The New Cambridge History of India
The Portuguese in India
- The New Cambridge History of India. I.1: The Portuguese in India
M.N. Pearson - Cambridge University Press, 1987 – xx + 178pp - £17.50
The original Cambridge History of India published between 1922 and 1937 formulated a chronology for Indian history and described the administrative structure of Indian government. The New Cambridge History aims to draw together the mass of new research published over the last fifty years. But it does so in a way which breaks from the format laid down by F.W. Maitland and Lord Acton when they planned the very first Cambridge History, the Modern History, in the summer of 1896 and which has been followed ever since. Instead of large many-authored volumes, whose contributions are invariably uneven in quality and often out of date by the time of publication, the History is now to be published as a series of short (i.e. circa 70,000-word) volumes, each devoted to a separate theme and written by a single scholar. Thirty volumes are planned over the next five years.