Europeans in India The Portuguese Part 5 Of Cruelty and Religion – The Indelible Connection

Canberra, 9 January 2023 The Arrogance of Ignorance Vasco da Gama was the first European to reach the western coast of India by sea direct from Europe. He had expected to find a ‘backward’ country that had to be ‘civilised’, since the Europeans of the 15th and 16th centuries illogically and erroneously assumed that their […]

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Europeans in India The Portuguese Part 4 Governance, Policies and Operations

Canberra, 5 January 2023 There are two viewpoints regarding the Portuguese attempt to establish a ‘State’ in the Indian sub-continent, headquartered at Goa. One, a sort of sweeping assessment, states that the defeat of the Arab coalition at Diu in 1509 by Almeida ended all threats to Portugal’s hegemony in the Indian Ocean region. The […]

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Europeans in India The Portuguese Part 3 A Viceroy and Three Governors Section I Francisco D’Almeida (1505-1509)

Canberra, 03 December 2022 ‘The Portuguese of the 16th and 17th centuries had nothing to teach the people of India except improved methods of killing people in war and the narrow feeling of bigotry in religion. Surely these were not matters of such importance as to make it necessary for Indians to feel grateful towards […]

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Europeans in India – The Portuguese Part 2 The Portuguese Vanguard

Canberra 19 November 2022 The Zamorin of Calicut welcomed the Portuguese in a friendly manner, as he was his custom with all merchants who came to trade at his port. He sent a local pilot to take the foreign ships to shelter from the fury of the on-coming South-West Monsoon rains. However, Vasco da Gama […]

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