Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Globalization in Southeast Asia over la Longue Duree

No part of the world has been affected more by globalization in recent decades than Southeast Asia. This has led many observers to believe that the regions present experience with globalization is at once unprecedented, inevitable, and irreversible. Professor Peter A. Coclanis challenges such beliefs, and, in so doing, provides a history of globalization in Southeast Asia over the past two millennia. Employing Stephen Jay Goulds famous temporal metaphors times arrow and times cycle Coclanis traces the trajectory of globalization, arguing that globalization has ebbed and flowed in the region over the centuries, that globalization is best viewed as a process rather than a permanent condition, and that its effects have differed considerably across space and over time