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Strange parallels: Southeast Asia in global context, c. 800–1830. Volume 2: mainland mirrors: Europe, Japan, China, South Asia, and the islands

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2012

Alan Strathern
Alan Strathern
Affiliation:
University of Oxford, UK E-mail: alan.strathern@history.ox.ac.uk
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Featured Review Article
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Journal of Global History , Volume 7 , Issue 1 , March 2012 , pp. 129 - 142
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

1 Darwin, Charles, Autobiography of Charles Darwin, London: Watts and Co, 1929 (first published 1887), p. 74Google Scholar.

2 An alarming image of doomed monomaniacal scholarship in George Elliott's Middlemarch.

3 See Wong, R. Bin, ‘Causation’, in Rublack, Ulinka, ed., A concise companion to history, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, pp. 27–56Google Scholar, on a loss of confidence in grand narrative and causation.

4 See Lieberman, Victor, Strange parallels: Southeast Asia in global context c.800–1380. Volume 2: mainland mirrors: Europe, Japan, China, South Asia, and the islands, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, pp. 75, 270Google Scholar.

5 See Seigel, Micol, ‘Beyond compare: comparative method after the transnational turn’, Radical History Review, 91, 2005, pp. 62–90Google Scholar, for a critique of comparative history as sympathetic to the nation-state as a unit of analysis, as opposed to the more deconstructive ‘transnational’ history.

6 For example, sixteenth-century France and Burma may be analogous in their deployment of ‘viceregal plenipotentiaries sent by the crown to replace hereditary dynasts in newly annexed areas’ (Lieberman, Strange parallels, vol. 2, p. 252), but Lieberman then goes on to list six major differences in the nature of administration from the monetization of bureaucracy to the fact that France had one royal appointee for every 45 square kilometres, while the Burmese empire had one for every 470–700 square kilometres.

7 Ibid., p. 548. South Asia also experienced long-term increases in cultivation, population, and trade c.850–1300 and c.1500–1700, although thereafter it diverged somewhat (p. 703).

8 See Lieberman, Strange parallels, vol. 2, pp. 55–6, 376–80, 416.

9 These are the first major indigenous states in any given area, from which subsequent states trace their origins.

10 These include the primary civilizations of the Indus valley, southern Mesopotamia, and the Nile valley, and the secondary states that developed and expanded from these areas as Maurya, Gupta, Han, and Rome (Lieberman, Strange parallels, vol. 2, p. 108).

11 See ibid., 109, 902.

12 In fact, Lieberman appreciates that all pre-modern polities have an imperial quality in their predisposition to expand over diverse peoples and polities; hence sixteenth-century France, Russia, and the mainland Southeast Asian realms are at one point referred to as ‘polyglot empires’ (p. 206).

13 Cooper, F. and Burbank, J., Empires in world history: power and the politics of difference, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010Google Scholar) are helpful here, but their biggest theoretical lacuna is in distinguishing ‘empires’ from ‘kingdoms’. This is what Lieberman's approach illuminates by focusing on the dynamic of integration.

14 Conversely, in the exposed zone it was possible for political formations to be assembled of such size and diversity that they placed limits on the capacities of ‘imperial’ centres to incorporate and homogenize them.

15 As emphasized by Pollock, Sheldon, The language of the gods in the world of men: Sanskrit, culture, and power in premodern India, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006, pp. 474, 476, 509–11, 715Google Scholar, for example.

16 See Bayly, C. A., Origins of nationality in South Asia: patriotism and ethical government in the making of modern India, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998Google Scholar.

17 Strathern, Alan, ‘Sri Lanka in the long early modern period: its place in a comparative theory of second millennium Eurasian history’, Modern Asian Studies, 43, 4, 2009, pp. 809–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 In this sense, Sri Lanka's early charter-state genesis does not fit with a ‘protected zone’ categorization, as the Indian Ocean seems to have been more a conduit of civilizational communication than a barrier.

19 This is not to deny the importance of links between the island and the subcontinent, or the continuing importance of south Indian political forms and waves of immigration.

20 The terminology of cultural ‘coherence’ or ‘integration’ may seem perverse to scholars of later, more specialized, more ‘complex’, and interconnected societies and has occasioned criticism in this way from Mary Elizabeth Berry (see her ‘Public life in authoritarian Japan’, Daedalus, 127, 3, 1998, pp. 133–65). However, Lieberman's argument is not that ‘diversity’ of whatever kind goes away – rather, it shifts its nature. New forms of diversity are played out on a greater field of common language, learning, religion, and loyalty.

21 Lieberman sees this: in the third feature of the protected zone above, note the absence of China in the first clause: ‘favor cultural integration more readily than across India and accelerating administrative centralization more readily than in China and India’.

22 Again, it should be clarified that none of this deviates from Lieberman's argument, strictly speaking; it merely places some limits on the power of the protected/exposed distinction to generate predictions about the strength of ethnic sentiment considered more widely.

23 And recall that the list of Qing achievements quoted above does not include political consolidation.

24 The consequences of this for India and China were, however, quite different. In India it meant that imperial powers were always subject to centrifugal entropy, that political evolution was far less continuous than in the protected zone. In China it meant that the state rarely felt in a position to subject its regions to intensive taxation.

25 Lieberman is careful to distinguish his position from that of older nationalist or communalist historiography. It has long been recognized that the Mughal throne retained an aura of legitimacy well into the nineteenth century, so few historians today would argue for the general friability of the Mughal cultural project. Lieberman's claim is smaller than this.

26 Bayly, C. A., The birth of the modern world, 1780–1914, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004Google Scholar, is another exception.

27 Fletcher, Joseph, ‘Integrative history: parallels and interconnections in the early modern period, 1500–1800’, Journal of Turkish Studies, 9, 1985, pp. 37–57Google Scholar. An exception as a textbook is Wiesner-Hanks, Merry E., Religious transformations in the early modern world: a brief history with documents, Boston, MA: Bedford/St Martin’s, 2009Google Scholar.

28 Delumeau, Jean, Le catholicisme entre Luther et Voltaire, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1971Google Scholar.

29 Reid, Anthony, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450–1680, volume 2: expansion and crisis, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993Google Scholar.

30 See Lieberman, Strange parallels, vol. 2, p. 359.

31 Gorski, Philip S., The disciplinary revolution: Calvinism and the rise of the state in early modern Europe, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 See the review by R. Po Chia Hsia in Central European History, 38, 2, 2005, pp. 280–2.

33 See also Lieberman, Strange parallels, vol. 2, p. 72, n. 86: ‘However impressive Prussian and Dutch performances, it is worth remembering that the two most successful European states c. 1550 to 1750 were Catholic Spain and Catholic France.’

34 See ibid., p. 743.

35 See ibid., pp. 39, 72, 284–5, 359. See also vol. 1, p. 137, for a reference to a teetotal movement in Upper Burma.

36 See Lieberman, Strange parallels, vol. 2, pp. 474, 608–9.

37 It should be pointed out that Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. and Schulchter, Wolfgang, ‘Introduction: paths to early modernities – a comparative view’, Daedalus, 127, 3, 1998, pp. 1–18Google Scholar, who helped initiate the notion of ‘multiple modernities’, were, however, concerned to give content to the concept. See also American Historical Review, 116, 3, 2011, on the vexed problem of ‘modernity’.

38 See Vink, Markus, ‘Between profit and power: the Dutch East India Company and institutional early modernities in the age of mercantilism’, in Parker, C. and Bentley, J., eds., Between the Middle Ages and modernity, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, 2007, pp. 285–306Google Scholar.

39 This line of analysis has much in common with the work of A. D. Smith (e.g. The ethnic origin of nations, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1986) and Adrian Hastings (e.g. The construction of nationhood: ethnicity, religion and nationalism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

40 Lieberman, Strange parallels, vol. 2, p. 359.

41 At one point Lieberman does suggest that (with the long-delayed stimulus of alterity in the shape of American and European threats) the rare success of Japan's modernization in the Meiji restoration was facilitated by ‘a pan-Japanese identity rooted in cultural distinctiveness and loyalty to the emperor’ (ibid., p. 490).

42 See ibid., pp. 54–5, and 94, n. 131.

43 Ibid., p. 55.

44 Lieberman deals with this at ibid., p. 53, where he argues that focusing on the ‘losing’ states would also indicate territorial consolidation.