Protected rimlands and exposed zones: Reconfiguring premodern Eurasia

Comparative Studies in Society and History

Volumn 50, Issue 3, 2008, Pages 692-723

  Lieberman, Victor ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ADMINISTRATIVE SYSTEM; CULTURAL HISTORY; POLITICAL HISTORY;

ASIA; EURASIA; SOUTHEAST ASIA;

EID: 46749144965     PISSN: 00104175     EISSN: 14752999     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0010417508000303     Document Type: Article

References (209)

1. Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800-1830, Volume One: Integration on the Mainland (Cambridge, 2003). 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.
3. For varied definitions of early modernity, see John Richards, "Early Modem India and World History," Journal of World History 8 (1997): 197-209
4. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Penumbral Visions (Ann Arbor, Mich., 2001), 261-65
5. Jack Goldstone's contrary views in "Neither Late Imperial nor Early Modern," in Lynn Struve, ed., The Qing Formation in World-Historical Time (Cambridge, Mass., 2004), 242-302
6. and discussion in Strange Parallels, 1, 79-80, esp. n. 117.
7. Samuel Huntingdon, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York, 1996), chapter 8, endorses this opposition, as in varying degrees and guises do David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (New York, 1998)
8. several contributors to Lawrence Harrison and Samuel Huntingdon, eds., Culture Matters (New York, 2000); and Immanuel Wallerstein and his disciples.
9. Barbara Price, "Secondary State Formation: An Explanatory Model," in Ronald Cohen and Elman Service, eds., Origins of the State (Philadelphia, 1978), 161-86.
10. Much as Southeast Asia looked to India for cultural inspiration, South India looked to North India. By this criterion, though not in terms of insulation from Inner Asian incursions, South India could be categorized alongside Southeast Asia.
11. On Pagan, Angkor, and Dai Viet, see Lieberman, Strange Parallels, I, chs. 2-4 and sources therein.
12. On Kiev, I have relied in part on Janet Martin, Medieval Russia 980-1584 (Cambridge, 1995)
13. Simon Franklin and Jonathan Shepard, The Emergence of Rus 750-1200 (London, 1996)
14. Simon Franklin, Writing, Society, and Culture in Early Rus, c. 950-1300 (Cambridge, 2002)
15. David Miller, "Monumental Building and Its Patrons as Indicators of Economic and Political Trends in Rus, 900-1262," Jahrbucher fur Geschichte Osteuropas 38 (1990): 321-55.
16. On Carolingian/Capetian France, see Patrick Geary, The Myth of Nations (Princeton, 2002)
17. Rosamond McKitterick, The Frankish Kingdoms under the Carolingians (London, 1983)
18. Rosamond McKitterick, ed., The New Cambridge Medieval History, c. 700-c. 900 (Cambridge, 1995)
19. Elizabeth Hallam, Capetian France 987-1328 (London, 1990)
20. Marcus Bull, ed., France in the Central Middle Ages 900-1200 (Oxford, 2002)
21. and Georges Duby, France in the Middle Ages 987-1460 (Oxford, 1991).
22. On early Japan, see Joan Piggott, The Emergence of Japanese Kingship (Stanford, 1997)
23. William Wayne Farris, Heavenly Warriors (Cambridge, Mass., 1992)
24. idem, Japan's Medieval Population (Honolulu, 2006)
25. Charlotte von Verschuer, Le Riz dans la Culture de Heian, Mythe et Realite (Paris, 2003)
26. Donald Shively and William McCullough, eds., The Cambridge History of Japan, Volume 2: Heian Japan (Cambridge, 1999)
27. and Conrad Totman, A History of Japan (Malden, Mass., 2000), pts. 1, 2.
28. Arguments for Russia, France, and Japan are set forth in detail in Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800-1830, Volume Two: Mainland Mirrors: Europe, Japan, China, South Asia, and the Islands (forthcoming, Cambridge, 2009), chs. 2-4.
29. Cf. William McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (Garden City, N.Y, 1976), chs. 3, 4
30. Ann Bowman Jannetta, Epidemics and Mortality in Early Modern Japan (Princeton, 1987)
31. Farris, Japan's Medieval Population
32. Lieberman, Strange Parallels, I, 50, 97-98, 224.
33. On climatic changes c. 600-1300, see Lieberman, Strange Parallels, I, 101-12, 224-26, 363-64, and sources cited therein.
34. Japan fit this pattern less well insofar as trade and cultural contacts with the continent tended to decline c. 900-1200.
35. See n. 7 supra
36. and David Henley, "Population and the Means of Subsistence," Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 36 (2005): 337-72.
37. On thirteenth/fifteenth-century crises, their etiology and manifestations, see sources in n. 7 supra
38. and Lieberman, Strange Parallels, I, 119-31, 236-47, 367-72; and II, chs. 2, 4, which in turn rely in part on John Fennell, The Crisis of Medieval Russia 1200-1304 (London, 1983)
39. Robert Crummey, The Formation of Muscovy 1304-1613 (London, 1987)
40. Donald Ostrowski, Muscovy and the Mongols (Cambridge, 1998)
41. David Potter, ed., France in the Later Middle Ages 1200-1500 (Oxford, 2002)
42. Christopher Allmand, The Hundred Years War (Cambridge, 1989)
43. Ole Benedictow, The Black Death 1346-1353 (Woodbridge, U.K., 2004), which sets forth the link between plague and new commercial circuits
44. Kozo Yamamura, ed., The Cambridge History of Japan, Volume 3: Medieval Japan (Cambridge, 1990)
45. Jeffrey Mass, ed., The Origins of Japan's Medieval World (Stanford, 1997)
46. and Mikael Adolphson, The Gates of Power (Honolulu, 2000).
47. In France, the interregnum of 1337-1453 was actually the second, the first having come c. 890-1110, between Carolingian collapse and early Capetian vigor. In this sense, as Lieberman, Strange Parallels, II, ch. 2 explains in detail, fusing the Carolingian and Capetian periods into a composite charter era, while convenient for this brief exposition, artificially conflates two administrative cycles.
48. 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.
49. See Lieberman, Strange Parallels, II, ch. 1.
50. On political integration c. 1450-1830, see Lieberman, Strange Parallels, II, chs. 2-4,3
51. based on, inter alia, Crummey, Formation of Muscovy
52. Nancy Shields Kollmann, Kinship and Politics (Stanford, 1987)
53. idem, By Honor Bound (Ithaca, 1999)
54. Richard Hellie, Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy (Chicago, 1971)
55. Valerie Kivelson, Autocracy in the Provinces (Stanford, 1996)
56. John LeDonne, Absolutism and Ruling Class (New York, 1991)
57. Isabel de Madariaga, Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great (New Haven, 1981)
58. David Potter, ed., France in the Later Middle Ages 1200-1500 (Oxford, 2002)
59. Mack Holt, ed., Renaissance and Reformation France 1500-1648 (Oxford, 2002)
60. William Doyle, ed., Old Regime France 1648-1788 (Oxford, 2001)
61. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, The Ancien Regime (Oxford, 1998)
62. William Beik, Absolutism and Society in 17th Century France (Cambridge, 1985)
63. James Collins, The State in Early Modern France (Cambridge, 1995)
64. Isser Woloch, The New Regime (New York, 1994)
65. Yamamura, Cambridge History
66. John Whitney Hall, ed., The Cambridge History of Japan, Volume 4: Early Modern Japan (Cambridge, 1991)
67. Marius Jansen, ed., The Cambridge History of Japan, Volume 5: The 19th Century (Cambridge, 1989)
68. John Whitney Hall et al., eds., Japan Before Tokugawa (Princeton, 1981)
69. Conrad Totman, Early Modern Japan (Berkeley, 1993).
70. Within 1825 boundaries, between 1300 and 1825 the population of France rose roughly 70 percent, those of Burma and Siam perhaps 100 percent, that of Vietnam some 250 percent, of Japan 500 percent, and of Russia 600 to 900 percent.
71. Dennis Flynn, "Comparing the Tokugawa Shogunate with Hapsburg Spain," in James Tracy, ed., The Political Economy of Merchant Empires (Cambridge, 1991), 332-59
72. Ward Barrett, "World Bullion Flows, 1450-1800," in James Tracy, ed., The Rise of Merchant Empires (Cambridge, 1990), 224-54.
73. Philip Gorski, The Disciplinary Revolution (Chicago, 2003).
74. On the dynamics and limits of cultural integration in each realm, sources in n. 15 supra, plus Stephen Batalden, ed., Seeking God (DeKalb, Ill., 1993)
75. Samuel Baron and Nancy Shields Kollmann, eds., Religion and Culture in Early Modern Russia and Ukraine (DeKalb, Ill., 1997)
76. Valerie Kivelson and Robert Greene, eds., Orthodox Russia (University Park, Pa., 2003)
77. Daniel Roche, France in the Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass., 1998)
78. Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution (Durham, 1992)
79. David Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France (Cambridge, Mass., 2001)
80. Bruce Batten, To the Ends of Japan (Honolulu, 2003)
81. David Howell, Geographies of Identity in 19th-Century Japan (Berkeley, 2005)
82. Susan Bums, Before the Nation: Kokugaku and the Imagining of Community in Early Modern Japan (Durham, 2003).
83. Strange Parallels, I, chs. 2-4, passim
84. Victor Lieberman, "Ethnic Politics in Eighteenth-Century Burma," Modern Asian Studies 12 (1978): 455-82; and previous note.
85. Discussion of Chinese political, cultural, and economic history follows Lieberman, Strange Parallels, II, ch. 5, which in turn relies on, inter alia,
86. Patricia Buckley Ebrey, The Cambridge Illustrated History of China (Cambridge, 1996)
87. G. William Skinner, ed., The City in Late Imperial China (Stanford, 1977)
88. F. W. Mote, Imperial China 900-1800 (Cambridge, Mass., 1999)
89. Benjamin Elman, A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China (Berkeley, 2000)
90. Herbert Franke and Denis Twitchett, eds., The Cambridge History of China, Volume 6: Alien Regimes and Border States, 907-1368 (Cambridge, 1994),
91. John Chaffee, The Thorny Gates of Learning in Sung China, 2d ed. (Cambridge, 1995)
92. David Johnson, The Medieval Chinese Oligarchy (Boulder, 1977)
93. Peter Bol, "This Culture of Ours" (Stanford, 1992)
94. Robert Byrnes, Statesmen and Gentlemen (Cambridge, 1986)
95. Beverly Bossler, Powerful Relations (Cambridge, Mass., 1998)
96. Valerie Hansen, The Open Empire (New York, 2000)
97. Brian McKnight, Village and Bureaucracy in Southern Sung China (Chicago, 1971)
98. Paul Jakov Smith and Richard von Glahn, eds., The Song-Yuan-Ming Transition in Chinese History (Cambridge, Mass., 2003)
99. R. Bin Wong, China Transformed (Ithaca, N.Y., 1997)
100. Charles Hucker, ed., Chinese Government in Ming Times (New York, 1969)
101. Ray Huang, Taxation and Governmental Finance in Sixteenth-Century Ming China (New York, 1974)
102. Beatrice Bartlett, Monarchs and Ministers (Berkeley, 1991)
103. Evelyn Rawski, The Last Emperors (Berkeley, 1998)
104. Struve, Qing Formation
105. Susan Naquin and Evelyn Rawski, eds., Chinese Society in the Eighteenth Century (New Haven, 1987)
106. Benjamin Elman and Alexander Woodside, eds., Education and Society in Late Imperial China 1600-1900 (Berkeley, 1994)
107. Bradly Reed, Talons and Teeth (Stanford, 2000)
108. Kwang-Ching Liu, ed., Orthodoxy in Late Imperial China (Berkeley, 1990)
109. Joseph Esherick and Mary Rankin, eds., Chinese Local Elites and Patterns of Dominance (Berkeley, 1993)
110. Peter Perdue, China Marches West (Cambridge, Mass., 2005)
111. Mark Elliot, The Manchu Way (Stanford, 2002)
112. Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence (Princeton, 2000)
113. Mathew Sommer, Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China (Stanford, 2000)
114. David Johnson et al., eds., Popular Culture in Late Imperial China (Berkeley, 1985)
115. William Rowe, Saving the World (Stanford, 2001).
116. Paul Jakov Smith, "Introduction," in Smith and von Glahn, eds., Song-loan-Ming Transition, 34.
117. Perdue, China Marches West.
118. Peter Lorge, War, Politics, and Society in Early Modern China (London, 2005)
119. Perdue, China Marches West
120. Nicola Di Cosmo, "Did Guns Matter?" in Struve, Qing Formation, 121-66. As noted, a pacific post-1640 environment also nullified firearms improvement in Japan.
121. Bruce Trigger, Understanding Early Civilizations (Cambridge, 2003)
122. Christopher Scarre and Brian Fagan, Ancient Civilizations (Upper Saddle River, N.J., 2003)
123. Ebrey, Cambridge Illustrated History, chs. 1-3.
124. For geographic definitions and historical overviews of Inner Asia - also termed "Inner Eurasia," "Central Eurasia," or in its western sector "Central Asia" - see Svat Soucek, A History of Inner Asia (Cambridge, 2000),
125. David Christian, "Inner Eurasia as a Unit of World History," Journal of World History 5 (1994): 173-211
126. idem, A History of Russia, Central Asia and Mongolia, Volume 1 (Malden, Mass., 1998)
127. Elliott, Manchu Way
128. Perdue, China Marches West
129. Thomas Barfield, The Perilous Frontier (Cambridge, Mass., 1989)
130. Nicola Di Cosmo, "State Formation and Periodization in Inner Asian History," Journal of World History 10 (1999): 1-40
131. Denis Sinor, "Central Eurasia," in D. Sinor, ed., Orientalism and History (Bloomington, 1970), 93-119.
132. Lieberman, Strange Parallels, II, ch. 5, n. 212.
133. Cf. Nicola Di Cosmo, "Review of The Cambridge History of China, vol. VI," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 56 (1996): 493-508.
134. Elliott, Manchu Way.
135. Rawski, Last Emperors
136. Elliott, Manchu Way
137. Perdue, China Marches West.
138. Cf. n. 24 supra
139. and Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel (New York, 1997).
140. James Lee, Cameron Campbell, and Wang Feng, "Positive Check or Chinese Check?" Journal of Asian Studies 61 (2002): 500.
141. See "Introduction" and other essays by Skinner in idem, City in Late Imperial China.
142. See Reed, Talons and Teeth.
143. For China, see Naquin and Rawski, Chinese Society, 219
144. Albert Feuerwerker, "State and Economy in Late Imperial China," Theory and Society 13 (1984): 298-307
145. Skinner, The City, 20-21, 29
146. P.H.H. Vries, "Governing Growth: A Comparative Analysis of the Role of the State in the Rise of the West," Journal of World History 13 (2002): 95.
147. For Europe, see Arcadius Kahan, The Plow, the Hammer, and the Knout (Chicago, 1985), 345
148. Richard Hellie, "The Costs of Muscovite Military Defense and Expansion," in Eric Lohr and Marshall Poe, eds., The Military and Society in Russia 1450-1917 (Leiden, 2002), 66
149. Peter Mathias and Patrick O'Brien, "Taxation in Britain and France, 1715-1810," Journal of European Economic History 5 (1976): 601-50, esp. 607-9
150. John Brewer, The Sinews of Power (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 91
151. Philip Hoffman and Kathryn Norberg, eds., Fiscal Crises, Liberty, and Representative Government 1450-1789 (Stanford, 1994), 299-302.
152. For Southeast Asia we lack statistics. For Japan, a pacific environment, rapid commercial and handicrafts expansion, and late Tokugawa inertia allowed effective tax rates on rural incomes to fall to the range of 15-40 percent. Penelope Francks, Rural Economic Development in Japan (London, 2006), 45-47, 79 ff.; Philip Brown, personal communication, 13 Nov. 2006. But this too was considerably higher than Chinese rates, arguing again for structural constraints in China.
153. Feuerwerker, "State and Economy," 300
154. Vries, "Goveming Growth," 94-95
155. Ray Huang, "The Ming Fiscal Administration," in Denis Twitchett and Frederick Mote, eds., The Cambridge History of China, Volume 8, Part. 2: The Ming Dynasty 1368-1644 (Cambridge, 1998), 113, 124, 134, 138, 144-48, 166.
156. Huang, "Ming Fiscal Administration"; Naquin and Rawski, Chinese Society, 225-26
157. Madeline Zelin, The Magistrate's Tael (Berkeley, 1984), 305-8
158. Yeh-chien Wang, Land Taxation in Imperial China, 1750-1911 (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), 8-9, 30, 26-35, 131.
159. Discussion of South Asian political, cultural, and economic history follows Lieberman, Strange Parallels, II, ch. 6, which relies on, inter alia,
160. F. R. Allchin, The Archaeology of Early Historic South Asia (Cambridge, 1995)
161. Romila Thapar, Early India (Berkeley, 2002)
162. Catherine Asher and Cynthia Talbot, India before Europe (Cambridge, 2006)
163. David Ludden, An Agrarian History of South Asia (Cambridge, 1999),
164. Tapan Raychaudhuri and Irfan Habib, eds., The Cambridge Economic History of India, Volume 1: C. 1200-1750 (Cambridge, 1982);
165. Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men (Berkeley, 2006)
166. idem, ed., Literary Cultures in History (Berkeley, 2003)
167. Andre Wink, Al-Hind: The Making ofthe Indo-Islamic World, 2 vols. (Delhi, 1990, and Oxford, 1997)
168. Peter Jackson, The Delhi Sultanate (Cambridge, 1999)
169. Cynthia Talbot, Precolonial India in Practice (Oxford, 2001)
170. John Richards, The Mughal Empire (Cambridge, 1993)
171. Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, eds., The Mughal State 1526-1750 (Delhi, 1998)
172. Muzaffar Alam, The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India (Delhi, 1986)
173. C. A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars (Cambridge, 1983)
174. idem, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (Cambridge, 1988)
175. Richard Eaton, A Social History of the Deccan, 1300-1761 (Cambridge, 2005)
176. idem, ed., India's Islamic Traditions (New Delhi, 2003)
177. Susan Bayly, Caste, Society and Politics in India (Cambridge, 1999)
178. Thomas Trautmann, Aryans and British India (Berkeley, 1997).
179. This post-1640 vigor India shared with Japan and South Russia, but not with Western Europe or China. Cf. Richards, Mughal Empire, ch. 9
180. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Political Economy of Commerce: Southern India, 1500-1650 (Cambridge, 1990).
181. Cf. Marshall Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, Volume 3: The Gunpowder Empires and Modern Times (Chicago, 1974)
182. Jos Gommans, Mughal Warfare (London, 2002).
183. Pollock, Language of the Gods, esp. chs. 8-12.
184. C. A. Bayly, Origins of Nationality in South Asia (New Delbi, 1998).
185. M. Athar Ali, The Mughal Nobility under Aurangzeb (Bombay, 1966)
186. idem, "Towards an Interpretation of the Mugbal Empire," Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1978): 38-49.
187. 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.
188. Discussion of island Southeast Asia follows Lieberman, Strange Parallels, II, ch. 7, which in turn relies on, inter alia,
189. Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age ofCommerce 1450-1680, 2 vols. (New Haven, 1988, 1993)
190. M. C. Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia since c. 1200 (Stanford, 2001)
191. Denys Lombard, Le Carrefour Javanais, 3 vols. (Paris, 1990)
192. Jean Gelman Taylor, The Social World of Batavia (Madison, 1983)
193. Barbara Watson Andaya and Leonard Andaya, A History of Malaysia (Honolulu, 2001)
194. Leonard Andaya, Leaves of the Same Tree (Honolulu, 2008)
195. J. Kathirithamby-Wells and John Villiers, eds., The Southeast Asian Port and Polity (Singapore, 1990)
196. O. W. Wolters, Early Indonesian Commerce (Ithaca, 1967)
197. John Phelan, The Hispanization of the Philippines (Madison, 1959)
198. Daniel Doeppers and Peter Xenos, eds., Population and History (Madison, 1998).
199. A Cola attack on southeast Sumatra in 1025 and a failed Mongol assault on Java in 1293 were exceptions proving the rule.
200. Andaya, Leaves of the Same Tree, ch. 2
201. idem, "The Search for the 'Origins' of Melayu," Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 32 (2001): 315-30.
202. Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, II, chs. 1-2.
203. Ottoman military aid to Aceh in the seventeenth century hardly negates this claim.
204. 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.
205. On the pre-1415 foundations of European expansion, see David Ringrose, Expansion and Global Interaction, 1200-1700 (New York, 2001)
206. G. V. Scammell, The World Encompassed (Berkeley, 1981).
207. Cf. Michael Adas, "Imperialism and Colonialism in Comparative Perspective," International History Review 20 (1998): 371-88.
208. Perdue, China Marches West.
209. See nn. 23, 39 supra