7 April, 2020
Our author, Anthony Reid draws on more than two decades of experience, devoting this volume “to the physical, material and social structures of Southeast Asia” during the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. He has labeled this period “Age of Commerce” in “the lands below the winds” so termed by the “Persians, Arabs and Malays because of the seasonal monsoons which carried shipping to it across the Indian Ocean”. This descriptive and factual presentation of the way of life of the region is enlightening as well entertaining vision into the lives of the people prior to the establishment of Dutch commerce in Southeast Asia.