Some more ‘East Indies’ book reviews have come in

Photo courtesy of Rianti

Ian Burnet journeys through the East Indies, from Calcutta and Goa to Timor and Malacca, as far as Nagasaki, Canton and Hong Kong. Europe’s desires for goods from the East —- spices such as cloves and nutmeg, textiles, tea, opium, porcelain, gunpowder and more —- led to a fiercely contested ongoing battle between the Portuguese, the Dutch and the English for supremacy in the region’s trade routes. ‘East Indies’ charts the course of history over two centuries with sections devoted to the three major players with short chapters focusing on individual cities or ports. The rest is a managable, accessable and engaging history of this vast topic. Peppered with accounts by past travellers as well as evocative descriptions from the authors own travels, each port city is brought to life with descriptions of the sights, sounds and smells of places like Malacca, the crossroads of the East. This scholarly, intensively researched and well illustrated book will satisfy the taste buds of the armchair traveller as well as the world history buff.

— Meg Quinlisk, Inside History

The author is so renowned as a historian of the era that he leads exclusive sailing tours all over the Moluccas Islands of eastern Indonesia in traditional wooden sailing schooners. Burnet’s intrepid groups climb over 16th century Portuguese forts and tramp through clove and nutmeg plantations … I applaud the author’s efforts in acquiring publication rights for 70 high-resolution digital images of unusual historic illustrations and maps synchronised perfectly with the text … six years in the making, drawing on extensive and meticulous research on the ground and in the Far East collections of some of the world’s most pre-eminant libraries, archives and institutions, East Indies is packed with historical detail supported by a very servicable index.

— Bill Dalton, The Bali Advertiser

Please go to the author website http://www.ianburnetbooks.com to see more details