A History of Southeast Asia: Critical Crossroads by Anthony Reid (review)

The principal challenge of writing general histories of Southeast Asia lies in the construction and justification of this heterogeneous region as a concept. Thomas Pepinsky (2016) referred to this challenge as the "fundamental anxiety" of Southeast Asian studies. Moreover, the further one goes into the past, the more difficult it becomes to give coherence to an area with such great variation in culture, governance, language and religion. There is also the danger of projecting the existence of modern states back into earlier periods. In A History of Southeast Asia: Critical Crossroads, Anthony Reid satisfactorily addresses these problems to produce an excellent textbook that covers over a thousand years of the region's history.

Reid defines Southeast Asia as a distinct "humid tropical environment" that "produced many common features of material culture and social structure" and "preserved political and cultural diversity", to a certain degree, from assimilation by foreign models(p. 26). In particular, he emphasizes the limits of Indic and Sinic influences, even as he charts the profuse connections between South and East Asia on the one hand and Southeast Asia on the other. The historical character of the latter was that of a "crossroads", into and through which trade, people and ideas flowed with relative ease (p. 420). To remedy the outsize attention to political elites characteristic of much historiography, Reid "dethrones" the state (pp. xix–xx) and spends most of the book examining the role of culture, demography, environments, gender, health and ideas in shaping the lives of Southeast Asians. Indeed, he takes the reader on a whistle-stop tour of modern Southeast Asian nation-building only late in chapter 19. In dealing with the pre-nineteenth century period, he takes care to describe locations using geographical terms, rather than the names of present-day countries, where possible.

But how does the book compare to other general works on Southeast Asia, such as the two-volume Cambridge History of Southeast Asia edited by Nicholas Tarling (1992a and 1992b)? The unique contribution of Reid's book to the literature is its synthesis of a vast scholarship, distilled through the efforts of a scholar singularly well versed in the history of the region. It is meant to be a comprehensive introductory history, one that accentuates the themes deemed most important to Reid. He regards the study of Southeast Asia and its history as vital for three reasons: the region's status as an active tectonic environment with the potential to affect the global climate; the relative socioeconomic autonomy of its women; and the limited role of the state in shaping the coherence of some of its societies (p. xvii). These are subtle but important elements in the region's long history, and they are raised in the book where most relevant.

The book is divided into twenty chapters ordered by theme and with chronological overlaps. This organization proves an effective way of circumventing the issues related to strict periodization; the nineteenth century, for example, was as much the era of high imperialism as it was of state-building and of encounters with "modernity" in Southeast Asia. Chapters 1 and 2 provide a sketch of Southeast Asia's geographies, peoples, economic systems, and relationship with Buddhism and Hinduism, from its earliest times to the fourteenth century. Chapters 3 to 6 examine trade, religion, and "Asian European encounters" in the early modern period. Chapters 7 and 8 examine the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with a focus on the crisis and recovery following a slowdown in global trade. Chapter 9 charts the expanding influence of the "sinicized world" in the region, beginning in the fifteenth century in Đại Việt, before it skips to the "Chinese century" from 1740 to 1840.

The rest of the book deals with the region's experience of colonialism and modernity. Chapters 10 to 13 explore Southeast Asia's colonial period and its effect on reshaping the environment, states and peoples. Chapters 14 to 16...