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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 January 2009
The lack of an adequate work in English—or indeed in any other language—on the history of the Portuguese in Africa before the nineteenth century has long been felt by those interested in what is still, in many respects, the Dark Continent, in so far as its past is concerned. In Africa as in Asia, the Portuguese pioneered the expansion of Europe; and their accounts of the indigenous peoples whom they successively discovered will always be of value as showing the state of those peoples before they were affected by contact with white rule. The reactions of the Portuguese to the African environment, whether in Morocco, Guinea, the Congo, Zambesia, or in Abyssinia inevitably affected not only the inhabitants of those regions but set precedents which were followed to a greater or lesser degree by the other Europeans who came after them.
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