Anthony Reid (born 19 June 1939) is a New Zealand-born historian of Southeast Asia. His doctoral work at Cambridge University examined the contest for power in northern Sumatra, Indonesia in the late 19th century, and he extended this study into a book The Blood of the People on the national and social revolutions in that region 1945–49. He is most well known for his two volume book "Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce", developed during his time at the Research School of Pacific (and Asian) Studies, Australian National University in Canberra. His later work includes a return to Sumatra where he explored the historical basis for the separate identity of Aceh; interests in nationalism, Chinese diaspora and economic history, and latterly the relation between geology and deep history. Professor Reid taught Southeast Asian history at University of Malaya (1965–1970) and Australian National University (1970–1999). He became the founding director of the Southeast Asia Center, University of California, Los Angeles, 1999–2002, and then the founding director of Asia Research Institute (ARI) at the National University of Singapore (NUS), 2002–2007. He retired from NUS in 2009. Since then he has been based in Canberra as Professor (Emeritus) at the Australian National University. As a writer of fiction he styles himself Tony Reid. He is the son of John S. Reid, a New Zealand diplomat who held postings in Indonesia, Japan and Canada in the 1950s and 1960s.

Awards

Reid was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1987. He won the Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize in the category of academics in 2002. He was elected as a Corresponding Fellow at the prestigious British Academy on 17 July 2008.

List of major publications

Reid has also written a novel, Mataram, about 17th century Java depicting the experiences of Tom Hodges, a fictional English East India Company officer, who sets off from Banten in 1608 with his Javanese paramour to reach the mysterious inland kingdom of Mataram: