About the Book : Coastal Western India is a contribution to several areas of historical study. Most obviously, it lies in the area of Indo-Portuguese history, a field of research at present undergoing a renaissance. Secondly, this book contributes to another fast-growing area, that of maritime history. Finally, some of these studies should interest historians of India. Among the topics covered in this book are a survey of the Goa archives, an historiographical study of “corruption” and “corsairs” in the sixteenth century, analyses of the crowd in Portuguese India and of Goa as a “port city”, an investigation of the role of Indians in the Portuguese Indian economy, and a discussion of Indian seafarers. About Author : M.N. Pearson was born in New Zealand in 1941, and has B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Auckland. His Ph.D. (1971) is from the University of Michigan. From 1970 to 1975, he taught in the Departments of History and South Asian Regional Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Since 1975, he has been at the School of History, University of New South Wales, where he is a senior Lecturer. He has spent considerable time in western India, especially in Goa, Bombay and Baroda. Among his other publications are Merchants and Rulers in Gujarat: The Response to the Portuguese in the Sixteenth Century (University of California Press, and Munshiram Manoharlal, 1976), and (co-editor) The Age of Partnership: Europeans in Asia before Dominion (University Press of Hawaii, 1979). He is currently co-editing, with Ashin Das Gupta, a collection of essays to be called India and the Indian Ocean, 1500-1800