WHY CHINA AND SOUTH ASIA?

Previous chapters argued that, amidst innumerable discrepancies and peculiarities, mainland Southeast Asian realms, Russia, France, and Japan shared broadly comparable trajectories. To recapitulate: Lying on the periphery of older civilizations, each region imported a world religion and developed a charter polity in the latter half of the first or the early second millennium c.e. Each was substantially protected against occupation from Inner Asia, in recognition of which I have termed these areas part of Eurasia's protected zone. Russia apart, all these states controlled what by Qing or Mughal standards were modest domains. Starting in the late first millennium, resuming at some point between 1450 and 1650, and accelerating in the 18th and 19th centuries, each state expanded territorially and centralized administration. So too, and again with notable acceleration after 1700, linguistic and cultural practices became more horizontally and vertically uniform even as cultural production grew more specialized. Symptomatic of cumulative integration was the tendency everywhere but Japan for successive interregna to grow shorter and less disruptive.

Because I sought to establish that mainland Southeast Asia participated in wider Eurasian trends, I have concentrated thus far on regions whose political chronologies approximated those of the mainland most closely. But several considerations oblige us now to extend our gaze in this and the following chapter to China and to South Asia, both part of what I term the “exposed zone” of Eurasia.