To borrow a phrase, the lack of Guns, Germs & Steel means the Native Americans would have lost the conflict inevitably. There’s a book idea in there somewhere.
For those who think the disease factor would have been insufficient – are you aware of the full scope of the impact of European diseases? Estimates of the death rates of native populations are contentious, but I have seen them run from 90% to 99%.
That’s 90% of the population killed off best case and before accounting for warfare and persecution. Once the contagion spread inland, entire cultures just vanished, like the Mississippi mound builders, without even meeting Europeans.
And consider for a moment that the new world probably was not nearly as populous to begin with, so it’s the smaller, technologically weaker side losing 90-99% of its strength before the contest begins.
To put that into military context, once conflict began, the Native Americans were already at a much worse population disparity than Nazi Germany was against its enemies at the height of World War II – and an almost indescribably weaker technological position. And Nazi Germany was utterly crushed and dismembered – well before taking 90% casualties, too. Heck, with technological parity they would have been swiftly exterminated once disease made the population differential that extreme. The underdog rarely wins in war, and this conflict took “underdog” to a whole new level.
But, as they say in the infomercials, that’s not all! That’s right, it was even worse for the natives for two additional reasons.
Firstly, cultural disruption. In many cases elders and leaders and knowledgeable community members were wiped out in the first run of European diseases, and ordinary adult community members soon followed. In cultures without writing, critical knowledge and organization are lost if too many individuals die suddenly, before the chance to train their successors. Many of the natives who struggled against the Europeans were all but cultural orphans, having lost both a certain amount of technology and their own history. Furthermore, after conflict began, many settled agricultural tribes were driven off their land and forced to become nomadic hunter-gatherers, which further depressed their populations and also made, well, anything but the daily struggle to keep eating all but impossible.
Secondly, written communication conferred more than just technological and organizational advantages on its European possessors. Jared Diamond makes this point cogently in Guns, Germs & Steel when discussing the Battle of Cajamarca. (Note: the Wikipedia article is execrably bad, and included only for a general outline of the circumstances. For instance, note the article says “At the signal to attack, the Spaniards unleashed gunfire at the vulnerable mass of Incas…” but note that the Spanish only had twelve single-shot muzzle-loading matchlock guns and there were 80,000 Incas present [7,000 warriors in immediate contact and the rest nearby.] Nobody “unleashes gunfire” from twelve single-shot weapons on 80,000 men.)
Diamond, noting that the Incan emperor Atahualpa had attained the throne after smallpox had killed the previous emperor, explains that the negotiations between Pizarro and Atahualpa came down to a matter of how much trust to extend and what experiences shaped the worldviews of the contenders. In this regard, Pizarro inherited thousands of years of written literature detailing betrayal, murder, greed, strategy, and warfare. Atahualpa had only his own life experiences, and had lost many potential advisers and mentors to disease. He was, unavoidably, a naif, essentially a completely raw yokel, going up against a vast, sophisticated history of conquest cynically aware of every human weakness. Because, essentially, Atahualpa had no history. Writing conveys much, much more than the formula for gunpowder.
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