Strange parallels: Southeast Asia in global context

摘要

This is a giant work in many senses of the word. Physically, it is gigantic. At close to 1000 pages, reading the book is like going on a long journey with its share of hardships and rewards. In terms of ambition, it wants to retell the history of the evolution of the modern world over a millennium. As a work of scholarship, aside from Victor Lieberman's important primary work on the empires of mainland Southeast Asia, it packs in the equivalent of secondary readings from at least six masters programmes in the regional histories of China, India, Japan, Russia, France and island Southeast Asia.