Strange Parallels: Volume 1, Integration on the Mainland: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c.800–1830: Integration on the Mainland v. 1 (Studies in Comparative World History) Kindle Edition

It's easy to get a historian to tell you the differences between Burma and France. It's much harder to find someone original and bold enough to write about their commonalities. In Strange Parallels: Volume 1, Integration on the Mainland: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c.800-1830 (Studies in Comparative World History) (v. 1), University of Michigan historian Victor Lieberman does just that for several countries across Eurasia. He finds that Eurasian states consolidated political and administrative power around the same time.

Note, this is merely volume one of two. You won't really get a full explanation of the "strange parallels" and Lieberman's evidence until you finish the second volume. This book focuses on Southeast Asian history - Lieberman's field of expertise. This is a weighty tome, and I wouldn't recommend this as your first foray into Asian history. Nonetheless, Lieberman's writing style is remarkably clear and straightforward. Moreover, it is clear that he has marshaled a large amount of evidence to support his theory and has considered everything from climate change to gunpowder as explanatory variables. If you can make it through both volumes - and I highly recommend the effort - you will be richly rewarded.

I had just travelled to south east asia and was interested in the history and originally picked up volume 2 which i enjoyed but it was also heavy going for a non-professional historian who really didn't have enough background of prior knowledge to make the reading flow. I am fascinated by his approach of grand theory and I suppose like all newcomers you just have to be amazed at the size and complexity of these civilizations that somehow lost it. Why, was it some other tribe with better technology, climate change, or do civilizations just run out of steam and exhaust their original advantage. So i suppose i was open to grand theory ideas. Yep I'm intriegued enough that i subsequenty bought my lonely planet for Burma and will plan to go and hav ea closer look at the irrawaddy basin and i will try to work out why a third of Russia starved at the same time that Asian civilizations went into decline also. whether history can be refined to a single equation might be just a dream but i found it interesting to move beyond a collection of facts. I think conventional wisdom probably find this a bit left field and i suppose i will now look to a more conventional approach to balance my thoughts. From our western perspective the majority of us seem to give so little value to what we should be able to learn from the history of the East.

See review for Volume II as it speaks for this volume as well. Again, the author does not fully understand historical analysis.

First, some truth in advertising. The author is a fellow faculty member at my university and I know him slightly. I am, however, an outsider to his field and attempting to write an objective review.

This is the first volume of a pair of books examining the comparative history state formation of the Eurasian continent in what might be called the premodern era. For Southeast Asia, this covers 800 CE to the early 19th century, when mainland Southeast Asia came under the dominance of the expanding industrial economies of western Europe. The author, an expert on Burmese history, has chosen to concentrate initially on mainland Southeast Asia, partly because of familiarity and partly to bring this region into the broad sweep of general history. Volume 2 will extend the author's analysis to Russia, France, and Japan.

In this volume, Lieberman's primary interest is the general pattern of state formation in the regions of what are now the predominant modern mainland Southeast Asian nations - Burma (Myanmar), Thailand (Siam), and Vietnam. Lieberman presents a bold thesis - that the general pattern of state formation was essentially parallel in the 3 geographic areas now occupied by the modern states. Over a millennium, Lieberman argues for the development of increasingly powerful and well developed states, with very similar trajectories in what would become modern Burma, Thailand, and Vietnam. This is not a model of gradual progression but rather one of punctuated development with a succession of increasingly powerful states separated by periods of political collapse.

Lieberman argues that each region - the Irrawaddy basin for Burma, the central mainland of Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia, and the western coastal regions that became Vietnam, began with a "charter polity." These would be the Pagan state of proto-Burma, the Angkor empire, and for Vietnam, particularly the somewhat Sinicized state of Dai Viet in the Red River valley of the north. These early states eventually fell and followed by prolonged interregna. Successor states arose, and with increasingly shorter interregna, were followed by even more powerful successor states until something like the modern pattern of states emerged just prior to the overwhelming impact of European colonialism in the early 19th century.

The initial chapter contains a nice overview of Lieberman's thesis accompanied by some thoughtful discussion of the relevant historiography. The initial description of the model specifies not just the basis descriptive features but also a nice discussion of the forces that might drive state formation. Lieberman is careful to specify the methodological limitations of his model. The following 3 chapters cover state formation in Burma, Thailand, and Vietnam. These chapters are essentially critical evaluations of the model via careful analysis of the political, economic, and social histories of polities in these regions. These chapters would be worth reading as stand alone summaries of the political histories of these regions accompanied by much of the relevant social, economic, and even economic history. They are based on what seems to be impressive mastery of a large array of primary and secondary literature, accompanied by consistently thoughtful analysis of the model. The quality of writing is excellent.

Lieberman provides good support for the basic parallelism of state evolution in mainland Southeast Asia. In the process, he provides also a series of careful analyses of the interacting forces that drove state formation. Lieberman's model of causation is a sophisticated one incorporating climate changes, population growth, technological improvements, changes in religious practice, absorption into international trade networks, inter-state conflict, and what might be called the internal logic of state formation. He demonstrates well that parallelism is present, that it is not superficial, and is driven by similar forces in the different regions. At the same time, he is careful not to force historical developments into the same mold. The distinctive features of each emerging polity are discussed well. Perhaps most impressive is the relative parallelism between the emerging Vietnamese state and the more Indically influenced states of Burma and Thailand. Regional climate changes, for which we have relatively little detailed data, are suggested to be important synchronizers of historical events.

The next volume will extend Lieberman's model across Eurasia to France, Russia, and Japan. It is already easy to see how this model might apply to the end of Medieval Europe and the emergence of early modern European states during the Renaissance and Reformation periods. The volume promises to be equally interesting reading.

Review Addendum 10/17/12: Volumes 1&2 of Strange Parallels were just the subject of a featured review in the American Historical Review, the flagship historical journal in the USA. The reviewer, Tonio Andrade, describes Strange Parallels as "the most important work of history produced so far this century." I agree.