ABSTRACT
Southeast Asia’s historical connections with the Indian Ocean provide a case study par excellence of ‘early globalization’, ‘archaic globalization’, or simply ‘globalization’ (cf. Abu-Lughod 1991; Hobson 2004; throughout this chapter, I use Island Southeast Asia and Maritime Southeast Asia interchangeably. I do not focus here on the mainland Southeast Asian sub-region; Figure 8.4.1). The region’s incorporation into global exchange networks largely predates the rise of Western Europe as a world power, and has, as such, inspired those taking issue with Eurocentric tropes on globalization (cf. Frank 1998; Liebermann 2009; Chew 2014). Maritime Southeast Asian globalization is an a posteriori concept; the region’s past, as this chapter demonstrates, was shaped by indigenous networks of exchange that eventually toppled over into trans-Asiatic and ultimately global spheres of interaction. These networks were global in the sense that they were not just macroscalar, but also brought about far-reaching cultural changes (Feinman this volume; Jennings this volume). Globalization as dened here need not necessarily be world-encompassing (Wallerstein 1974; Pitts and Versluys 2015; Knappett this volume).
