Anthony Reid

The Australian Academy of the Humanities acknowledges, with deep sadness, the death of Emeritus Professor Anthony (Tony) Reid FAHA FBA, one of the foremost historians of Southeast Asia, a prolific author and a dear colleague and mentor. Emeritus Professor Robert Cribb FAHA reflects on his legacy. Download the PDF version here. 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. 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 convinc