A distinguished historian of the Indian Ocean Barendse is author of the Arabian Seas: the Indian World of the Seventeenth Century and of the four volume Arabian Seas 1700-1763. He is at the IIAS to work on the publication, annotation and translation into English of the Descrição de todas as fortalezas do Estado da Índia written by the official chronicler and archivist of the Portuguese state in India António Bocarro with extensive revisions and statistical material added by its accountant general Pedro Baretto de Resende. An administrative and geographical manual commissioned and subsequently checked on accuracy by Viceroy Dom António de Noronha, Count of Linhares, in 1634 this is the final and crowning volume of one of the great monuments of European renaissance scholarship; the chronicle of Portuguese India: the Decadas da Ásia. As an exhaustive economic, geographical, political, demographic and administrative treatment of all Portuguese settlements there it is surely the most important single text on the Portuguese Empire in Asia and East Africa in the seventeenth century and arguably the most important single European text on Asia in that century too as the text is by no means merely confined to Portuguese matters.