S.K. Mhamai (ed.), *Mhamais of Goa: in the Network of Trade and Culture*, Panaji, 2004, pp. 248 + illustrations. Price: Rs.300/ The author is the retired Director of Goa Historical Archives and son of one of the oldest business families of Goa. The family has donated lands where today Dhempe college and the Sharda Mandir school function. Their ancestral house still stands just nextdoor to the old Adil Khan palace, the former Secretariat. I had the good fortune of discovering the family archival treasures that were hidden for over a century in the heart of the capital city and making them available to scholars in early 80s. Since then the Mhamai House role in Goa’s history has become internationally known through dozens of research studies and newspaper write-ups in India and abroad. Mhamais were acting as official customs assessors and provision suppliers to the Portuguese administration. They also acted as financiers, political informants and brokers for the French East India Company in India at the critical period of the Anglo-French rivalry in India and worldwide in the late 18th century. Mhamais were also carrying on their own country trade all over Asia (till China), and international trade as far as Portugal and Brazil. The family business records numbering hundreds of thousand manuscript papers in Marathi, Kanada, Portuguese, English and French are preserved at the Xavier Centre of Historical Research in Porvorim. They have been extensively used by scholars and quite a few Ph.D, theses have resulted from such research. The present volume has gathered together together 37 dispersed texts of various authors, in various languages and published in various places. Fundação Oriente in Goa has once again been a generous benefactor in making this publication financially viable. I felt myself honoured when invited by Dr. S.K. Mhamai to write the Foreword to this book. It is not often that one discovers such a treasure of one’s cultural heritage, and one of my greatest experiences of self-fulfilment as historian was to be accepted as family friend of Mhamais and gain their trust and confidence to the extent of their letting me take charge of their family archives. My being a Christian and a Jesuit at that time proved to be no barrier to the friendship which flowered and fructified into an enriched history of Goa through the Mhamai Kamat House. Teotonio R. de Souza
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