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REID, Anthony
Visiting Research Fellow
(Term: August 1, 2009 - Junuary 31, 2010)
Area Studies I
Pushing the frontiers of Southeast Asian History

Research Interests

Always an historian of Southeast Asia, my interests have moved from political/diplomatic history, particularly in understanding the nature of nationalism and revolution, to economic and social history. Without losing the politics, I have over the last 20 years tried at least to correct the balance by exploring social changes that affected peoples’ lives profoundly without necessarily being in the sphere of the state. Some fieldwork among stateless peoples, particularly the Batak of Sumatra and the Kadazan/Dusun of Borneo, has led to an increasing interest in how to correct their omission from history as we typically tell it in a state-centric way. The chief task at CSEAS, therefore, is to construct a History of Southeast Asia that gives the states of the region no more than their due.

Academic Career

My formal career began and ended in the Southeast Asian region. The first job was teaching history at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur (1965-70), and the last establishing a new research institute, the Asia Research Institute of the National University of Singapore (founding Director, 2002-7). In between I was mostly at the Research School of Pacific & Asian Studies of the Australian National University in Canberra (1970-99), to which I returned in 2009 as Emeritus Profesor and Visiting Fellow. I also had a period teaching history and establishing a Center for Southeast Asian Studies at UCLA (1999-2002), and visiting assignments at Yale, Auckland, Makasar, Paris, Oxford and Cambridge. I was awarded the Fukuoka Asian Culture prize in 2002, largely (I believe) for my Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, my most widely read and translated work (Indonesian, Japanese, Thai, and this year Chinese).

Publications

1. * Principal books *

1. Imperial Alchemy: Nationalism and Political Identity in Southeast Asia (Cambridge U.P., 2009)

1. An Indonesian Frontier: Acehnese and other histories of Sumatra (NUS Press, 2004)

1. Charting the Shape of Early Modern Southeast Asia (Silkworm, 1999)

1. Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450-1680 (2 vols. Yale U.P., 1988-93)

1. The Blood of the People: Revolution and the End of Traditional Rule in Northern Sumatra (OUP, 1979)

1. The Indonesian National Revolution, 1945-1950 (Heinemann, 1974)

1. The Contest for North Sumatra: Atjeh, the Netherlands and Britain, 1858-1898 (Oxford U.P., 1969)

1. * Editing or Co-editing books *

1. Negotiating Asymmetry: China’s Place in Asia ( NUS Press, 2009)

1. Chinese Diaspora in the Pacific [Selected readings] (Ashgate, 2008)

1. Islamic Legitimacy in a Plural Asia (Routledge, 2007)

1. Viet Nam: Borderless Histories ( University of Wisconsin Press, 2006)

1. Verandah of Violence: The Historical Background of the Aceh Problem (NUS Press, 2006)

1. Southeast Asian Studies: Pacific Perspectives (Arizona State U., Centre for SE A Studies, 2003)

1. Asian Freedoms: The Idea of Freedom in East and Southeast Asia (Cambridge U.P., 1998)

1. Essential Outsiders: Chinese and Jews in the Modern Transformation of Southeast Asia and Central Europe (University of Washington Press, 1997)

1. Sojourners and Settlers: Histories of Southeast Asia and the Chinese (Allen & Unwin, 1996)

1. Southeast Asia in the Early Modern Era: Trade, Power and Belief (Cornell U.P., 1993)

1. The Japanese Experience in Indonesia: Selected Memoirs of 1942 -1945 (Ohio University Center for Inter¬national Studies, 1986)

1. Slavery, Bondage and Dependency in Southeast Asia (Queensland U. P., 1983)

1. Perceptions of the Past in Southeast Asia (Heinemann 1979)

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