: Zoltan Biedermann, Alan Strathern
: Sri Lanka at the Crossroads of History
: UCL Press
: 9781911307815
: 1
: CHF 8.90
:
: Soziologie
: English
The peoples of Sri Lanka have participated infar-flung trading networks, religious formations, and Asian and Europeanempires for millennia. This interdisciplinary volume sets out to draw Sri Lankainto the field of Asian and Global History by showing how the latest wave ofscholarship has explored the island as a 'crossroads', a place defined by itsopenness to movement across the Indian Ocean.Experts in the history, archaeology, literature andart of the island from c.500 BCE to c.1850 CE use Lankan material to explore anumber of pressing scholarly debates. They address these matters from theirvaried disciplinary perspectives and diverse array of sources, criticallyassessing concepts such as ethnicity, cosmopolitanism and localisation, andelucidating the subtle ways in which the foreign may be resisted and embracedat the same time. The individual chapters, and the volume as a whole, are awelcome addition to the history and historiography of Sri Lanka, as well asstudies of the Indian Ocean region, kingship, colonialism, imperialism, andearly modernity.