The opening paragraph in Mr. Campbell's excellent article on “American business interests and the Open Door in China, “published in the preceding number of the Quarterly, might leave the casual reader with the impression that the principle of the Open Door in China was no older than the year 1899. Actually, as has been pointed out by numerous authors, the principle of equality of opportunity for all nations in China, which constitutes the meaning of the Open Door in its broadest sense, goes back at least to the most-favored-nation clauses in the supplementary British treaty of 1843 and the American treaty of 1844.

One of the most encouraging trends in contemporary scholarship is the considerable raprochment between fields of study conventionally classed as the “humanities” and those called the “social sciences,” or now fashionably, “behavioral sciences.” A strong contributing factor here has been the growth, especially during and since World War II, of so-called “area” studies which focus various disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches upon a region. Furthermore, the region which has constituted perhaps the most active front for such experiments in coordination is the Far East.

In the area under consideration in this paper, eight countries with a population of 600 million people or about 30% of the world's total population have acquired their independence since the end of World War II. National governments in this area are faced with serious economic, social and other problems, many of them long-standing but of more compelling current importance because of the raised expectations of the Asian peoples. The technical and financial resources of these governments for meeting their problems are limited and, in some cases, ineffectively and inefficiently used. Their ability to develop, in the short-term future, solutions to these problems judged effective by their people will determine the survival of these or similarly-oriented governments, or their replacement by chaos or extremism.

As the East India Company prepared for its First Anglo-Afghan War (1839–42), its officials grew suspicious of a Muslim uprising within British India. They became convinced that itinerant Muslim reformers—mislabeled “Wahhabis”—were inciting princes of India's Deccan region to rebellion. This article describes how the very talk of this “Wahhabi conspiracy” not only triggered the interventionist impulses of the colonial state, but also inspired local intrigues associated with the downfall of two Indo-Afghan princes of the Deccan, Kurnool's Ghulam Rasul Khan and Udayagiri's Abbas Ali Khan. In both cases a preoccupation with the transnational Wahhabi operative masked local and sometimes petty interests, which drove the politics of these smaller regimes. The case studies of Kurnool and Udayagiri illustrate how news of events arising in one region of imperial conflict could “travel” to remote regions of India's Deccan, evolving into conspiracy narratives along the way. The discourse of conspiracy provided a pretext for military action and the annexation of territory. The story being told, however, is not simply about paranoid colonial officers who were all too eager to intervene, but is also about local entrepreneurs who knew how to exploit the situation toward their own ends.

Every now and again a book comes along that “shakes foundations”, as it were. Such volumes let us know that something novel has appeared on the scene, in terms of new ways of knowing the shape and landscape of the past, the great “undiscovered country” of the proverb. Strange Parallels – not one book, but two – is this kind of project. In an age of hyperbole it is easy to believe the breathless hype of publishers when they tell us, the reading public, that such work has arrived. Many of us often end up feeling deflated, though, when the volume finally gets to our desks. On occasion, though, such books do live up to the praise, and happily this is the case with Victor Lieberman's absorbing two volumes. Lieberman is a well-respected historian of Burma; in recent years, his tastes have been ranging further afield, however, as he has sought to connect Burma to larger stories and themes. Strange Parallels is the result of that philandering eye, an occasion when infidelity of one's locus of choice cannot only be forgiven, but applauded because of the result. Lieberman did not just covet his neighbors in this exercise – Siam and Vietnam and the other polities of mainland Southeast Asia. He ended up coveting Eurasia, or the expanse of an entire continent. What happens when you marry a very specific area studies expertise to this kind of vastly expanded vision? What paradigms can be shifted, and what new patterns can be seen? Perhaps most importantly, what new things can be discerned about the “undiscovered country” of the past that previously were hidden, even to cognoscenti?