Compare And Contrast Portugal And European Civilizations

Portugal is located on the continent of Europe, in a little area west of Spain along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea and Atlantic Ocean. The Indian Civilizations lived on the Indian Peninsula. The Indian peninsula is located north of the Indian Ocean, and east of Africa, west of China and south of Russia. The Brazilian Civilizations lived in modern-day Brazil, which is a large area of rainforest in eastern South America. The Inuit Civilization lived in what is today Greenland, a large island north of Canada.
In this paper, I will talk about three different civilizations that were visited by Portugal. All of the Portuguese explorers in this essay are from the timeframe in history called the “Age of Exploration”, a period of exploration by
The navigation of the Old World increased. It lasted from the early 1500s to the late 1700s. It started when Christopher Columbus sailed his ships to what he thought was “India”, but was actually the islands of the Bahamas.
The first few explorers, such as Columbus, claimed land for European countries out of the new territories, and they conflicted with the natives originally living there. Examples of peoples the explorers met are the Indians, Brazilians, Greenlandians, etc.3 The natives had different feelings about these “white newcomers”. Originally, most thought them as friendly. Boy, they would be wrong because the newcomers had little to no intention of cooperating with them in the long term, unless it was for trading purposes.4
The Age of Exploration is important because it was the first time people from Europe officially met people from North and South America. It was particularly important because trade flowed faster than before and many closed off civilizations became open5.There was also an extreme downside to this, meaning conquest could be easier and revolts were harder to manage between countries. This meant that cultures could be interchanged, but in most cases, Europeans took land for themselves and he cultures in that land, they deemed inferior to their own6. They met many kinds of people that they wanted to change, and ultimately, they changed their civilization.
Arab, Persian, and Indian pilots have been sailing the Indian Ocean many centuries, or even millennia before Da Gama was born19. The information of the sailing was passed down from generation to generation, to ensure minimal competition. That is one reason why there are few Indian maps from that time period, and multiple European maps from centuries later.
Most of the trading was not to the upper class, but marketed to the general everyday consumer. For example, the mass majority of textiles was sold not to the rich, but to the many middle-class and poor civilians.20 The international trade was managed, actually, by large-scale merchants that traded inside and outside of India.21
The high taxes was feeding the Indian economy, and many banjaras, or merchants, became rich on their own accord, and stayed rich. For example, one merchant called Abdul Ghafur sometimes conducted more trade than the ENTIRE EUROPEAN EAST INDIA COMPANY, for over ten years!22. Another example of this, is later, in the first half of the 17th century, Virji Vora, accumulated an estate of such eminence that, “...he was able to assert control over the entire Dutch East India Company”23. The banjaras also played a major role within the Indian economy by helping weave together much of the interior with the overseas trading system. The ‘typical’ Indian village (which Eurocentrism views as, “the epitome of subsistence and isolation”24)