Bidspirit auction | STRANDES (Justus). THE PORTUGUESE Period

STRANDES (Justus). THE PORTUGUESE Period in East Africa by Justus Strandes. Nairobi. 1971. - STRANDES (Justus) THE PORTUGUESE Period in East Africa by Justus Strandes . Translated from the German by Jean F. Wallwork, B.A.; Edited, with Topographical Notes, by J.S. Kirkman. Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau, 1971. [14], 326 pp.: il.; 220 mm. A classic study on the Portuguese presence on the East African coast, authored by Justus Strandes, a merchant from Hamburg. The author was drawn to the subject by a long residence in East Africa, where the ruins of large buildings, traditionally attributed to the Portuguese period, led him to want to better understand the history of the region during that time and, in particular, its economic conditions, which previous histories (Guillain, Burton, Krapf, and Kersten) only addressed in a fragmentary way. The preface is dated Hamburg, November 1895, and the work appeared in German in 1899, under the title Die Portugiesenzeit von Deutsch- und Englisch-Ostafrika . Strandes bases his work on collections of documents and chronicles published in Lisbon and Goa, including the Archivo Portuguez-Oriental of JH da Cunha Rivara and the Archivo da colecção luso-indiana, as well as on copies of official documents from Portuguese archives obtained through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the German Embassy in Lisbon. He notes that the golden age of the Portuguese colonial empire is abundantly documented, but that the period of decline, from the point where the great chroniclers (João de Barros, Diogo do Couto and Faria y Sousa) end, is very little treated, and argues that Portuguese archives would allow for a much more complete study, especially from the point of view of economic history. The English translation, published in Nairobi by the East African Literature Bureau, was annotated by James Kirkman, an archaeologist at Fort Jesus in Mombasa. In the second edition, with a preface dated December 1967, the notes were updated to that year, in light of the work of Neville Chittick, Peter Garlake, AHJ Prins, and Brian Fagan (Carbon-14 dating), and Kirkman underlines its value as a bibliographical guide and as an indication of the areas in which research remained to be done. The volume also includes editor's notes to the author's preface, concerning E. Axelson's work in Portuguese archives. ⚑ Auto-translated via Google Translate