Were it not for such help from the Italian historian Marco Spallanzani, one of my earliest published essays – on the Florentine merchant Piero di Andrea Strozzi in the Indian Ocean – would not have been written when it was (Subrahmanyam 1987). One had to depend on the goodwill of one’s colleagues in more privileged locations, who would periodically photocopy and mail key articles or chapters from books. Access to books and archival materials was far more difficult indeed, I can think of few people who in 1990 would have imagined that one could consult whole series from Lisbon’s Torre do Tombo or The Hague’s Nationaal Archief in a digitized version from the comfort of one’s home.Ģ Since the book was largely written in Delhi, these problems of access were even more acute for Delhi’s main libraries for my purposes – those of the University of Delhi and the Jesuits’ Vidya Jyoti – did not possess copies of even many essential modern works.
Many aspects of historiography that younger scholars may take for granted today were anything but obvious then. The world was a rather different place, after all, in around 1990 than it is today. Roughly thirty years on from the time of its writing, it possibly requires some analysis but also some explanation, concerning the circumstances of and motivation for its birth as a book. The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500-1700 was first published by Longman in 1993, but written between 19.
1 The purpose of this short essay is to look back and revisit a book from three decades ago, but which is still in print in at least two languages (English and French).
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