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How Taiwan became Chinese: Dutch, Spanish, and Han Colonization in the Seventeenth Century /

Review Date:

28 Feb 2010

In this book, Tonio Andrade tells the story of a wild and uncultivated island originally inhabited by aboriginal hunters and traders.

A Nation Upon the Ocean Sea: Portugal's Atlantic Diaspora and the Crisis of the Spanish Empire, 1492-1640 / Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert

Review Date:

31 Mar 2009

In a seminal article on Portuguese merchants published 35 years ago (1), David Grant Smith suggested (on p. 247) that emigrants from Madeira ‘constituted a sort of gentile Diaspora’, highlighting how family ties and friendships originating on this small Portuguese Atlantic island ‘endured and formed the basis for a network of commercial relationships’.

The Dutch Slave Trade 1500-1850 / P. C. Emmer

Review Date:

1 Oct 2006

This is a short book on what turns out to be a rather bigger subject than might have been expected from the title; not because the Dutch slave trade was so important, but because Emmer uses it as an entry to a wide range of issues concerning the Atlantic slave trade in general and its historiography.