At Eurasia's northwestern and southeastern extremities, two large peninsulas often have been considered exceptions to the general course of human history, albeit in diametrically opposed fashion. Europe has been seen as a site of a unique economic and political dynamism that distinguished its peoples from the rest of mankind by the 16th, if not the 13th, century. Mainland Southeast Asia frequently has been portrayed as a backwater, a residual region between China and India, easily influenced by external agents, but prone to inertia and lacking its own dynamic.

I argue that in fact both peninsulas followed comparable political and cultural trajectories according to ever more synchronized chronologies. These odd congruences, these “strange parallels,” provide my point of departure to consider patterns of political and cultural construction across Eurasia.

My central thesis is that over at least a thousand years vast stretches of Eurasia, including Southeast Asia, Europe, Japan, China, and South Asia, responded in broadly comparable ways to coordinated economic, climatic, and military stimuli. Most regions, for example, saw a great upsurge in economic and political vitality in the late first and early second millennia, and again for much of the 16th and 17th centuries. In every case the latter era generated an unprecedentedly expansive, internally specialized “early modern” political and cultural system whose essential features endured to the early 1800s.