Dougald O’Reilly, "Empires of the Southern Ocean: Early Civilizations of Mainland and Insular Southeast Asia" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026)

From about the middle of the first millennium of the Common Era through to the fifteenth century, Southeast Asian societies underwent a political transformation that produced the first, early states that were the forerunners of the countries we know today as Myanmar, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam. Dougald O’Reilly’s Empires of the Southern Ocean: Early Civilizations of Mainland and Insular Southeast Asia (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026), tells the complicated story of the development of these earlier polities from ‘chiefdoms’ to more complex states. The book highlights the role of local factors in the rise of these states, as well as the influence of early Southeast Asia’s participation in long-distance trade networks in the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea.

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