Ben Kiernan
Research project
Southeast Asia and the Mediterranean: Autonomy and Integration of Maritime World Regions over the Millennia
Project summary
I propose a long-range comparative study of the Mediterranean and Southeast Asian worlds. This is a parallel but increasingly integrated history of two seagoing world regions over the past two to three millennia. It involves close comparisons of environmental conditions, trade, culture, statecraft, science and medicine, religious pluralism, uses of and limitations on violence, military and naval competition, climate change, colonization and decolonization, the impact of the two World Wars, and globalization, in both the Mediterranean and Southeast Asia. The narrative will move from a study of these two regions that shared certain common geographical characteristics yet remained remote from one another in the first millennium BCE and the early first millennium CE, to the explication of patterns of increasing integration and exchange between them (especially through trade, religious conversion, colonialism, climate change, and World War and globalization) in the second millennium CE and up to the present day.
