is attracting over half of the far-away Ryukyu kingdom's commerce off southern Japan in the early sixteenth century, precisely at a time when Westerners were just starting to trade in earnest with Siam. In Burma the author summons the expertise of paleo-climatologists and geo-physicists in an exegesis on longue durée changes, while he also manages to debate the historiographical fashions of classical Burmese temple architecture, and the crucial nature of Yunnan's cotton markets in the growth of the overall Burmese economy. Strange Parallels is replete with this kind of amalgamation, overlap, and fusion. There are hundreds if not thousands of bits of minutiae such as the above, but all are used in an effort toward clarification of regional cycles of causation. Judged only as a composite of difficult-to-find information, the volumes are certainly worthwhile. But the books end up being much more than this ultimately, as the facts hang together and they are also deployed toward a larger argument of how the region worked over a long period of time.

Volume I is already a very large book; some five hundred pages, with all of the fore-and after-matter attached. Volume II is of an altogether larger scale, however, and stretches to close to a thousand pages. It is notable that the table of contents to Volume I is streamlined and very short – only four simple chapters, each devoid of sub-titles, or sub-rubrics. Volume II, on the other hand, boasts a table of contents that is almost as detailed and panoptic as Strange Parallels is itself as a work of history. It stretches for six full pages with each chapter sub-divided into numerous sub-chapters, and these sub-chapters again sub-divided into even smaller units of explication and organization. Therefore in Chapter One of this volume we receive not only the view of what Lieberman calls the “far promontory of Southeast Asia and Eurasia”, we also get discussions of “intended and unintended consequences of state interventions”, as well as “idiosyncrasies” of the “synchronized trajectories” of the region with Europe and Japan. Chapters Two and Three offer up an overview of what Lieberman calls the “great acceleration” between 1600 and 1830, but then delve down into sub-rubrics on warfare, intellectual currents, and absolutisms, as well as a formidable summing-up fragment called “Europe and Southeast Asia During a Thousand Years.” After a look at Japan in Chapter Four, Chapters Five and Six look specifically at China and India, and the notion of an Inner Asian exceptionalism; these chapters, it seemed to me, may have required some of the most daunting research carried out for the volumes as a whole. Horizontal cultural exchange, vertical cultural integration, military and fiscal imperatives, as well as the locus of a Pacific environment all come under discussion. It is easy to see what Lieberman is after; his is an omnivore's vision of the world. To bite all of this material off, however, and then still to be able to chew it is another matter entirely. And yet this is just what Lieberman has been able to do. His articulations of events, patterns, and trends in France, Russia, China, and Japan act to explicate evolutions that he knows more intimately in Southeast Asia, though in that latter territory he is now looking through sets of area-tinted lenses that no one prior to him has used before.¹¹

Is Strange Parallels a success as a massive, two-volume behemoth of comparative history? It seems that only the most uncharitable scholar could say no to this. It is not merely the daunting size of Strange Parallels that instructs, but the incredible amount of learning assembled, as well as the unusual angles at which Lieberman glimpses his subject. The art historian/theorist John Berger has talked about how our “ways of seeing” change the meaning we take from things; a shift of just a few degrees can make all the difference in our vantage upon understanding any particular subject (Berger, 1972). Lieberman has been particularly good in these volumes at using a shift in vantage to his benefit. His discussion of absolutism in the royal courts of Southeast Asia clearly gains from his understanding of this concept in Ancien Regime France and in Tokugawa Japan, and his untangling of the dynamics of dynastic and military histories in China and Russia achieves precisely the same thing. This is not to say that the two volumes of Strange Parallels are perfect books. There are no “perfect books.” Lieberman's grasp can be at times so vast that one wonders if the parallels are all real, or causative, or linked; surely the distances that separated some of these places were so vast in pre-modern times that the echoes may sometimes be coincidences, even if things line up on a number of fronts. For me, however, this is a quibble, in what arguably are two of the most important books produced not just in Southeast Asian History, but also in History generally in the past several decades. The level of synthesis, the degree of learning, and the sheer force of will to command such an enormous scope of academic writing seems almost unprecedented. Though most of these books take place in the overland expanses of Eurasia, it feels like the ship has come into port here in the “undiscovered country” I mentioned earlier in the Introduction to this essay. We likely won't see the lines of a project such as this anytime soon again.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Jeffrey Wasserstrom and Jennifer Munger for inviting me to participate in this exchange on Victor Lieberman's ideas. I am also grateful to fellow panelists at the AAS meeting in Honolulu, whose ideas and reflections helped provoke my own thinking on these matters.

Notes

References