Southeast Asia In The Fifteenth Century

The argument rests on developments such as the introduction of firearms, more intensive rice agriculture, Thai and Viet ceramic exports, Korean and Ryukyu contacts with Southeast Asia, the demise of Champa, the climax of Viet and northern Tai statecraft, the birth of Melayu-Muslim kingship in Melaka and the creation of a new Muslim Javanese civilisation on Java's north coast. Coincident with these changes, Ming China's engagement with Sourtheast Asia grew as a result of overland expansion into the Tai and Viet polities, state-sponsored maritime voyages, and private Chinese trade and migration to the region. --

Southeast Asia has sometimes been portrayed as a static place. In the ninth to fourteenth centuries, however, the region experienced extensive trade, bitter wars, kingdoms rising and falling, ethnic groups on the move, the construction of impressive monuments and debate about profound religious issues. Readers of this volume will learn much of how people lived in Southeast Asia five hundred to one thousand years ago; the region today cannot be comprehended without reference to the seminal developments of that period.

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The political and religious identities of Southeast Asia were largely formed by the experiences of the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, when international commerce boomed before eventually falling under the domination of well-armed European powers intent on monopoly. This book is the first to document the full range of responses to the profound changes of this period: urbanization and the burgeoning of commerce; the proliferation of firearms; an increase in the number and strength of states; and the shift from experimental spirit worship to the universalist scriptural religions of Islam, Christianity, and Theravada Buddhism. Bringing together ten essays by an international group of historians, Southeast Asia in the Early Modern Era shows how various states adapted to new pressures and compares economic, religious, and political developments among the major cultures of the area.

This substantial work explores the impact of monetization in premodern Southeast Asia from the third century BCE to the rise of Maleka in the early fifteenth century. The author explores why concepts of money developed unevenly throughout the region. He considers trade policies, price controls, exchange ratios, monopolies, variant standards of value, and the administrative structures required to support such a complex economic innovation.

Anyone who has seen the stunning ruins at Angkor, Bagan, or Barabudur will understand why Southeast Asia boasts so many Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization World Heritage sites. But this is only part of an immense historical and cultural heritage, much of which is revealed in this guide that helps readers grasp the sites' value and comprehend the society in which they were created over a period of a thousand years. Covering the countries of Brunel, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam from the 1st through 15th centuries, Historical Dictionary of Ancient Southeast Asia explores the vast and complex history of the region through diagrams. It also includes hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entires on major and minor sites; significant figures; kingdoms and lesser entities they ruled; economic and social relations; and the artistic, cultural, and religious context of the time. Book jacket.