Anthony Reid > Quotes

“Chinese migrants had learned from long experience to expect little of governments, and to rely much on the networks of kinship, culture, and trust.”
― Anthony Reid

“Paradoxically, the period of liberation from European power structures marked an unprecedented embrace of modern European cultural and political norms. It marked probably the most dramatic iconoclasm towards Asian traditional cultures of any period in history.”
― Anthony Reid, A History of Southeast Asia: Critical Crossroads

“The first generation of revolutionary nationalists had more difficulty occupying the legal-bureaucratic space of the colonial states than the charismatic space in people’s hearts. The first symbolic leaders of the upheavals that delivered proudly independent and assertive states-- Aung San, Ho Chi Minh, Sihanouk, Sukarno, Phibun Songkhram, Tunku Abdul Rahman—achieved an almost supernatural aura from their identification with racial/national liberation, though some of their henchmen also spilled considerable blood to achieve that result. Their successors invariably imposed more of an iron hand, particularly in what I have called the post-revolutionary countries, to defend a single definition of the fruits of those revolutions.”
― Anthony Reid, A History of Southeast Asia: Critical Crossroads

“The very prominent images of the Javanese aristocratic daughter Kartini learning ‘liberation’ from her Dutch correspondent... began a discourse of ‘female liberation’ as a modern western import... The reality of the high colonial period was however closer to the reverse. Up until the nineteenth century the great majority of Southeast Asian women had more latitude and agency than their European (or Chinese or Indian) counterparts, and played economic roles equivalent to (though different from) those of men.”
― Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Early Modern Era: Trade, Power, and Belief

“Marital property was held jointly, marital residence was more often with the bride’s than the groom’s parents, descent and inheritance was bilateral, and women’s claim on property was sufficiently secure to allow them to be the initiators of divorce as often as men. Attractive as this pattern seems in modern terms, it could be argued that the absence of male primogeniture, which cruelly concentrated wealth in particular dynastic lines in Early Modern Europe and China, was one of the reasons that Southeast Asians did not accumulate capital as those centers did.”
― Anthony Reid, A History of Southeast Asia: Critical Crossroads

“The more balanced power equation between women and men Below the Winds encouraged serial monogamy and easy divorce for both parties… Hybridity was therefore the norm for these cities, up to the point when communication with the homeland became so well established that its prejudices were imported.…. Southeast Asian women were therefore the pioneers of cultural interaction with outsiders, a creative role appreciated by neither nationalist nor imperialist authors.”
― Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Early Modern Era: Trade, Power, and Belief