Anthony (Tony) Reid FAHA, who died on 8th June 2025, was one of the foremost historians of Southeast Asia of his time. Born in New Zealand in 1939, and always proud of his Kiwi heritage, Tony studied history at the Victoria University of Wellington before obtaining a scholarship to complete his PhD at Cambridge on the late 19th-century diplomatic and military struggle over northern Sumatra involving Britain, the Netherlands and the local sultanate of Aceh. While in Cambridge, he married a fellow New Zealander, Helen, who was a tower of support to him throughout his career.
Tony’s first academic appointment, in 1965, was at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur, where he began teaching Southeast Asian history at a time when much of the region was in political turmoil. In this environment, if not earlier, he became critically aware of both the importance of history for understanding the region’s unfolding developments and of the power of historical understandings to shape what Southeast Asians believed might be possible and impossible for their countries’ futures. He first addressed these issues in studies of Indonesia’s revolution against the Dutch (1945-1949). In two books, The Indonesian National Revolution (1974) and The Blood of the People: Revolution and the End of Traditional Rule in Northern Sumatra (1979), he presented a sensitive analysis of the tension between the noble aspirations that underpinned the Indonesian national project and the reality of sometimes intense violence.
Increasingly sensing that a view of Southeast Asian history that put colonialism and its antagonists at the centre set destructive national agendas, Tony turned his attention to the period immediately preceding the imposition of colonialism. In an early address at Flinders University, he posed the question of how Southeast Asians themselves had understood the causes of the sudden transformation of their social and political order brought about by colonialism. In Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450–1680 (2 vols, 1988, 1993), he answered this question by bringing to life an era when Southeast Asia had been vibrant, diverse, powerful and cosmopolitan. The book was not just an analysis of the pre-colonial political order, but also a Braudelian exploration of the region’s varied material cultures. His vision, delivered through close and source-critical reading of an enormous range of Southeast Asian and outsider texts from the period, was to demonstrate to Southeast Asians that their region had produced great things in the past and to imply that they could do it again. The great things he emphasised were not the powerful rulers who sometime inspired modern-day authoritarians but instead the middle and ordinary people of the region. The arguments and evidence presented in Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce were bolstered by a remarkable number of journal articles and book chapters focussing on specific issues, such as the deliberate choice between Islam and Christianity made by rulers in southern Sulawesi on the cusp of the colonial era.
A prolific organiser—and with institutional support a funder—of small, focussed conferences and workshops, Tony had a knack for identifying imaginative and important topics that could only be investigated by groups of scholars. His edited books arising from these conferences covered topics ranging from Southeast Asian perceptions of the past, the last stand of autonomous states in Southeast Asia before colonialism, the similarities and differences between Jews in Europe and Chinese in Southeast Asia, slavery, freedom and surnames. Later in his career, Tony returned his focus to violence-wracked northern Sumatra, writing Verandah of Violence: the Background to the Aceh Problem (2006 – the title was an allusion to the common Indonesian description of the strongly Muslim region as the ‘verandah of Mecca’). In addition, he entered the crowded field of synthesising analyses of Southeast Asian history with three major works, Imperial Alchemy: Nationalism and Political Identity in Southeast Asia (2010), To Nation by Revolution: Indonesia in the 20th century (2011), and A History of Southeast Asia: Critical Crossroads (2015).
Tony’s career was also marked by his deep commitment and contribution to the community of scholars working on Southeast Asian history. He believed in scholarly debate, and he sought to include in that scholarly debate not just the big names – and not even just those with the potential to be big – but also all those smaller voices that also had something to say, whether it was a novel insight, an unexpected rebuttal of current wisdom, or even a curmudgeonly obsession. He was especially committed to promoting the voices of scholars from Southeast Asia itself. He was firmly convinced that the domination of Southeast Asian history by Western scholars was, and should be, a temporary phenomenon, a means to help Southeast Asia out of the intellectual depression of the colonial era, not a means of preserving outside influence.
Tony occupied academic positions that were, by today’s standards, immensely privileged. He held a position in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at the Australian National University in Canberra, followed by the post of founding director of the Southeast Asia Center and program at UCLA in Los Angeles, and was the founding director of the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore. In all these positions, he reached out to offer to more junior scholars opportunities that others in comparable positions sometimes kept to their own small circles. His role as an editor of scholarly collections was especially important in bringing emerging scholars together under the discipline of an imaginative theme and giving them academic profile. He was a generous supervisor of PhD students, and he offered intellectual and career advice to a much wider range of younger scholars. He was a stalwart of the Asian Studies Association of Australia (ASAA). Recognising the importance of public recognition for the scholarly careers of coming generations, he endowed the biennial Reid Prize, administered by the ASAA for the most significant book contributing to the understanding of Asia.
Tony Reid’s final innovation – inspired by the catastrophic 2004 tsunami in Aceh – was to use the historical record to begin exploring the history of earthquakes and tsunamis in Indonesia and its consequences for Indonesian society. His identification of a massive earthquake which devasted the Dutch East India Company capital, Batavia (today’s Jakarta), in 1699 – and the consequent conclusion that Indonesia’s capital may be vulnerable to a repeat event – appears to have contributed to the decision by Indonesia’s past president Joko Widodo to move the country’s capital to a new site, called Nusantara, in geologically stable Kalimantan. The move has been attended by corruption and uncertainty, but Tony himself would have been the first to concede that not all those who draw lessons from history do so effectively.
Emeritus Professor Robert Cribb FAHA
Australian National University
