Translated from a doctoral dissertation (Portugueses e Malaios: Malaca e os sultanatos de Johor e Achem 1575–1619, published in 1999), this work by Paulo Jorge de Sousa Pinto is long overdue. The humble acknowledgement and location of his work in the survey of the subject field indicate an obvious gap and dearth of treatment in the area. The subject field is also, as is accurately observed by the author, except for scholars like Charles Boxer, Denys Lombard, Peter Borschberg, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Alfredo Botelho de Sousa, Luis Filipe Thomaz and Jorge M. dos Santos Alves, plagued by the inaccessibility of scholars working in either Dutch or Portuguese-based language to both these and the Malay languages (p. xxiii).
Specifically, Melaka during the Portuguese period, a point also observed by the author, is glaringly absent in Kernial Singh Sandhu and Paul Wheatley's edited magnum opus, Melaka: Transformation of a Malay capital, which looks at the Melaka sultanate, and then hops to ‘Melaka under the Dutch’, ‘Melaka under the British’ and other chronological periods down the line.
Sousa Pinto, while acknowledging his ‘lack of familiarity with Dutch and an insufficiency in Malay […] ventures to define the objectives and value of the book to be plugging the gap in the historiography of Melaka during the Portuguese period’, as well as to ‘enrich the Portuguese panorama of studies about Southeast Asia’. His intention is not always to present revelations, but to discuss approaches and problematic questions and freshly interpret materials already known (p. xxiii–xxiv).
A case in point of his approach to the reinterpretation of known materials is his nuanced perspective on the sociopolitical evolution of elite Malay groups in the Archipelago. Sousa Pinto sees the transformation of the two groups in this process — the elite, from administrative-political to mercantile-official roles — and the sultans, who became less rigidly constrained by adat — beginning as early as the sixteenth century (when the Portuguese conquered Melaka), as opposed to J. Kathirithamby-Wells and Barbara Andaya, who do not distinguish between the two processes and stress their maturation in the seventeenth century. Elsewhere Sousa Pinto combines a reading of the Portuguese sources on the Malay world (specifically, on the Johor sultanate), highlights and explains succinctly the genealogical problems and issues of the sultanate (p. 156–7). For somebody who professes unfamiliarity with the Malay language, Sousa Pinto's work certainly presents a clear explanation of the complex issues (although the author points out that a reliance on Portuguese sources could also deprive it of ‘a critique that […] should ideally be extended to the entire work’, p. 237).
On the Portuguese fort and defences during the Portuguese period, Sousa Pinto reveals the evolution of the fortress of Melaka (A. Formosa); for instance, that up till 1610, ‘Melaka continued to be a city unprotected on its inland side’ and how ‘the militarisation of Melaka's internal city space led to a disruption of civilian life; for example, the demolition of houses built over the fortified perimeter’ (p. 213–19).
Overall, appended with detailed genealogies of the sultanates of Johor and Aceh, two lists of the (Portuguese) official-appointees at Melaka and in Goa/India, maps, a useful glossary and an updated bibliography (one is curious though as to why John Villier's comprehensive treatment The Estado da Índia in Southeast Asia is not included nor engaged in discussion in the main narrative), Sousa Pinto's work is a valuable addition to the field of the history of Melaka in the early modern period.
