Local Integration and Eurasian Analogies: Structuring Southeast Asian History, c. 1350—c. 1830

Abstract

The historiography of precolonial Southeast Asia remains remarkably fragmented and inaccessible, even by the standards of that variegated region. We have a limited number of country monographs. But no systematic overview of Southeast Asian political or economic history has been attempted for all, or even part, of the period between the waning of the classical states in the fourteenth century and the onset of high colonialism in the early nineteenth. Scholarly surveys, like the magisterial and still standardmagnum opusof D. G. E. Hall, make discretion the better part of valor by providing separate country chapters without integrative theme or comment.