A History of Southeast Asia Quotes

“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

“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

“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