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The histories of western and central mainland Southeast Asia were closely joined and reasonably comparable. The central mainland is here defined as present-day Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and more peripherally, the Mekong delta. Although in fact communications between this region and China were at least as easy as with South Asia, from an early date India and Sri Lanka provided the central, no less than the western, mainland with its chief high cultural inspiration. The broad similarities between the western and central mainland in art, literature, law, kingship, and Theravada affiliation that grew from this common South Asian exposure were reinforced by a constant west-central exchange. Monks, diplomats, traders, soldiers, and migrants showed that upland barriers between the Irrawaddy, Chaophraya, and Mekong river systems were relatively porous. Thus a unique Theravada civilization embracing virtually all wet-rice areas in the western and central mainland cohered and diverged from the ever more Sinic eastern sector. To these shared cultural traditions must be added the unifying effects of demography and geography, particularly in what became the two chief Theravada kingdoms, Burma and Siam. In both kingdoms a semicircle of highlands surrounded a great alluvial plain whose chief river, the Irrawaddy or Chaophraya, provided the main avenue of communication. In both sectors a maritime coastal region competed with a less commercially privileged interior zone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The eastern mainland exhibited a number of unique features whose interpretation became particularly embroiled in 19th and 20th century politics. The eastern mainland is here defined as the Red River basin and surrounding uplands, the eastern half of the Annamite Chain, the coastal lowlands, and the Mekong delta. The most obvious difference between this region and the rest of the mainland was the east's unique exposure to Chinese culture, which began in systematic fashion with the incorporation of the Red River basin into the Chinese empire between 43 and 938 c.e. Encountering a monarchy that congratulated itself on fidelity to Confucian norms, Frenchmen in the late 1800s developed what has been termed “the little China fallacy”: they assumed that Vietnam owed everything to Chinese tutelage, made few independent advances, and thus was no more able than its “stagnant” northern mentor to enter the modern world without European direction. That this endorsement of Europe's historic mission would appeal to many colonizers is hardly surprising. Curiously, however, long after the French left Indochina, the notion that China provides the most appropriate template continued to grip even resolutely anticolonial Western historians who inherited the scholarly apparatus of colonial researchers, together with the Sinocentric bias inherent in Chinese-language records. So too the alliance c.1950–1978 between Vietnamese and Chinese Communism may 1have encouraged linkage in the minds of anti-Communist scholars and those sympathetic to Communism alike. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our detailed examination of mainland history begins with the western sector of the mainland in part because it is convenient to proceed west to east and in part because here I am best able to address regional conundrums with indigenous-language primary sources. Moreover, insofar as any sector can be representative of so varied a region, the western mainland has a good claim. In duration and degree, for example, post-charter disruptions were intermediate between those of the central and eastern mainland. The same may be said of intrasectoral tensions: Upper Burma reemerged as the dominant zone within the western mainland in the 1630s. This was long after Ayudhya had established its preeminence in the central mainland, but almost 170 years before Hue gained a secure authority along the yet more fragmented eastern littoral. As elsewhere, political change had a cyclic character: periodic breakdowns encouraged administrative reform, but reformed administrations collapsed before destabilizing economic growth, external attacks, and domestic factionalism. Whenever the capital region was in trouble, restive provinces were quick to magnify its difficulties. Thus Lower Burma exploited Upper Burma's problems in the 1280s and 1740s, and when the south faltered in the late 1500s, Upper Burma returned the favor. With the interior home to Burmans and the south to Mons, endemic north–south tensions had an irreducible, if fluid, ethnic component. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1792 the French monarchy collapsed. Between 1799 and 1815, a new Parisian regime improved the efficiency and penetration of the central apparatus, while dramatically extending French military power. Short-lived though France's conquests were, her continental wars precipitated imitative reforms of administrative and military structures across Europe and a permanent reduction in the number of independent states. Between 1752 and 1786 the Burmese, Siamese, and Vietnamese kingdoms all disintegrated. In each realm, a new, more dynamic leadership then succeeded in quelling the chaos, increasing the resources and local authority of the state, and enlarging its territorial writ. The ensuing wars between reinvigorated empires in the late 18th and early 19th centuries accelerated competitive reform while diminishing the number of independent polities across mainland Southeast Asia. How shall we explain these parallels between Europe and Southeast Asia? Surely, one is tempted to say, no explanation is needed: the cultural contexts were so different, the interstate and domestic systems so unique, the trajectories so disparate as to render parallels ultimately meaningless. This is historical flotsam, curious but basically random coincidences, like similarities between Meso-American and Egyptian pyramids or between Jewish and Buddhist cosmogonic explanations for the origin of suffering. But closer scrutiny suggests rather more was involved. In fact, in mainland Southeast Asia as well as in France, the late 18th and early 19th centuries ended the third and inaugurated the last of four roughly synchronized cycles of political consolidation that together spanned the better part of a millennium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rulers of Ming China would not have recognized the region known today as Southeast Asia. They considered the archipelago east of Brunei (modern Borneo) to be part of that area they termed the Eastern Oceans, while all other coastal states they considered part of the Western Oceans, which, for long periods in their nomenclature, also included countries bordering on the Indian Ocean. Those states which comprised what are now modern Burma, Laos, and northern Thailand, were grouped quite differendy from the other nations comprising the Eastern or Western Oceans. The view of other nations held at the imperial capital at Nanking or Peking was always sinocentric. Foreign countries were considered to have no meaningful existence unless their rulers had a relationship with the emperor of China. Such factors as the country's distance from China's capital, whether the country shared a border with the empire or not, and whether the country was important to the empire's defense were also deemed significant. There were held to be technical differences between nations as well: countries which sent missions through Ch'üan-chou in Fukien were distinguished by the court from countries whose missions entered China through Canton in Kwangtung; and countries sending overland missions from beyond the provinces of Kwangsi and Yunnan were considered yet different again from the others. Certain general principles concerning the proper conduct of foreign relations that the Chinese court continually emphasized notwithstanding, what remained most important in determining Chinese foreign policy toward Southeast Asia were the political conditions prevailing at the particular time during the dynasty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The British were able to conquer the Indian subcontinent within a period of two generations because they commanded the Indian seas and the Bengal revenues. No less important, however, was the knowledge of the country that enabled the East India Company to use these resources to greatest effect. The subcontinent was straddled by complex and highly sophisticated information systems and the British had learned the art of listening in on these internal communications. By controlling newswriters, coralling groups of spies and runners, and placing agents at religious centres, in bazaars and among bands of military men and wanderers, they had been able to anticipate the coalitions of the Indian powers and to plot their enemies' movements and alliances. It was for this reason, rather than because of any deficiency of patriotism or absence of resistance, that there failed to materialise a general alliance against the British, an alliance of ‘all Puckery wallahs’ or turban-wearers against ‘all Topy wallahs’, or hat-wearers, as Tafazzul Hussain Khan put it. As they moved beyond the intricate information systems of the Indian plains, the conquerors began to face unforeseen difficulties. In Nepal between 1814 and 1816, in Burma between 1824 and 1826, and on the northwestern frontiers through to the military debacle of 1838–42 and beyond, the British were often confronted by a virtual information famine which slowed their advance and sometimes put the whole edifice of their power in peril. Frontier wars these may have been, but the cumulative financial impact of military and intelligence failures undermined the Company's government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]