Anthony John Stanhope Reid—known to friends, students, and colleagues simply as Tony—passed away on Sunday, 8 June 2025, in Canberra. It was a quiet Sunday, typically devoted to church and reflection with his wife, Helen, his lifelong partner in both scholarship and life. A month earlier, I had an unexpected encounter with Tony in the coffee queue at Canberra Hospital after his oncology consultation. Sitting under the crisp late spring sun, we spoke not about illness but about Helen. “I just want to make sure Helen is taken care of,” he said quietly, deeply concerned she might outlive him.

Tony Reid’s academic journey began at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, where he was actively involved in the Student Christian Movement. From this early context emerged a progressive intellectual orientation grounded in ideals of social justice and egalitarianism. Unlike many of his contemporaries who focused on Europe or North America, Reid turned decisively toward Southeast Asia—then a marginal region in global scholarship. His aim was not merely to study Southeast Asia but to rewrite its history from within, challenging Eurocentric paradigms and colonial epistemologies. He consistently treated the region not as an object of Western theory but as a generator of knowledge in its own right.

This epistemological reorientation found its fullest expression in his 1990 magnum opus, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450–1680. In this two-volume work, Reid reconceptualised Southeast Asia as a dynamic and interconnected maritime world, linked by monsoon winds, port cities, commercial exchanges, and religious movements. Rejecting nationalist and colonial historiographies that fragmented the region, he demonstrated that long before European imperialism, Southeast Asia was part of a cosmopolitan and global historical continuum. Through the use of travel accounts, commercial records, and ethnographic detail, Reid uncovered a richly textured world of cultural and economic interdependence.

Methodologically, Reid was committed to writing history from below. He foregrounded everyday life, material culture, environment, and popular religious practices. His use of early European travel writings and colonial documents was both critical and ethnographic: rather than taking these as objective records, he treated them as refracted lenses through which indigenous societies could be glimpsed—biases and all. In addition, Reid employed economic data such as commodity prices and export statistics to delineate historical turning points, most notably the 17th-century crisis that marked the decline of Southeast Asia’s “Age of Commerce”. His scepticism toward grand, imported theories led him to build grounded historical periodisations based on regional dynamics.

Although trained within European historiographical traditions, Reid’s ethical and intellectual allegiances were with the marginalized: women, laborers, peasants, diasporic Chinese communities, and adherents of local spiritual traditions. From his doctoral work on anti-colonial resistance in Aceh, completed at Cambridge, to his later studies on Indonesia’s revolution, Reid consistently approached history as a field shaped by the struggles and aspirations of ordinary people. A pivotal moment in this orientation came during his 1966 research trip to Sumatra, where he encountered firsthand the revolutionary fervor and suffering of the local populace. This encounter deeply influenced his 1979 book The Blood of the People, where Reid argued that the 1945–46 Indonesian revolution in Aceh and East Sumatra was a mass social uprising, not merely a political transition orchestrated by elites.

For Reid, revolution was not just a national event but a profound social rupture with transformative potential. In 2009, he provocatively argued in his book Imperial Alchemy: Nationalism and Political Identity in Southeast Asia that “Indonesia’s unification as a centralized nation-state (not to mention China’s) would have been impossible without it.” Reid framed revolution as the crucible in which new national legitimacies were forged, particularly in the decolonising world of the mid-20th century. Yet he also acknowledged its paradoxes. As he observed in 2011 in To Nation by Revolution: Indonesia in the 20^th Century, post-revolutionary states often invoked revolutionary rhetoric to suppress pluralism and dissent: “Revolution did not deliver all it promised, but it opened up possibilities that were once unthinkable.” For Reid, revolution was both emancipatory and wounding, and its unfinished legacies demanded ongoing critical reflection.

Equally significant was Reid’s institutional legacy. He was not only a prolific scholar but a builder of scholarly communities. At UCLA, he founded the Southeast Asia Center, and later became the founding director of the Asia Research Institute (ARI) at the National University of Singapore. ARI was envisioned as an inclusive intellectual space, deliberately interdisciplinary and intergenerational, designed to encourage critical dialogue across national and theoretical boundaries. For Reid, it was also a site of epistemic experimentation: “ARI is a place where you can see whether your theories make sense from an Asian perspective. But not ruling somebody out just because they don’t know enough about Asia,” he once said. In a field often marked by intellectual gatekeeping, ARI under Reid’s leadership became a rare space of openness and intellectual hospitality.

Hundreds of young scholars benefitted from Reid’s mentorship. He was never a didactic supervisor but rather an empathetic and generous intellectual interlocutor. He would read long drafts by emerging researchers and offer incisive yet encouraging feedback. He always had time for a thoughtful conversation, whether between academic panels or after a spirited game of tennis. He listened carefully, not to interrogate, but to understand. Above all, Reid remained committed to nurturing a new generation of Southeast Asian scholars—those who would write with intellectual freedom, grounded empathy, and regional insight.

With his passing, Southeast Asian studies has lost one of its most compelling voices. But Reid’s legacy—his commitment to bottom-up history, to intellectual integrity, and to the dignity of marginalised voices—will continue to shape the field for decades to come. His work reminds us that history is not a tool of power but a space for questioning, understanding, and healing. For Anthony Reid, truth-telling about the past was not a threat to the nation but the foundation of its maturity. In this spirit, he remains a guiding light for scholars committed to writing Southeast Asia from within.

Farewell, Tony.

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