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.
The equally vast strengths of the book lie in its impeccable scholarship, the author's indefatigable capacity to carefully synthesise research and debates within each field, and to draw comparisons and contrasts between these regions. The argument is, however, not easy to summarise. It is not in the mode of historical sociology where the materials are organised around the argument. Rather it is a vast comparative history which presents the longue durée of eight regions of the world, more or less. Nor does it have an easily identifiable narrative. Rather, the fruits of this work emerge from the integration of an older narrative with a comparative methodology that yields new subnarratives of considerable interest.
Lieberman's goal remains in large part to understand the distinctiveness of the modern state and society. As such it remains within the Enlightenment–modernisation narrative. His selections are not shaped by Marxist–subaltern goals of conflict and resistance, nor by the telos of a postnational cosmopolitanism, and nor even by the search for alternative modernities — although it would not be incompatible with the last. Thus, his attitude is quite different from, say, Charles Tilly's pioneering work on state-formation in Europe (The formation of national states in Western Europe, 1975), which attends equally to the violence and costs of state-making. Indeed, on occasion Lieberman reveals quite an admiring attitude towards the goals of the territorially centralising state, declaring that the Chinese state developed ‘superb homogenising techniques’ (p. 534).
Ostensibly, Lieberman seeks to explain the ‘strange parallels’ between different regions of Eurasia over his period of inquiry, 800–1830 CE. The work distinguishes two types of historical states in this region, namely, those in the ‘protected zone’ and those in the ‘exposed zone’. Geographically, the latter include South Asia and China, which have large northern and northwestern areas exposed to Inner Asian invasions, whereas the former zone includes kingdoms in Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, Russia, France and Japan which are relatively protected from direct massive predation. Maritime or island Southeast Asia belatedly developed into an exposed zone, exposed to the ‘white Inner Asians’ takeover from the sixteenth century. Historically, the two zones are separated by the presence in China and India of precocious civilisations from which the protected kingdoms later crafted their own ‘charter kingdoms’ towards the latter part of the first millennium. In Frankish/Carolingian France, the charter state derived its ideas from the Roman empire, whereas Kiev derived its ideas from the Byzantine empire.
Lieberman sees two patterns over the millennium. The charter states in the protected zone facilitated a cycle of agrarian and population expansion, commercial growth, and development of new literate elites and charter religious ideologies of integration — in short an early form of agrarian state-building. This pattern was also experienced in China and India, although in these cases, new techniques and cultures of state-formation derived from Inner Asian invasions — such as by the Khitan, Jurchen, Tangut, Turks — combined with the older civilisational forms to create (ironically perhaps) more hybrid forms than the civilisational purity claimed, for instance, by Confucian and Hindu–Buddhist states in the protected zones.
Lieberman argues that the causes of the rise of these states are related. They have to do with the global Medieval Climate Anomaly — a warming trend which had the effect of extending the growing season and lands, population adaptation to diseases (particularly smallpox), and long-distance trade between 830–1240 CE. The period of efflorescence is followed by the collapse of these polities in the protected zone occurring very roughly within the same period between 1240 and 1470. Just as with the rise, the decline of these states was correlated and coordinated by the lapse of the good but anomalous climactic condition, the spread of the bubonic plague, and the impact of the Mongol empire — whether directly through disease spread, direct assault or indirect displacements of peoples such as the Tai, who then extended the invasive and disruptive process into other parts of Asia.
A new cycle began again around 1500, where stronger states consolidated in both zones (although China was somewhat anomalous here). Now state-building entered its early modern phase across Eurasia. Territorial expansion by the successor states was accompanied not only by deepening administrative control and integration, but also by the development of what Lieberman calls ‘politicized ethnicities’ — the horizontal and to some extent, vertical, social and cultural homogenisation within these empires, which in turn created a majority group (who presumably become the dominant national core). Administrative and political technologies improved to the extent that political fragmentation during the interregna between centralised polities became shorter over the millennium in both zones.
This comparative study yields many valuable insights, but it also has important limitations. Let me first list the insights that I found most illuminating, although I am sure others can develop a different list — such is the capaciousness of the book. The identification of sweepingly broad trends in the two zones that are roughly correlated with each other — the attribution of causal relationships is another matter — is itself an important contribution, particularly in the author's bold comparison between Southeast Asia and Europe, for instance, between Dai-Viet and Carolingian France. Moreover, while the differentiation of protected and exposed zones may seem somewhat over-generalised (e.g. Kiev's relative exposure), it is also valuable. As a student of continental Asia, I was especially struck by Lieberman's conclusions about South Asia, and to a lesser extent, about China.
With regards to China, he reveals that, given China's population growth, its ratio of administrative officials to population was probably lower in 1800 than most of his other cases, a quite startling conclusion given our presuppositions about relatively centralised state power in China. At the same time, he is fully aware that the real strength of the Chinese polity emerged from the process of Confucian gentry-integration with the political system which yielded a much more precocious ‘political ethnicisation’ of the culture than in the other states. The even greater exposure of South Asia's Indo-Gangetic plain to Inner Asian invaders rendered political formation here an oscillating, even Sisyphean, process. Lieberman discerns two contradictory trends that locate South Asia actually somewhere between the protected and the exposed zones. On the one hand, the size of the vast plain and the repeated infusion of new state-building, if also marauding, techniques raised the ambitions and possibilities of subcontinental empire. At the same time, South Asia outside the Indo-Gangetic valley together with the modes of cultural, religious and linguistic transmission promoted regional cultures and polities, akin to the protected zones. Yet, because the two trends were not able to harmonise, especially in the second millennium, they tended to cancel each other.
What about the weaknesses? Remarkably, Lieberman is meticulously up to date in the vast scholarship on each of the regions — at least the ones I am more or less familiar with. Indeed, the display of his vast erudition may ironically turn out to be a weakness. I found much of his detailing of the almost two millennia history of several of these regions — and some of the debates accompanying them — to be rather unnecessary. The level of detail is certainly an important reason for the 1000 pages, which I see as a weakness of the book. Lieberman would have encouraged a much wider readership if he had a shorter book and a more pointed argument.
Furthermore, some of the discussions could have been replaced by more relevant arguments. Thus, while he does refer to William Skinner's hypotheses about Chinese macro-regions, it would have been more fruitful for his argument to focus on Skinner's thesis about the structural and cyclical relationship of the macro-regions to the political centre. Moreover, while the discussion of Manchu ethnicity was rendered well, the wide coverage of the Pomeranz-Huang debate (which has been rehearsed in many places) did not seem particularly relevant or consequential to his argument.
As I have suggested, the causal relationships that Lieberman ostensibly seeks to specify between the strange parallels are among the less successful fruits of this work. Indeed, he is too good a historian to push the weak evidence regarding the effects of global warming/cooling or disease adjustments as causal links between regions and readily serves up the doubts himself. It turns out, however, that these particular links are not the main point of the book; rather it is a history of the patterns of evolution to ‘early modernity’. Yet the significance of early modernity is not explored even as it might in a page or two. Lieberman gives us important evidence that early modernity did not only develop in one or two parts of the world, but represented (through whatever means) an interconnected Eurasian process.
The significance of Lieberman's conclusions regarding the evolution to early modernity are enhanced when set against the arguments of scholars like Jack Goody (The thief of history) who have urged us to see Eurasia as an interconnected region where inventions and innovations have circulated at different speeds since ancient times, perhaps since the Bronze Age. The effect of such an understanding is to devalue histories that trace such developments to unique national or civilisational traits of a singular people, histories that are often used to glorify one people against others. And finally, we need to understand the relationship of early modernity to modernity. Lieberman hints that the one does not automatically lead to the other; thus, while politicised ethnicity may resemble nationalism, it is characterised by hierarchy and universalism that are lacking in nationalism. If the telos of early modernity is not modernity (this is unspecified by Lieberman), and modernity catalysed only some aspects of early modern forms, it is fair to ask what other aspects may be catalysed or developed in this globalised era — of which Lieberman's account is itself a worthy representative.
