Anthony Reid (academic)

Anthony Reid (born 19 June 1939) is a New Zealand-born historian of Southeast Asia.

Quotes

• Similarly, Malaya lost much of its population as a result of the campaigns of Aceh in the period 1618-24.
  • Reid A (1988) Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce 1450–1680, Yale University Press, New Haven, Vol. I., p. 17,18 also quoted in M.A. Khan, Islamic Jihad.

• The Makassarese of Sulawesi were reputed in the sixteenth century to be resisting Islam because pork was their major meat source. According to the local chronicle of Bulo-bulo in the Sindjai region, when this district was invited to accept Islam in the seventeenth century by the ruler of Makassar under the veiled threat of war if it refused, one prominent chief defiantly declared that he would not bow to Islam even if the rivers flowed with blood, as long as there were pigs to eat in the forests of Bulo-bulo. Miraculously, the story goes, all the pigs disappeared that very night; so the chief and all his men were obliged to convert.
  • Reid A (1988) Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce 1450–1680, Yale University Press, New Haven, Vol. I., p. 35 also quoted in M.A. Khan, Islamic Jihad.

• According to the Hikayat Banjar (432-37), the Islamization of Banjarmasin was effectively determined when opposing claimants to the throne decided on single combat to avoid a civil war.
  • Reid A (1988) Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce 1450–1680, Yale University Press, New Haven, Vol. I., p. 124 also quoted in M.A. Khan, Islamic Jihad.

• Even when great cities were attacked and seized, the defence was not stubborn and desperate except in the unusual case that a surrounding army cut off all means of retreat. The Dutch general Coen was told that "the Pangeran of Banten fears no Portuguese, Spanish, Hollanders, or Englishmen, but only the [King of] Mataram. From the latter, he says, no one can flee, but for the others the whole mountains are sufficient for us; they cannot follow us there with their ships." The river ports of eastern Sumatra, Malaya, or Borneo often shifted far inland in response to a seaborne attack. When an English party went to buy pepper at the once flourishing town of Inderagiri in Sumatra, they spent two days looking in vain for some trace of where it had been and then learned that the whole population had moved three days' journey up the river in response to an Acehnese invasion six years earlier.
  • Reid A (1988) Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce 1450–1680, Yale University Press, New Haven, Vol. I., p. 122ff also quoted in M.A. Khan, Islamic Jihad.