Abstract: |
Recent attempts to determine the causes of or delineate the prerequisites for the emergence of the state on a comparative basis (Fried 1967, Krader 1968, Carneiro 1970, Service 1975) have focused upon a number of regions of the world but have ignored Southeast Asia.' This area may, however, be highly relevant to an understanding of state formation, for while the various geographical and other conditions often mentioned as causes or prerequisites appear to have been long present in the region, state formation was relatively late and, in some ways, rather incomplete. The purpose of this paper is to suggest how and why this was the case.
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