Robert J. Antony

My name is Robert J. Antony, a historian and author. I was a Senior Researcher in Maritime History at Guangzhou University, a Visiting Distinguished Professor at Shandong University, and Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton. My research focuses on what is called history from the bottom up. I believe that in order to understand a society, and its history, we must look at it not only through the eyes and words of the men at the top but also from the perspective of the little guy at the lower ends of the social ladder. This history, however, is not easy to get at and involves tedious research using both conventional and unconventional sources as well as innovative methodologies and lots of imagination. I find my clues to the past not only in dusty archives but also in gritty fieldwork in bucolic villages. My interests range from the history of crime and the culture of violence to popular religion and local folkways in late imperial China. I mostly write about the social and cultural histories of pirates, smugglers, bandits, triad thugs, and shamans who lived in the Ming and Qing dynasties in Guangdong, Fujian, and Taiwan.