This volume is a tribute to the great service rendered to historiographical tradition by one of the most outstanding historians of our times, Prof. Dr. K.S. Mathew. His colleagues, friends, students and admirers all over the world have made use of this opportunity to express their solidarity with him by contributing scholarly articles, which make this volume a rich collection of research papers on Indo-European history, for which Prof. Mathew has spent his whole life-time and continues to do so. ‘The Portuguese’, ‘Indian Ocean’ and ‘European expansion’ form the three major thematic areas on which he concentrated his academic researches for more than three decades and hence, the felicitation volume has taken this wider thematic frame.