Jan Kieniewicz is a full professor at Warsaw University, where he earned a graduate degree and a PhD after studying under Fernand Braudel at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. He has authored some 20 books and 200 or so articles on the history of Portuguese trade in the Indian Ocean, the expansion of precolonial Europe, the economic and social history of Kerala in the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, colonialism in the modern era, Spanish-Polish relations, the theory of systems, and the comparative history of civilisations. His latest interest is the creation of environmental history. He served as a Polish ambassador in Spain and was awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of Isabella the Catholic.