In the 1976 volume of History in Africa D.N. Beach published a brief but very interesting account of his visit to and findings in the Historical Archives of Goa (HAG). The objectives of Beach's visit to the Archives were precisely and rather narrowly delimited by the particular interests of this scholar and his university. He searched for and found a number of documents bearing on Shona history, which was at the center of his professional interests, and he identified some but by far not all the relevant collections. Beach's mission in view of his limited objectives and time restrictions can be rated successful. However, there are other interesting collections in the Goa archives of value to historians with interest in the territory of south-eastern and central Africa with all its peoples rather than one particular group. To historians with broader interests in the history of south-eastern, central, and even western Africa, as well as that of the Indian Ocean, the following background and description of the contents of the Historical Archives of Goa should be of considerable interest. The account is based on a two-week visit I made to the Archives in 1971 and my four months of research in the Archives in 1974.

Although barely known to the community of modern historians, the Historical Archives of Goa are probably the best existing archives in the non-western world and the records there cover a large area of the world over a period of four hundred and fifty years from the early sixteenth to the twentieth century. These documents represent primarily the history of the Portuguese State of India from 1515 to 1961, an area which covered far more than what was known in 1961 as Goa, Damão, and Dio. For much of four centuries the viceroyalty of Goa extended for all practical purposes from the Cape of Good Hope to Nagasaki and Timor. Thus the documents collected in Goa contain the history of many countries with which the Portuguese came into contact. Among them the most prominent are, in geographic order: Mozambique, Rhodesia, Zanzibar, Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia, the Arab countries, Persia, the Mughal Empire, the Marathas, the Deccani Sultanates, Goa, Vijayanagar, Ceylon, Bengal, Siam, Malaysia (Malacca), China, Japan, the Moluccas, and Timor. In addition there is a good deal of information on Angola and Brazil. The wide geographic coverage of the archival holdings is matched by the depth of the period covered. Although the Archives were instituted in 1595, the holdings extend further back into the sixteenth century and provide detailed evidence for study of diplomatic, religious, political, economic, and social history, unmatched in amount and quality in any archives in the given geographic area.