Melaka revisited

Reviewed publication:
Paulo Jorge de Sousa Pinto. 2012. The Portuguese and the Straits of Melaka 1575-1619; Power, Trade and Diplomacy. Singapore: NUS Press. xxx + 375 pages. ISBN: 9789971695705 (paperback)

Based on a wide range of unexplored contemporary Portuguese sources, this ambitious study aims to reconsider and to expound the Portuguese expansion at the heart of political, social and economic structures in Asia. In doing so, it expects to open new paths in the study of contact between civilisations that began at the end of the 15th century. This is all the more promising as the fog of ideologies and of the nagging aftermath of colonialism has, according to Pinto, been dispelled (xxii).

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