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Protected Rimlands and Exposed Zones: Reconfiguring Premodern Eurasia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 June 2008

Victor Lieberman
Victor Lieberman
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
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Extract

In a recent study, I sought to analyze political and cultural patterns across mainland Southeast Asia during roughly a thousand years, from c. 800 to 1830.1 In brief, I argued that each of mainland Southeast Asia's three great north-south corridors experienced a pattern of accelerating integration. This process was territorial in the sense that some twenty-three small polities in the fourteenth century were assimilated, gradually or convulsively, fully or partially, to three overarching imperial systems by the early 1800s. Integration was administrative insofar as within each imperial system mechanisms of provincial control, economic extraction, and manpower organization became more penetrating, stable, and efficient. Integration was cultural in the sense that hitherto self-sufficient communities across each of the three principal zones came to accept linguistic, ethnic, and religious norms sanctioned by imperial elites.

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 50 , Issue 3 , July 2008 , pp. 692 - 723
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Comparative Studies in Society and History 2008

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References

1 Lieberman, Victor, Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800–1830, Volume One: Integration on the Mainland (Cambridge, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Mainland Southeast Asia comprises the modern countries of Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam.

2 By these three criteria, southeastern Europe could be included in the “exposed zone.” “Southwest Asia” includes Persia, Transoxania, and the Ottoman lands. The three defining features of the exposed zone do not all apply as completely to Transoxania and Persia as to China and South Asia. In its civilizational precocity and subjection to Inner Asian influence, Persia, for example, clearly had much in common with other exposed zones, but along with Transoxania, Persia had a population and territory on the same modest scale as many protected rimlands. What is more, although the three defining features of the exposed zone all apply to the Ottoman lands, in those lands as in Persia and Transoxania, Islam displaced/camouflaged pre-Islamic charter-era cultural legacies far more substantially than in South Asia. The Ottoman lands were distinct too in that they escaped fresh post-1500 Inner Asian incursions such as transformed Persia, South Asia, and China. In short, depending on criteria, between the “exposed zone” and the “protected rimlands” one can find a degree of overlap, while both categories contain internal variations.

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10 Japan fit this pattern less well insofar as trade and cultural contacts with the continent tended to decline c. 900–1200.

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13 I take the period between Carolingian collapse and early Capetian consolidation as the first interregnum. If we start with the Hundred Years War and proceed through the Wars of Religion to the Revolutionary upheavals, the ratio, depending on definitions of breakdown, would be in the order of 116:36:2.

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26 Lieberman, Strange Parallels, II, ch. 5, n. 212.

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35 Feuerwerker, “State and Economy,” 300; Vries, , “Governing Growth,” 94–95; Ray Huang, “The Ming Fiscal Administration,” in Twitchett, Denis and Mote, Frederick, eds., The Cambridge History of China, Volume 8, Part. 2: The Ming Dynasty 1368–1644 (Cambridge, 1998), 113, 124, 134, 138, 144–48, 166Google Scholar.

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43 But in turn, because South Asia lacked a universal administrative language comparable to Chinese, the Turkic insistence on Persian was perhaps unavoidable. Sanskrit was a primarily religious tongue associated with Hinduism, while the congeries of dialects that evolved into Hindi lacked sufficient standardization or prestige, the Delhi sultans and Mughals felt, to serve as an imperial lingua franca.

44 Discussion of island Southeast Asia follows Lieberman, Strange Parallels, II, ch. 7, which in turn relies on, inter alia, Reid, Anthony, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce 1450–1680, 2 vols. (New Haven, 1988, 1993)Google Scholar; Ricklefs, M. C., A History of Modern Indonesia since c. 1200 (Stanford, 2001)Google Scholar; Lombard, Denys, Le Carrefour Javanais, 3 vols. (Paris, 1990)Google Scholar; Taylor, Jean Gelman, The Social World of Batavia (Madison, 1983)Google Scholar; Andaya, Barbara Watson and Andaya, Leonard, A History of Malaysia (Honolulu, 2001)Google Scholar; Andaya, Leonard, Leaves of the Same Tree (Honolulu, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kathirithamby-Wells, J. and Villiers, John, eds., The Southeast Asian Port and Polity (Singapore, 1990)Google Scholar; Wolters, O. W., Early Indonesian Commerce (Ithaca, 1967)Google Scholar; Phelan, John, The Hispanization of the Philippines (Madison, 1959)Google Scholar; Doeppers, Daniel and Xenos, Peter, eds., Population and History (Madison, 1998)Google Scholar.

45 A Cola attack on southeast Sumatra in 1025 and a failed Mongol assault on Java in 1293 were exceptions proving the rule.

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48 Ottoman military aid to Aceh in the seventeenth century hardly negates this claim.

49 Admittedly, Europeans also intervened on the pre-1824 mainland. For example, Spanish forces entered Cambodia in the 1590s, French troops were stationed in Siam in 1687–1688, and both Portuguese and Dutch meddled in the Vietnamese civil wars of the mid-seventeenth century. But all these short-lived, generally half-hearted actions either had no long-term impact or, often inadvertently, strengthened local authorities.

50 On the pre-1415 foundations of European expansion, see Ringrose, David, Expansion and Global Interaction, 1200–1700 (New York, 2001)Google Scholar; Scammell, G. V., The World Encompassed (Berkeley, 1981)Google Scholar. Cf. Adas, Michael, “Imperialism and Colonialism in Comparative Perspective,” International History Review 20 (1998): 371–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

51 Perdue, China Marches West.

52 See nn. 23, 39 supra.