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History Optional PYQ Master Pack · Model answer

Write a short essay on: “Significance of the arrival of the Portuguese in India.”

  • UPSC 2008
  • The Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Century: Political History

Vasco da Gama's landing near Calicut in May 1498, with three ships reportedly guided across the Arabian Sea by a Gujarati pilot, is conventionally treated as the opening of a new epoch in Asia's relations with Europe — not because it was Asia's first contact with the West, but because it inaugurated direct, unmediated European…

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What the full answer covers

  • The Break with the Old Red Sea–Mediterranean Trade Route
  • Political Impact: Real but Narrow
  • Commercial and Economic Reorientation
  • Technological and Military Transfer
  • Agricultural and Cultural Contributions

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