Lanham Boulder-New York -Toronto Plymouth, UK: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2011. XIV, 384 p., ill.* At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the study of the ancient and medieval history of Southeast Asia entered a new stage. It is still difficult to say what is the main content of this phase: the unprecedented expansion of archaeological research with the inevitable multiplication of available sources, the unstoppable criticism of the traditional concept of the history of the region as the periphery of the great civilizations of India and China and the emphasis on the independent nature of local evolutionary paths, or the tendency to generalize the material in archaeology [Southeast Asia, 2004; Higham, 2002] and stories [Munoz, 2006; Miksic, 2007; O'Reilly, 2007]. The peer-reviewed monograph by American historian Kenneth Hall is a new attempt to understand the history of "early" Southeast Asia. In 1985, he published the then landmark work "Maritime Trade and State Development in Southeast Asia", where he showed the closest interdependence of fluctuations in the rhythms of trade and the political evolution of local communities [Hall, 1985]. This was a further development of the Y. K. project. Van Leur and O. W. Walters on identifying the role of trade and entrepreneurship in the history of ancient and medieval Indonesia (Van Leur, 1955; Wolters, 1967). Along with O. W. Walters ' monograph on the profound identity of Southeast Asia (Wolters, 1982), Hall's book still formed the foundation of scientific knowledge about the history of Southeast Asia up to the turn of the XIV-XV centuries. In these monographs, political history did not occupy the main place assigned to it in the work of J. R. R. Tolkien. Coedes, 1948), and the development of the region was interpreted as deeply original, and not due to Indian cultural influence. This very influence was seen as a consequence of the deliberate choice of Indian cultural heritage by local rulers in the in ... Читать далее