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Different parts of the world are said to have "entered modernity" – a tenuous phrase at best – at different times.  For Southeast Asia, there is an argument to be made that this transition was happening just as we move into the eighteenth century.  How and why was this the case?  What signals are there to connote this change?  This presentation examines that question in regi

Plains, Hills and Mountains: The Balkan Peninsula in the Eighteenth Century is intended as a response to Faruk Tabak’s sweeping study of the Mediterranean, The Waning of the Mediterranean 1550-1870: A Geohistorical Approach (2008). In the book Tabak argues that Mediterranean unity continued long past Braudel’s famous sixteenth century.