Author Meets Critic: Reading Multiscalar Historical Method and Buddhist Political Theory from Anne Blackburn’s Buddhist-Inflected Sovereignties across the Indian Ocean: The Pali Arena, 1200 - 1550 (University of Hawai‘i Press 2024, paperback 2025)

How do premodern Buddhist sources make arguments for Buddhist political theory? From a multiscalar historical analysis, Anne Blackburn’s Buddhist-Inflected Sovereignties across the Indian Ocean meticulously examines how royal authority engaged buddha-sāsana in specific historical circumstances in Southern Asia in the second millennium CE. This groundbreaking book offers a model for how scholars can rethink Buddhism and politics. With sharp attention to the local production of meaning, it shows the power of researching textual and non-textual forms of evidence at the micro-, meso-, and macro-historical levels. This panel brings together specialists from across Asia to consider the broader implications of the newest work from a leading historian of the Pali arena. This roundtable will offer a lively conversation with the author about how premodern Buddhist sovereigns and would-be sovereigns wielded their power based on Buddhist ideas and ideals, as well as how locally produced Buddhist political theory operated in different contexts.