Explores the role of technology in the larger political and economic fabric of Southeast Asia. In Technology in Southeast Asian History, Suzanne Moon explores the profound entanglement of technology with Southeast Asian politics, social life, economics, and culture over its long history. Moon offers a unique framework for understanding the place of technology in this region and its pivotal role in the emergence of the modern technological world. Synthesizing scholarship from the fields of history, archaeology, and anthropology, Moon examines and links technological stories from prehistory to the mid-twentieth century. She uses analytics in the history of technology—such as circulation, coproduction, and assemblage—to highlight the processes and evolving patterns of technological dynamism that characterize the region. Drawing on research focused on specific technologies, including temple construction, rice agriculture, weaving, and shipbuilding, Moon investigates the interconnectedness of these technologies within the larger political and economic fabric of Southeast Asian history. In contrast with portrayals of Southeast Asia as technologically deficient, Moon demonstrates the richness of this region's technological cultures. She rejects polarizing binaries such as traditional and modern or indigenous and foreign, instead underscoring Southeast Asia's role as a dynamic cocreator of the modern technological world. Technology has contributed to the creation and disruption of social and political orders; shaped engagements across barriers of distance, culture, and language; and produced and reproduced diverse cultures in this region. This narrative of technological change offers students, scholars, and readers critical new perspectives on both technological history and Southeast Asian history.

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.

The study of the history of Southeast Asia is still growing, evolving, deepening and changing as an academic field. Over the past few decades historians have added nuance to traditional topics such as Islam and nationalism, and created new ones, such as gender, globalization and the politics of memory. The Routledge Handbook of Southeast Asian History looks at the major themes that have developed in the study of modern Southeast Asian history since the mid-18th century. Contributions by experts in the field are clustered under three major headings - Political History, Economic History, and Social and Cultural History – and chapters challenge the boundaries between topics and regions. Alongside the rise and fall of colonialism, topics include conflict in Southeast Asia, tropical ecology, capitalism and its discontents, the major religions of the region, gender, and ethnicity. The Handbook provides a stimulating introduction to the most important themes within the subject area, and is an invaluable reference work for any student and researcher on Southeast Asia and Asian and World history.

Much has been written about the wealth of nations, the history of unequal distribution and zones of affluence and deprivation within and between societies. This book explores why some Asian nations are more prosperous than others through an examination of how their interaction with and utilization of resources has changed over the centuries.

Spanning over a millennium of history, this book seeks to describe and define the evolution of the China–Southeast Asia nexus and the interactions which have shaped their shared pasts. Examining the relationships which have proven integral to connecting Northeast and Southeast Asia with other parts of the world, the contributors of the volume provide a wide-ranging historical context to changing relations in the region today – perhaps one of the most intense re-orderings occurring anywhere in the world. From maritime trading relations and political interactions to overland Chinese expansion and commerce in Southeast Asia, this book reveals rarely explored connections across the China–Southeast Asia interface. In so doing, it transcends existing area studies boundaries to present an invaluable new perspective to the field. A major contribution to the study of Asian economic and cultural interactions, this book will appeal to students and scholars of Chinese history, as well as those engaged with Southeast Asia.

To celebrate Anthony Reid's numerous and seminal contributions to the field of Southeast Asian history, a group of his colleagues and students has contributed essays for this Festschrift. In addition to introductory essays which provide personal and intellectual histories of Anthony Reid the man, there is a range of original scholarly contributions addressing historical issues which Reid has researched during his career. Divided into sections which examine Southeast Asia in the world, early modern Southeast Asia, and modern Southeast Asia, these works engage with issues ranging from the Age of Commerce and comparative Eurasian history, to nationalism, ethnic hybridity, Islam, technological change, and the Chinese and Arabs in Southeast Asia. The authors include some of the foremost historians of Southeast Asia in our generation.

Since the late first millennium CE, Maritime Southeast Asia has been an inter-connected zone, with its societies and states maintaining economic and diplomatic relations with both China and Japan on the east, and the Indian Sub-Continent and Middle East on the west. This global connectedness was facilitated by merchant and shipping networks that originated from within and outside Southeast Asia, resulting in a trans-regional economy developing by the early second millennium CE. Sojourning populations began to appear in Maritime Southeast Asia, culminating in records of Chinese and Indian settlers in such places as Sumatra, Malay Peninsula and the Gulf of Siam by the mid-first millennium CE. At the same time, information of products that were harvested in Southeast Asia began to be appropriated by pockets of society in China, the India and the Middle East, resulting in the production of new knowledge and usages for these products in these markets.

This comprehensive history provides a fresh interpretation of Southeast Asia from 100 to 1500, when major social and economic developments foundational to modern societies took place on the mainland (Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam) and the island world (Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines). Incorporating the latest archeological evidence and international scholarship, Kenneth R. Hall enlarges upon prior histories of early Southeast Asia that did not venture beyond 1400, extending the study of the region to the Portuguese seizure of Melaka in 1511. Written for a wide audience of non-specialists, the book will be essential reading for all those interested in Asian and world history.

The contributors to this volume show how the practices of health in Southeast Asia over the past two centuries were mediated by local medical traditions, colonial interests, range of health agents and intermediaries.