According to that page "Terra preta soils are found mainly in the Brazilian Amazon, where Sombroek et al.[18] estimate that they cover at least 0.1 to 0.3%, or 6,300 to 18,900 square kilometres (2,400 to 7,300 sq mi) of low forested Amazonia;[1] but others estimate this surface at 10.0% or more (twice the area of Great Britain).[12][19]
Terra preta exists in small plots averaging 20 hectares (49 acres), but areas of almost 360 hectares (890 acres) have also been reported."
No of course not, rain forrests happen in any tropical environment. But that the diversity and resilence of the Amazon Rain Forest, specifically the Terra Preta islands is unique, and is a direct result of human intervention. That's what's so interesting and amazing to me about Terra Preta and why I feel it should not be brushed aside and reiterated whenever possible.
I think its a result of a good management of the forest. What if instead of cutting the trees we manage them to get a better forest? Like pruning and laying the wood in the soil to decompose faster and better, we can increase the speed of ecological succession a lot. What if for every hard good wood we cut we plant more so we can have even more later?
I've being learning and practicing this type of agriculture for 3 years, its incredible how the soil can improve without adding things from outside, like fertilizers, just seeds: http://vimeo.com/159262175
Also by eating raw fruits, the food we should eat the most, we act as a very powerful seed dispersal, where you through your food there is big chance for the seeds to germinate, its a mistake to get every trash together and treat them the same, by spreading rests of fruits and vegetables and just covering them with enough dried leaves to stop the smell you will plant easily thousands of trees every year with little effort.
Exactly!
There's a great book called Wisdom of the Native Americans [1] that curates a lot of the oral tradition that was only ever recorded during the first trials with the US government. Reading that book really gives a sense of the responsibility felt by the individuals to nature. It's easy to extrapolate from that book and these new studies that are coming out with the population sizes involved how a comparatively simple societal structure could give rise to such large ecosystem refinements that made such large populations possible and subsequently have given us so many of the foods and medicines we enjoy today. It truly is staggering.
There’s a book called American Holocaust by David Stannard which is just devastating to read. That’s where I first learned about the advanced civilizations which existed in the Americas before Columbus.
If we have accounts of massive villages criss crossing the Amazon from early Spanish explorers then why is the article saying we thought it was empty? We’re they not believed? Didn’t the Spanish return to the same place with conquistadors later to fill up all those gold ships? Even if everyone died of disease in between Spanish forays wouldn’t the second one have noted all the abandoned villages creating new folklore like the single abandoned Roanoke?
I'm an historian of the colonial Americas. I agree with the comment below about 1491 being a great guide to this question. The very short answer is that there was an active effort throughout the 19th and 20th centuries to establish a myth of an untouched wilderness that settlers "expanded into" rather than confronting the reality of conquest.
The longer answer involves the above, plus a lot of population demography and source analysis regarding the effects of "virgin soil" epidemics. Crosby's Ecological Imperialism is an excellent guide to that stuff. Even the very earliest European accounts of populations in the interior, like the expedition of de Soto, [1] are describing the aftermath of massive depopulation, since many diseases were spread by an advance guard of European domesticated animals before any Europeans actually showed up on the scene (or at least, any literate ones did).
I just read the book “1491” which covers a lot on this theme. Recommended. Short answer: it was always politicized, in various ways, for various ends. Most of those ways downplayed the size, scope and sophistication of native cultures.
I read "1491" and "1493" recently. The big take away for me was how the pre-European population successfully managed their environments in both North and South America. The environments that Europeans encountered were not so much wild and as they were managed. In North America fire was an important tool in managing forests. Something that BLM and the forest services have only recently come to understand, after hundreds of years.
Up to the end of sec. XVIII most Brazilians spoke a creole of portuguese and indian languages (mostly tupi-guarani) tipped more to the indian side.
Since most of written history is based on what the educated colonizers could write, and I would imagine they would not notice entire civilizations crumbling due to socioeconomical changes (due to urban living as a member of the elite, only really caring for the results of the extractivism), a lot of really important changes went by and we'll probably not ever know what happened.
Remember that most interaction between natives and colonizers would be solely for the purpose of extraction of resources (chronologically: slaves for sugar and pau-brasil, gold, rubber and up to this day, farming/cattle) and catholic conversion (with one interesting exception for the spanish missions in the south, which even sided with the natives in wars [0]). I would not imagine these interactions to be performed with any considerations to understanding these people, and those who did would probably not even be able to read [1].
If you search the ancient history of Brazil (with luck you can span at most 3 centuries) you'll find plenty of foreign adventurers and not many brazilians.
Most colonization of Brazil happened cronologically in the northeast, southwest, south and gradually expanding to the center into Minas Gerais [2]. Expansion to the north only happened massively at the end of the XIX century for rubber extraction. So I would imagine 4 centuries would be enough time for whole indigenous civilizations to disappear without anyone noticing.
My non-educated guess would be that the first serious brazillian researchers would just appear in the mid sec. XX [3], and this just on the center-west area bordering the north.
The short answer is that many written accounts aren't necessarily reliable--and we've come to understand (more recently) that many historians made things up if reality didn't conform to their world view. Actually, the "make things up" still continues to this day; most popular history books fall prey to this.
In the past 60ish years, we've started to make good strides in rebuilding our understanding of history based on firmer grounding of reliable facts and evidence, but where we lack reliable archaeological evidence to backstop our historical narratives, we still end up relying on plausible lies. South American archaeology is much less thoroughly explored than North American or European archaeology, so we've had less ability to revisit what we thought we knew. We are learning more, but this is very recent (21st century recent, far too new to really percolate into the popular history sphere).
If we're going to get pedantic, it's more accurate to say that both the Kingdoms of Spain and Portugal were dynastic possessions of the House of Hapsburg from 1580 to 1640. Hence why it's called a "joint monarchy" or "personal union" in English - Portugal was never folded into Spanish state control, it was just another hereditary claim of the Kings of Spain, like the Low Countries or Naples.
In terms of real-world impact in South America, based on the sources I've looked at, the joint monarchy was pretty negligible. Brazil was in many ways an independent state long before it actually split off from the Portuguese empire, anyway.
One of the triggering events for the independence of Brazil
was a 13 year period during the Napoleonic wars when the
Portuguese Crown and their court of ~15k people moved to Brazil just before Lisbon was invaded.
Elsewhere in this thread there is a discussion about Terra Preta (the local version of sustainable soil). Simple techniques like this have been used all over the world for thousands of years, from Eastern China, to the Steppes, to the cow-dung based agriculture in India.
I wonder if there is an analysis somewhere on how much land will be needed to completely move away from harsh, "chemical" based fertilizers to naturally occurring ways to replenish agricultural lands. We don't have to eat meat all the time and may be 7 billion people could be fed a decent, vegetarian, varied diet with the existing lands without the modern fertilizers?
On a side note to that point, have you tasted the difference between simple, unsalted German butters and the ones sold in NYC? Oh my god. You will never want to come to America on that basis alone. (Sorry, a bit of hyperbole there; there may be one or two other reasons to not go to the USA).
I clicked thinking it was a sci-fi piece about a future where historians inspect the remains of our current society. Amazon had grown to be so significant that the future generations regarded this whole period and all our cities as Amazon
If anyone is interested in seeing some neat artwork by a pre-Columbian era society, near the Tapajós river mentioned in the article, type "marajoara art" into Google Images. The same type of art is still being made in and around the capital city of Belém, specifically in the neighorhood of Icoaraci, in case anyone is traveling there.
On another note, what would have happened if humanity didn’t do a big disease swap back in the 1500’s. Could a flotilla of South American ships have showed up in Italy in the 1700’s and caused massive death across the Old World?
There is a good book that deals with the question of why it was Europeans that colonized the Americas (and other places) and not the other way round: "Guns, Germs, and Steel" by Jared Diamond https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel
One of the main points is that the geography of Eurasia allowed easier transfer of staple crops and useful animals between cultures. More, higher quality food than elsewhere allowed a better division of labor, and among other things it made it possible to send flotillas across the ocean.
(I should add that all the other points made in the book are also non-racist. There is nothing inherent in European humans that made them the explorers and colonizers; it was simply winning the geographic lottery.)
The central thesis of Guns, Germs, and Steel doesn't hold up that well when you compare it to facts. One point to make is that maize was very readily adopted by North American culture to a strong degree (it took historians a while to realize that North Americans had in fact developed agriculture independently of Mesoamerica). By contrast, there was no major transfer of crops along the Eurasian interior between the independent agricultural discoveries in Mesopotamia and China.
Another thing to point out: the American staple of maize is very nearly a complete provider of essential nutrients (just add beans), which cannot be said for Eurasian crops. And maize is the highest caloric yield crop, followed by potatoes. As 1491 points out, when the Mesoamericans faced the Spaniards, the Spaniards were probably suffering from lifelong malnutrition... and the Aztecs weren't.
The evidence is, in fact, that Mesoamerica in particular won the agricultural lottery, meaning that Eurasian supremacy cannot be based on agricultural superiority.
It's been a while, so I don't remember the details. But he does go on about domesticated animals that are useful in agriculture for tilling fields (mainly oxen, horses as well), and that they enable not just being well-fed, but achieving a large surplus.
He also goes on about how there were no large animals to be domesticated, completely ignoring the bison, and basically just saying the llama and alpaca don't count.
Llama and alpaca really don't count. They are much smaller and much weaker than cattle. You can breed them to be bigger, but there may be limits to that; there may also be a path dependence to it, in that they started in one economic niche and there was no reason for a concerted effort over dozens or hundreds of generations to make them stronger.
Bison are much more problematic IMO for Diamond. The most I've seen on them is that they are surlier than cattle. But it's not like aurochs were cuddly fur friends in the beginning either.
> They are much smaller and much weaker than cattle.
Same with Donkeys.
Totally agree w/ Bison.
edit: It is worth considering the maximum extent of the Inca Empire roughly coincided with the greatest distribution of alpacas and llamas in Pre-Hispanic America, so I think they had a major influence.
I think you treat his thesis in a too m literal sense. He is speaking of broad patterns. There will of course always be various other factors playing a part. If you look at several areas of the world his ideas seem to stack up quite well. The lack of animal domestication in the Americas and its consequences seem like a strong point to me. He also offers a plausible explanation why there was so little domestication.
If you read his latter books, Diamond makes it quite clear that he really does believe that the environmental situation of a culture is the most important factor in its successes and failures. (Collapse is especially egregious in this regard).
One of the main problems of Guns, Germs, and Steel is that it ignores a lot of evidence that is challenging to its thesis. To be fair, some of that evidence wasn't available when the book was first written, but Diamond's more recent comments indicate that he still believes in now-discredited theories (such as Clovis-first peopling of the Americas), and some pieces of evidence are fairly obviously wrong even when he wrote it (such as the fact that most latitudes don't actually have climactic continuity, and the ones that do involve civilizations that were "backwards" for most of history, such as the steppe nomads).
Moreover, Diamond argues that the reason that Native Americans were largely killed due to disease rather than Europeans was because of the much broader range of domesticated animals in Eurasia. Most of these pandemic diseases hopped from livestock to humans and were able to evolve into especially virulent forms due to the high population density. The Americas didn't have the range of animals that could be domesticated, (or the range of plants that could support the high population densities of Eurasia) so similar diseases never evolved there.
> or the range of plants that could support the high population densities of Eurasia
A bit entertaining, because maize (corn) and potatoes come from the Americas, and were adopted over much of Europe (and in northern China) because they were needed to support high population densities.
I'm not an expert, but the argument that Diamond made was that by 1492, every animal on the planet that could be domesticated had already been. It takes a very special combination of traits to make it possible to domesticate an animal and the vast majority of large mammal species do not possess those traits. Bison, for instance, have never been domesticated, nor have deer, even in modern times.
> domesticated animals that are useful in agriculture for tilling fields
One key trait that Diamond mentions is whether a species
is susceptible to dominance - horses evolved with a herd
dominance order, zebra did not; thus horses can be domesticated and put to the cart or plow, while zebra cannot
(modulo a few feral zebra which have been tamed & trained).
The book is well worth reading, and contains a great deal
of content which the margin of this reply is too small to
contain.
I've read the book.
And afterwards I felt very compelled to believe what he had to say, but overtime, more and more examples start pointing to an over simplification of what is possible.
Horses may have herd dominance, but what about the ox? or the donkey? or the water buffalo? or the yak?
There is another great one called 1491: before coloumbus or something, that describes a lot of what the place was like before, it also shows many geoglpyhs.
"Any omnivores better be happy eating whatever[1] and better be super worth it[2]."
1: Narration over pigs in a pen.
2: Narration over a dog pulling a human on a skateboard.
Cats... aren't fully domesticated (well, there's debate). I don't remember the source, but I do remember one study looked at how well dogs and cats dealt with life when humans were removed from the equation. IIRC, dogs are iffy. Sometimes they do okay, but a lot of their behaviors have evolved for cohabitation with humans, so don't work as well when humans are removed and a pack functions purely with dogs. Cats have much less problems, and it was claimed this was because of their only partial domestication.
Another way of looking at it is that being a pet does not infer domestication. I can have a pet rat, rabbit, hamster or one of many different species of bird. That doesn't mean that species is domesticated (it may have a natural timidness that lends itself well to being a pet, at least more than an aggressive animal might). That's not to same some level of domestication may not have been achieved with some breeds of those animals (e.g. rabbits).
Please don't recommend this book. Jared Diamond, while an excellent writer and a solid ornithologist, is a crackpot historian. There's no other word for someone who ignores a couple centuries of work on the question at hand (the influence of geography on history) that would invalidate his ideas and brutally cherry picks his data to match his thesis.
The reason the book is derided as racist is exactly that it tries to generate a mechanistic inevitability for European dominance, the facts be damned.
How can that be racist? What is the alternative non-racist way?
I can only see one alternative and that is “luck”. Luck however os a pretty shitty explanation for anything.
If you rule out luck or geography as reasons for European supremacy then the only thing left is biology, which would most definitly be the MOST racist explanation.
If it were an accurate mechanistic inevitability, then it wouldn't be racist. Constructing an inaccurate one to justify the current distribution of wealth and power is a racist act.
Now, luck and other alternative causes.
Any process in history on the scale of western European dominance is necessarily a sample of one, so describing a sequence of events is the only way to work with it. Whether that sequence of events seems lucky or not is irrelevant. Indeed, a "lucky" confluence of many factors is often required for a particular large scale shift to occur.
The only time you can talk about luck or chance usefully in history is when you have many similar situations, and a few of them come out quite differently for some reason. Empirically, we say that those are "less likely," but that is a way of summarizing things.
And you are leaving aside culture. If we accept that the general set of behaviors and approaches of a group differs from other groups, then that's a vital component of any historical description or explanation. Why, when the Maori obtained firearms, was one of their first acts to go massacre a nearby island's population, while when the Hawaiians got them, the result was a war of unification? Any explanation of that is going to involve cultural differences.
How western Europe went from being a backwater with, as Jared Diamond would put it, less "cargo" than much of the rest of the world up to the 15th century to having more is very complicated, and much of it involves culture.
> Constructing an inaccurate one to justify the current distribution of wealth and power is a racist act.
Good thing it doesn't try to justify anything.
> Why, when the Maori obtained firearms, was one of their first acts to go massacre a nearby island's population, while when the Hawaiians got them, the result was a war of unification?
All I know about that "war of unification" is what I just read on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unification_of_Hawaii, but "the introduction of European weapons gave some Ali'i an advantage over others, and they began aggressively taking over their neighbors" sounds pretty much the same as "go massacre a nearby island's population".
What's the difference you are trying to construct between these two cases of people going out and killing their neighbors?
You're right. Justify is not the right term. Explain the existence of. But mechanistic inevitability is considered justification in our culture for accepting what is and moving on. We don't inveigh against the injustice of not being able to levitate out of our seats when we wish.
For Polynesia, the difference is that in one case they used force to impose a political structure on the population. In the other they completely wiped out the population.
Well, for starters, the book sets out to explain how Europe conquered the world by describing the superiority of Eurasian agriculture. Which misses the mark by failing to explain how the consistently poorest, least advanced, and least populated portion of Eurasia conquered the consistently richest, most advanced, and most populated portions of the world.
Even the explanation of how the Old World conquered the New World falls flat, because (for example) the Spaniards could not have conquered Tenochtitlan were it not for their 20,000 Tlaxcala allies, and, even then, the battle was not a slam dunk.
The real answer is that the growth of political power tends to be on the basis of a transitory superiority in some regard (usually, but not exclusively, military weaponry). Europeans happened to have had their time to shine in the first era to make intercontinental empires possible. I guess you'd call that "luck," but that ignores the fact that there are deeper reinforcing situations in political, cultural, and socioeconomic spheres that cause small advantages to become big ones.
One in particular is that the rules of the universe are consistent, and can be modeled. The behavior of the model would then apply to what was being modeled.
This is the basis of nearly all scientific progress.
Other views of the universe are that everything is a special case and model results are therefore not applicable. Creationism is an example of such a viewpoint.
Are we saying that Europeans never discover the Americas or that there just isn't any transfer of disease?
The first is sort of implausible. As ship building techniques improve in Europe the ease of finding the Americas would tend to increase. Without Columbus the Portuguese were going to run into Brasil while trying to sail around Africa pretty soon. Without the Portuguese then northern European fishing fleets would pursue Cod into Nova Scotia at some point. Technological progress tends to build on itself so bootstrapping from what were similar to bronze age city states without the bronze to ocean crossing flotillas would probably take closer to 2,000 than 200 years.
If we just remove disease then colonialism proceeds differently and more slowly but still proceeds. Agricultural settlers have a tendency to push back hunter gatherers everywhere for population density reasons and I think that would be true of Europeans wanting to start farms in the colder parts of North and South America just as it was in Russia's expansion east across the continent or anywhere else. Hungry people living in Malthusian conditions are almost invariably assholes to people who are different from them.
Without the introduction of malaria in particular there's a much denser settlement in many parts of the Americas. Influenza killed off a large proportion of the native inhabitants across the Americas but often they recovered their numbers if Europeans didn't move in. The introduction of Malaria essentially made large scale agricultural civilization impossible in large swaths of the US South, Mexico, the Caribbean and the Amazon basin except for people who had developed a partial immunity by living in areas suffering from that disease for many generations. People talk about the people of Jamestown starving because they were lazy or looking for gold but really it was mostly because they were suffering from "Tertian Fever" and unable to work. The native Virginians were suffering in the same way but sadly didn't leave written records. Malaria was eventually eliminated in the US in the early 20th century.
I can't find a good historical online map of malaria but it more or less corresponds to the current range of the Ae. aegypti mosquito.
I expect that there would still be colonialism but that it would look a lot more like colonialism in South Asia, Indonesia, and the Philippines - happening later and incompletely.
Right, most certainly weren't. I should have been clearer when I talked about European settlers moving into the coldest parts of the Americas, IIRC there wasn't widespread farming there.
I'm not sure about the general answer but in the US it was finally eliminated in public works projects during the Great Depression.
There aren't all that many people of European decent that are living in the coldest parts of the Americas. At least that's what I noticed when visiting the Northwest Territories and Nunavut.
Unless you're talking about somewhere farther south? I know the Huron who were based around present day Toronto were almost strictly farmers.
Europeans were superior technologically in a number of relevant fields, from navigation to metalurgy, that were directly impacting their warfare effectiveness. The diseases just made the conquest far quicker and more importantly cheap, both in pecuniary and human terms.
Europeans also had writing, which enabled military leaders to benefit from a thousand years of military history.
Consider that an organized Roman legion could (and did) defeat barbarian hordes, equally armed, ten times their size. That's what strategy and tactics will do.
from your link: "More recent scholarly works mostly agree that the armies were similarly sized"
Since that battle occurred fairly late (378 AD) it wouldn't be in the least surprising that the barbarian "hordes" had learned how to fight in a more coordinated, tactical manner than a mob rushing the legions.
And yet they didn't accomplish these things in other areas. Africa, and a lot of south east asia for instance are not populated by huge swaths of people of European descent.
Based on Guns, Germs and Steel, Europeans had so many terrible diseases because of the close proximity to animals that carried the ancestors of those diseases: pigs, cows, sheep, chickens and because they spread those diseases around much easier due to the geography. Native American (hemisphere) didn't have the animals to do the same thing (just some native turkies and ground mammals I think).
If the first Native American ship had shown up in Europe and then gone home, the exact same diseases would have done the exact same thing.
Orson Scott Card wrote a decent but weird scifi book on this premise called "Pastwatch: The redemption of Christopher Columbus." It contains a really graphic description of how a time traveling character convinces the Mayans to trust him by pulling spikes out of his penis. Weird but interesting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pastwatch:_The_Redemption_of_C...
If the Americans had been immune to the old world diseases, the Americas would most likely not have been colonized, and would have been full and equal players in world history ever since.
That seems like too much of a simplification. Neither India nor China were especially vulnerable to European diseases yet they still came to be dominated.
Yeah, but that was centuries later, and probably in part due to the riches gained in the New World.
China especially was only dominated well into the late 1800s. You can see that more as a symptom of Chinese decline. Note that Japan made the transformation to modernity quite well.
But you're of course right in that we'll never know what would have happened. The Americas were way behind in military technology, but they could have caught up in a generation or two, with huge amounts of gold and other riches to trade.
The "great disease swap" is a myth. By far the greatest cause of the destruction of indigenous American cultures was intentional actions by European settlers: massacres, war, starvation, displacement, kidnappings, alcoholism, and economic dependency.
Disease also played a role (although in many cases it was spread intentionally to accelerate depopulation or help win a war), but in modern narratives that role has been enormously emphasized, allowing us descendants of settlers to conveniently avoid taking responsibility for the institutionalized genocide that is at the heart of our culture.
This is a strong assertion. I'd like to see a more complete argument for it. In a lot of cases what Europeans did would have been impossible without an initial spread of disease. For example, when Pizarro invaded Peru, he was preceded by a plague that upset the political order in a way that made it possible for him to insert himself into it. It's unlikely the Inca would have been as easily conquered (if at all) without that plague. Likewise, when the Plymouth colony settled in Massachusetts, they moved into the homes of recently deceased natives. Had the original natives been alive, they never would have been able to settle there. That's just a couple of examples and this whole thread is about civilizations that disappeared completely just prior to European colonization, too quickly for the Europeans to have done it through conquest.
> allowing us descendants of settlers to conveniently avoid taking responsibility for the institutionalized genocide that is at the heart of our culture.
This is a silly thing to say. European settlers obviously weren't angels, but conquest and colonization is a common thread through most civilizations worldwide, including pre-Columbian American civilizations. (Both the Inca and the Aztecs were empires after all.) The difference with European expansion was simply the scale of the process.
> This is a strong assertion. I'd like to see a more complete argument for it.
I understand. This came as a surprise to me too, and it took a lot of my own research before realizing how much the scientific consensus is changing in just a few years. This is covered at length by modern historians and geographers, who are revisiting the work of previous generations, and realizing that much of it is distorted by the political and ideological biases of the past centuries. As it turns out, a large share of history we take for granted is basically cargo-culting.
Here are a few pointers to get you started.
William M Denevan: The Pristine Myth. In this work Denevan acknowleges the role of disease, but highlights the many other causes of death which have been overlooked or intentionally downplayed in the past. Link: http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~alcoze/for398/class/pristinemyth.htm...
Sherburne F. Cook: The conflict between the California Indian and white civilization. Here Cook tallies up specific death numbers by cause in California. Spoiler alert: disease was not the main cause of death, neither in early conflicts with the Spanish, nor in later conflict with the US Army. (A reminder: the primary role of the US Army for a long time was killing Indians, another topic modern Americans are not too comfortable discussing). Link: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7ck1w556
Benjamin Keen: The White Legend Revisited. In this work Keen explains that historians "accept uncritically a fatalistic 'epidemic plus lack of acquired immunity' explanation for the shrinkage of Indian populations, without sufficient attention to the socioeconomic factors... which predisposed the natives to succumb to even slight infections." (spoiler alert: by socioeconomic factors, he means the adverse effects of war, colonization and the destruction of traditional lifestyle). Link: https://www.scribd.com/document/264650329/B-White-Legend-Rev...
And a few longer reads:
Ned Blackhawk. Violence Over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West.
David E. Stennard. American Holocaust: the Conquest of the New World.
Winona Laduke. The Militarization of Indian Country
> In a lot of cases what Europeans did would have been impossible without an initial spread of disease. For example, when Pizarro invaded Peru, he was preceded by a plague that upset the political order in a way that made it possible for him to insert himself into it. It's unlikely the Inca would have been as easily conquered (if at all) without that plague. Likewise, when the Plymouth colony settled in Massachusetts, they moved into the homes of recently deceased natives. Had the original natives been alive, they never would have been able to settle there. That's just a couple of examples and this whole thread is about civilizations that disappeared completely just prior to European colonization, too quickly for the Europeans to have done it through conquest.
This is a strong assertion. I'd like to see a more complete argument for it. :-)
More seriously, the way you present these facts is a good illustration of the problem I'm describing. For example, you are correct that the Plymouth colony found native colonies already weakened by disease spread by earlier traders. However, they did not just "move into the homes of recently deceased natives". They pressed their advantage and waged total war against the tribes, in several cases killing entire villages including women and children. Then they moved in. This is amply documented, but oddly absent from the popular narrative which we were tought in school.
So, as you can see, even when disease has played a role, the way that role is depicted is problematic, because it creates a narrative where violence is swept under the rug. You yourself just perpetuaded that narrative in your comment.
Pre-empting your request for more documentation, here is a quote from a participant in one of the massacres:
those that scaped the fire were slain with the sword, some hewed to pieces, others run through with their rapiers, so as they were quickly dispatched and very few escaped. It was conceived that they thus destroyed about 400 at this time. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire, and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent thereof, but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the prayers thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them. Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Of_Plymouth_Plantation
> > allowing us descendants of settlers to conveniently avoid taking responsibility for the institutionalized genocide that is at the heart of our culture.
> This is a silly thing to say. European settlers obviously weren't angels, but conquest and colonization is a common thread through most civilizations worldwide, including pre-Columbian American civilizations. (Both the Inca and the Aztecs were empires after all.) The difference with European expansion was simply the scale of the process.
You are engaging in whataboutism. What other cultures are guilty of is irrelevant, this isn't an innocence contest. My culture (descendant of the Europeans who colonized North America), which presumably is yours too, is guilty of not acknowledging the central role that institutionalized genocide played in our history. As long as we don't come to terms with that past, honestly and openly, we will be crippled as a society, and even worse we will be blind to the role of that past in modern problems. Do you really think our modern crisis, from gun violence to the resurgence of white supremacy, have nothing to do with our history of killing people to take their land, and building a political system celebrating those who managed to secure the most land in the process? To me it's obvious that there is a connection. By refusing to acknowledging where we came from, we are robbing ourselves of the chance to control where we go.
Thanks for sharing these good sources. I’m eager to read them and learn more.
I also recommend Empires of the Atlantic World by J.W. Elliot. Although the book is broad-ranging and not focused exclusively the causes of depopulation, it presents details of how Spain viewed inhabitants of the New World in the same way as it did those of territories it had recently conquered in Europe: as vassals who would provide the labour, while the conquerors sat at the top of the social hierarchy and pursued the consolidation of the conquest and extraction of resources.
From this perspective, the subsequent depopulation was not the intended goal of the conquerors, although they indeed caused it through disease, wars against resisting groups, and disasterous attempts at improving the agriculture system to fit European models.
> From this perspective, the subsequent depopulation was not the intended goal of the conquerors, although they indeed caused it through disease, wars against resisting groups, and disasterous attempts at improving the agriculture system to fit European models.
Depopulation might not have been the goal of the Spanish, but it was a very explicit goal - in fact the foundational goal - of Anglo-American settlers.
For example, in order to become a state, newly settled territories had to meet specific criteria which included a minimum ratio of settlers to native. That created powerful incentives to drive away natives by any means necessary.
The history of Tennessee is a brutal example of this, but there are (literally) dozens of examples to chose from.
That is also why, in the US independence war, most tribes that participated chose to side with the British Empire. They understood very well that between a distant empire focused on resource extraction on the one hand, and a fast-growing nation of settlers focused on land acquisition and ethnic cleansing on the other, it was in their interest to pick the lesser evil.
Thank you, sir. Well-stated, and appreciate the reading list.
One example. In the area I grew up in the US, millions of acres of virgin forest were stripped (but not cleanly) within a century. This expedient, wanton and careless destruction also largely destroyed the means of 'self-determination' for tens of thousands of natives - oftentimes forcing them into dependence on meagre handouts. Never mind the cultural disruption.
Hmm. Your first comment is a complaint that the reason people talk about disease with regard to the conquest of the New World is to let themselves off the hook for genecide and that disease killing of the natives was largely a myth. I don't think you've demonstrated that. In fact your first link counters your whole argument as I understand it:
Abstract. The myth persists that in 1492 the Americas were a sparsely populated wilderness, -a world of barely perceptible human disturbance.- There is substantial evidence, however, that the Native American landscape of the early sixteenth century was a humanized landscape almost everywhere. Populations were large. Forest composition had been modified, grasslands had been created, wildlife disrupted, and erosion was severe in places. Earthworks, roads, fields, and settlements were ubiquitous. With Indian depopulation in the wake of Old World disease, the environment recovered in many areas. A good argument can be made that the human presence was less visible in 1750 than it was in 1492.
I don't think that anybody here is arguing that violence against the natives Americans didn't happen. (The genocide in Argentina was particularly egregious.) The discussion is about the importance of disease in the initial phases of colonization. I think that it's pretty clear a large die off was a necessary precuser to colonization. It is part of why you don't see as much European colonization on other continents.
You can read The Conquest of the Inca by John Hemming for an account of how disease affected the Inca before the Spanish invaded.
You can also read just about any history of Plymouth Colony to know that the settlers found an empty harbor to settle in. Accounts of Plymouth Colony like yours frustrate me because you imply that the settlers had to massacre people in order make an initial settlement when the massacre you refer to happened seventeen years after the initial settlement and comes from an incident where natives for fought alongside settlers. This is because the Plymouth settlers were initially welcomed by local tribes hoping to use them as support against their enemies.
This is why I bring up the universality of violence and empire. Oftentimes when people talk about colonialism as something that was done to the natives, as if the natives had no agency or understanding of their own. It reads like a sort of benevolent racism but I think that what's really going on is the replacement of one oversimplification with another.
Violence is not just a part of European and a few other civilizations but a part of humanity generally. This is important to understand. You can't treat the conquest of the Americas like it was some sort of aberration or the result of something specific to European culture that can be rooted out. This is a broader condition of humanity generally. So no, I don't think that modern gun violence has anything more to do with the conquest of the Americas than it does with the conquest of Babylon by Assyria.
I appreciate the time you spent on your comment. Would you mind not indenting the block quote? People need to side-scroll to read it, which is particularly problematic on mobile. It's common on HN to use a ">" prefix and sometimes asterisks to italicize block quotes instead.
Sorry. I posted yesterday just before bed. Here's the quote in full:
"Abstract. The myth persists that in 1492 the Americas were a sparsely populated wilderness, -a world of barely perceptible human disturbance.- There is substantial evidence, however, that the Native American landscape of the early sixteenth century was a humanized landscape almost everywhere. Populations were large. Forest composition had been modified, grasslands had been created, wildlife disrupted, and erosion was severe in places. Earthworks, roads, fields, and settlements were ubiquitous. With Indian depopulation in the wake of Old World disease, the environment recovered in many areas. A good argument can be made that the human presence was less visible in 1750 than it was in 1492."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta