I think it’s pretty well accepted that the European contact with the New World starting with Columbus was a massive genocidal catastrophe, wiping out millions, destroying cultures and societies, and generally being a massive blot on human history.
My question is… what’s a realistic best case for how it could have gone? Assuming that the basic logistics are the same, and that human nature is still human nature, what’s a path that the entire sordid story could have taken which would have ended up better for the New World inhabitants?
And please, no pie-in-the-sky idealistic answers like “well, the Europeans should have just seen that the continent was occupied and then just sailed away because that’s what virtuous people would do”. On the other hand, there might well be some key turning points where things were actually close to going another way… could the Aztecs or Incas reasonably have beaten the Spaniards if things had gone a little differently? Were there key turning points in North America where some-guy-who-wanted-to-deal-fairly-with-the-Indians got narrowly edged out by some-guy-who-didn’t?
Are there examples from history of somewhat similar contact scenarios that do NOT end up in genocide and cultural destruction?
If they hadn’t been a bunch of nut job Christians who devalued the lives of the native inhabitants simply because they hadn’t accepted Jesus as their personal savior, a lot of the bloodiness might have been averted.
So if the Americas had been colonized by Atheist humanists things might have gone a lot smoother.
But you don’t want pie in the sky ideas so I’ll have to think on this a bit more…
The best case is if there had been more contact before between Europe and the new world. The main thing that wiped out the native population was the Europeans germs, not their steel. So, had the folks in the new world had more immunity (and possibly access to other technology) then there would have been more parity between them, and the Europeans would have had to tread a bit lighter.
Sure…the Europeans didn’t completely wipe out the Chinese or Japanese, nor destroy their culture, though they did exploit both, and the contact certainly had a profound change on both Chinese and Japanese culture and society. I think one of the main reasons that the various cultures and civilizations in the new world came to a bad end was that they were initially crippled by European germs, and were so imbalanced by this that they never really recovered. It’s hard to recover when large portions of your population are dead AND you are at such a huge technological disadvantage. It was just too much for them, and it allowed the Europeans to dominate and destroy, rather than having to work with on some level as they did with the Chinese and Japanese.
Unless they met each other wearing bio-hazard suits I don’t see how to arrange contact without it turning into a disaster for the natives. Small Pox is passed on just as easily from a benevolent explorer of good will as it is from an greedy enslaver, and that’s what really wiped out the native populations.
The Genocidal thing was going to happen for the most part if only because more than 90% were wiped out by disease.
Beyond that, they had the same thing going that the Europeans had in the face of the Mongol invasion. That was that they had spent so long fighting and hating each other that they were not capable of recognizing that the new foe was more than a match for all of them combined and that the only thing that would save them was to join together to repel the invaders. The only thing that saved the Europeans was that the Khan died, the Mongols turned back to Mongolia to elect a new Khan, and never came back in force.
So instead of seeing this, the American tribes did the same thing we’ll do when faced with Aliens: Each tried to see these new outsiders as potential allies in their petty conflicts with each other instead of the complete game changer that they were.
Kinthalis, you have a naive view of human nature that thinks that it is religion that makes people devalue the “other” rather than that religion is a tool in service of the aspect of human nature that will do that no matter what. There is no reason to believe that a technologically superior atheist culture would have any better morality or ethics than a religious one, no more than there is to believe they would have less.
Unfortunately the only way to create a better outcome (ignoring those aspects of the genocidal outcome that were infectious disease exposure based) would require pie in the sky imaginations. It would have required an extant value system that viewed native peoples and cultures as having values worthy of understanding and of respecting even when incompletely understood. A means to trade profitably and sustainably and the ability of someone to make the case that such was a more long term profitable option than just taking over.
Either that or the native peoples somehow quickly developing a cohesive fighting force that raised the cost of invasion versus sustainable trade.
I’m leaning towards the earlier contact as a possible solution. It helps with the germs, and trade might have also brought about exchange of technology.
If the native population could effectively resists European invasion through it’s military, then the Europeans would have engaged in diplomacy.
I think it could have played out better had it played out sooner. E.g., both the ancient Phoenicians and Greeks were in the habit of planting colony-towns (independent from their founding, at least the Greek ones were) all around the Mediterranean. If they could have gotten out of the Mediterannean and started planting towns along the Atlantic coasts of Europe and Africa and the islands of the Atlantic, only a matter of time before somebody discovers America, on purpose or by getting blown off course. If that happens, the Europeans who arrive in America are not yet numerous enough to form a threat. Instead, they plant colony-towns on the American coast, and trade with the Indians (including trade, perhaps, for some of their neighbors as slaves, but not enough of them to destroy any Indian nation; and there’s no obvious profit in shipping slaves from America to Europe at this period anyway, there are quite enough slaves in Europe), and the Indians are no longer in isolation but get exposed to Old World culture and technology, and can gradually adopt elements of it at their leisure. Eventually some Indian nations will become, in their own ways, civilized, with cities and metallurgy and writing, much more so than the Aztecs and Incas and much sooner. Also, at this period – say, 300 BC or so – any diseases the Euros carry are probably far less virulent and dangerous-to-Indians than those carried by Columbus’ crew, etc. The Indians lose a few on initial contact, but have time to build up herd immunities.
And I’m not sure that the monotheistic and violent streak of religion of many of the settlers of the time weren’t worse than other philosophies might have been. They saw the heathens as less than human, precisely because their religion told them it was so.
I guess, it’s not necessarily true that some non religious peoples wouldn’t have thought the same thing simply because of their technological inferiority. I grant you that.
An alt-history that ended with better outcomes for natives is one in which the Viking explorations had been more successful and had lead to a much earlier introduction of european diseases and technology, before the vikings faded from the scene, leaving the natives already acclimatized to both before the main european invasions showed up a few hundred years later.
Edit: in line with what the previous posters have said.
I’m kind of flabbergasted by the amount of death the old world germs brought to the natives.
It’s not like they lived in cities. How the heck did disease spread so quickly? We’re talking like a 90% reduction in some places, in just a few decades. I always thought of the native peoples as living fairly isolated lives.
But that’s exactly why there was a 100+ year gap between Columbus and the first English colonies. North America was occupied, and it was only after the native societies were ravaged by disease that the English moved in.
[QUOTE=Kinthalis]
It’s not like they lived in cities.
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Sure they lived in cities or large towns. The tribes that were more nomadic were what was basically left after European disease had wiped out most of the large concentrated population centers on the East Coast and in Central and South America. In those more heavily concentrated population centers European disease ran like wild fire, decimating (hell, more than decimating, since that would only be 1 in 10, instead of 8 or 9 out of 10).
This is not quite right. For the intellectuals and priests ( not always synonymous ), it was far more of a “White Man’s Burden” issue - New World heathens weren’t less than human, they were misguided savage humans that needed to be converted and made into good citizens for the sakes of their immortal souls. There was certainly bigotry by the tanker-load, but it sort of stood outside of or existed in spite of the strictly religious POV. Of course the end results were essentially the same, as the desire to conquer-so-as to-convert acted as a convenient cover for the adventurers who did the conquering to put their far more “practical” goals into effect.
I don’t think a better solution was possible. 90%+ die-off was inevitable once contact was made. Period. Maybe you can have the Spanish not be Catholic, but that really wouldn’t have helped much. The remnants of the natives would still be enslaved and abused. It is just the way things happened back then.
Spike: Oh! Someone put a stake in me. Xander: You got a lot of volunteers in here. Spike: I just can’t take all this mamby-pamby boo-hooing about the bloody Indians! You won! Alright? You came in and you killed them and you took their land. That’s what conquering nations do. It’s what Caesar did and he’s not going around saying “I came, I conquered, I feel really bad about it.” The history of the world is not people making friends - you had better weapons and you massacred them. End of story.
So again, assuming the infectious disease bit had not occurred … perhaps some earlier exposure led to immunity …
Why didn’t the Aztecs represent a bigger obstacle? Would a better leader than Moctezuma II have been able to not have the various tribes under his control and not but in the area not side against him and not been so freaked by horses and cannons, instead working to steal some and use them against the enemy as well?
How about just a minor alt-history? Cortes was not sent to invade; he was sent to initiate trade. Velázquez, governor of Cuba, allegedly had sent him and wanted to be the one to lead an invasion later (and thus get the glory). When Velázquez became suspicious that Cortes was indeed going to invade he tried to have him removed and replaced with Luis de Medina instead but he was killed by those loyal to Cortes before he got there.
What if that murder attempt had failed? Would that trade mission be enough exposure to give a heads up and to reduce some of the surprise of horses?
A survivor of a previous Spanish shipwreck, Gonzalo Guerrero, fought along side the natives in the Yucatan. What if he had the wisdom and foresight to do more than just fight along side his new family and was instead inspired to go to Moctezuma and indeed got his ear and helped prepare them for the invasion, demystify horses, and led some raids to steal some?
What if the Tlaxcallans, who had the Spanairds beat in the Yucatan, had not decided that it was better to ally with this force against the Aztecs, and killed them all instead?
I am no historian of this period and am taking all this off basic sources like Wikipedia, but it seems that there were many points that could have ended up leading to very different outcomes.
Another bigger alt-history: what would have happened if the infectious disease pandemic had gone the other way, some germ coming back to the Old World from the New that they had never seen before that caused mass die off?
