Peter A. Coclanis is Albert R. Newsome Distinguished Professor of History and director of the Global Research Institute at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the author of The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country, 1670–1920 (1989) and Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Globalization in South East Asia over la Longue Durée (2006), and the co-editor of Environmental Change and Agricultural Sustainability in the Mekong Delta (with Mart A. Stewart, 2011).