New Perspectives on the History and Historiography of Southeast Asia: Continuing explorations

Description

Using a unique "old–new" treatment, this book presents new perspectives on several important topics in Southeast Asian history and historiography. Based on original, primary research, it reinterprets and revises several long-held conventional views in the field, covering the period from the "classical" age to the twentieth century. Chapters share the approach to Southeast Asian history and historiography: namely, giving "agency" to Southeast Asia in all research, analysis, writing, and interpretation. The book honours John K. Whitmore, a senior historian in the field of Southeast Asian history today, by demonstrating the scope and breadth of the scholar’s influence on two generations of historians trained in the West. In addition to providing new information and insights on the field of Southeast Asia, this book stimulates new debate on conventional ideas, evidence, and approaches to its teaching, research, and understanding. It addresses, and in many cases, revises specific, critically important topics in Southeast Asian history on which much conventional knowledge of Southeast Asia has long been based. It is of interest to scholars of Southeast Asian Studies, as well as Asian History. Front Cover New Perspectives on the History and Historiography of Southeast Asia Copyright Page Contents Maps, tables, figures and illustrations Contributors Foreword 1. Introduction: Michael Arthur Aung-Thwin and Kenneth R. Hall 2. John K. Whitmore’s contribution to Vietnamese and Southeast Asian studies: Victor Lieberman 3. A new/old look at “classical” and “post-classical” Southeast Asia/Burma: Michael Arthur Aung-Thwin 4. Sojourning communities, ports-of-trade, and commercial networking in Southeast Asia’s eastern regions, c. 1000–1400: Kenneth R. Hall 5. Chinese-style gunpowder weapons in Southeast Asia: focusing on archeological evidence: Sun Laichen 6. To catch a tiger: the suppression of the Yang Yinglong Miao uprising (1587–1600) as a case study in Ming military and borderlands history: Kenneth M. Swope 7. Maritime subversions and socio-political formations in Vietnamese history: a look from the marginal center (mien Trung): Charles Wheeler 8. “1620,” a cautionary tale: Michael Vickery 9. The imported book trade and Confucian learning in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Vietnam: Li Tana 10. Literacy in early seventeenth-century Northern Vietnam: Keith W. Taylor 11. The limping monk and the deaf king: peasant politics, subaltern agency, and the postcolonial predicament in colonial Burma: Maitrii Aung-Thwin 12. The myths of the Tet Offensive: Edwin E. Moïse Bibliography Index