About the book, by C. Collin Davies from the Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies, University of London Vol. 7, No. 1 (1933):
This well-written and well-arranged work provides the student of Indian history with the first comprehensive account of Jesuit activities in Mughal India from Aquaviva’s mission in the reign of Akbar to the death at Lucknow in 1803 of Father Wendel, the ex-Jesuit. Although Sir Edward Maclagan offers an apology to his readers for the frequency with which they are introduced to the authorities on which his narrative is based, no such apology is necessary, for much of the value of this book lies in the excellent arrangement whereby future investigators may readily find references to information scattered throughout numerous publications.
Useful work on this subject has already been done by Father Hosten, a list of whose articles will be found in Appendix ii, and by Mr. C. J. Payne whose Akbar and the Jesuits and Jahangir and the Jesuits were published in 1926 and 1930 respectively. It is interesting to note that manu-script copies of several works in Persian written by the Jesuit missionaries form part of the Marsden collection in the School of Oriental Studies. These are described in considerable detail in Chapter xiv. When it is remembered that the Persian sources for the last ten years of Akbar’s reign are of little historical value, some idea will be obtained of the importance of the Jesuit reports for any reconstruction of the history of this period.