Empires and State Formation in East Asia: The Cases of the Chinese and Angkor Empires

Tuong Vu, University of Oregon

This paper is part of a book project that proposes to (re)introduce empires into our thinking about state formation and political development in East and Southeast Asia. I am particularly interested in the historical processes by which empires helped give birth to states, some of which in turn grew into empires in their own right. Existing scholarship on state formation in Southeast Asia has generally neglected the subject of empires while the scholarship on empire generally ignores the Angkor Empire. Through the cases of the Chinese Empire, the Angkor Empire and their adjacent states, I argue that the interactions and mutual transformations between empires and states can illuminate important and consistent parallels between East and Southeast Asia as both regions coevolved around these two empires.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 115. Historical Social Sciences and China (III): The State and Empire in Chinese History