Anthony Reid

Professor & Director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at UCLA
Anthony (Tony) Reid has spent most of  his life in the Southwest Pacific, between New Zealand, Australia and Southeast Asia.  He did his first degrees in History and economics in Wellington and his Ph.D. at Cambridge.  He has taught Southeast Asian History at the University of Malaya (1965-70), Hasanuddin University in Indonesia (1980-81), Hawaii, Yale, and Auckland.  Most of his career however was at the Australian National University in Canberra, where since 1989 he was Professor of Southeast Asian History and Director of Projects on Southeast Asian Economic History and on the Chinese Diaspora..

After early research on the history of Sumatra, of Sulawesi, and of the Revolutionary period (1945-50) in Indonesia, he began to focus on the Early Modern Period in Southeast Asia as a whole.  His Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, c.1450-1680  (2 vols, Yale University Press, 1988-93) sought to give coherence to the whole of Southeast Asia as a major player in world history. Subsequently he edited a number of books which looked at problems in Southeast Asia as a whole or in broader comparisons.   Essential Outsiders (1997) compared the experience of Chinese in Southeast Asia with that of  Jews in Central Europe in the transition to capitalism and nation states.  The Last Stand of Asian Autonomies (1997) looked at the ways in which states and societies in Southeast Asia and Korea coped with the pressures of modernity in the century before they were overcome by colonial powers.  Asian Freedoms considered how far the idea of freedom was indigenous to different Asian intellectual traditions.

Anthony Reid was one of the founders of the Asian Studies Association of Australia in 1976, and edited its first newsletter and Publications series.  He became President of that Association in 1997-98, in which role he initiated a network for “Asian Studies in Asia”.  He is currently one of the two non-Asians on the initial Advisory Committee of the Asian Studies in Asia Fellowship Program being administered by the Institute for International Education. He also had a period as International Secretary for the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and led a delegation of that Academy to China in the aftermath of the Tien An Mien crisis.

In addition to his appointment in the History Department, he is Director of the new Center for Southeast Asian Studies at UCLA.

Last year (2002), he was awarded the Academic Prize of the Fukuoka Asian Culture Prizes.

Currently, he is on leave and will be for the whole of 2002-2003.

 

Principal research and teaching interests:
early modern Southeast Asia;
economic, demographic and social history;
modern Indonesia and Malaysia;
slavery and freedom;
ethnicity and identity in Southeast Asia;
Chinese diaspora studies.

MAJOR  BOOKS
As author:
The contest for North Sumatra: Atjeh, the Netherlands and Britain, 1858-1898. OUP, 1969.

The Indonesian National Revolution, 1945-1950. Longmans Australia, 1974.
-  reprinted by Greenwood Press, Westport, Conn., 1986.
-  Indonesian translation, 1996

The Blood of the People: Revolution and the End of Traditional Rule in Northern Sumatra.  Kuala Lumpur, OUP, 1979.  288 pp.
-  Indonesian translation 1986.

Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450-1680.  Vol.I: The Lands below the Winds. Yale University Press, 1988.
- Indonesian translation 1992; Japanese translation 1997.
- Southeast Asia edition,  Silkworm Books, 1995.

Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450-1680.  Vol.II: Expansion and Crisis. Yale University Press 1993.
- Southeast Asia edition,  Silkworm Books, 1995.

Charting the Shape of Early Modern Southeast Asia. Chiang Mai, Silkworm Books, 1999, 298 pp.  (North American and European rights with University of Washington Press, Seattle).

As editor:

(with Marr), Perceptions of the Past in Southeast Asia. Heinemann , 1979.
-  Indonesian translation 1983.

Slavery, Bondage and Dependency in Southeast Asia. Queensland UP/ St.Martin's, 1983.

Southeast Asia in the Early Modern Era: Trade, Power and Belief. Cornell University Press, 1993.

Witnesses to Sumatra: A Traveller's Anthology, OUP, 1994.

Sojourners and Settlers: Histories of Southeast Asia and the Chinese in Honour of Jennifer Cushman, 1996, 232pp..

Early Modern Indonesia. Editions Didier Millet, 1996.

The Last Stand of Asian Autonomies. Responses to Modernity in the Diverse States of Southeast Asia and Korea. Macmillan, 1997.

(with Chirot), Essential Outsiders: Southeast Asian Chinese and Central European Jews in the Modern Transformation of Southeast Asia and Central Europe.  Seattle, University of Washington Press, 1997

(with Kelly), Asian Freedoms: The Idea of Freedom in East and Southeast Asia. Cambridge University Press, 1998.

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