exist.
Both authors strive to avoid an Eurocentric view of the early modern world. Lieberman said that traditionally Western writers on Southeast Asia "tended to see indigenous civilizations as intensely conservative, if not static" and Western societies dynamic (p. 1). Goldstone similarly disdains biased Western accounts that viewed political change in Asia "as mere peasant uprisings or dynastic changes" (p. 2 & p. 353). Both of them seek to explain why the changes they studied occurred (Lieberman, pp. 14-15. Goldstone's focus is narrower than Lieberman's. His book "examines the causes of revolutions and major rebellions in the early modern world" (p. xxii). Lieberman on the other hand chronicles and explains processes of political and cultural integration. They also define the period under study differently.
Both authors discuss earlier and later periods, but Lieberman concentrates on the period c. 1450 to c. 1830 while Goldstone focuses on the two periods of revolution and state breakdowns from roughly the late 1500s to about 1650 and from 1770 to 1850. France and, to a lesser extent pre-Meiji Japan, is studied by them both. Otherwise, the nationstates under glass differ (England, the Ottoman Empire and Ming China by Goldstone and Burma. Malaysia-Indonesia, Russia, Siam and Vietnam by Lieberman). The credibility of Lieberman's overriding conclusion, namely, that all across Eurasia the dominant feature of the period was "political and cultural integration" is somewhat undercut by his failure, except in passing, to study any of the less integrated regions of Europe, such as Germany, and the main centers of Asian civilization, the Islamic world, Mughal India and Ming China. As Goldstone cautioned, "suspicions have . . . arisen that, in seeking generalities, comparative history is disdainful of facts" (p. 54).
Principal Findings and Explanations
Lieberman's Theses. According to Lieberman, during the early modern period a...