That may be true, but it’s also a very small island, to the point where there’s little reason to go there in the first place. The British did take over other areas in the islands, despite the threat of violence from the indigenous population.
This is silly. Exploration would have continued because that’s what we do. They would have been found sooner rather than later. And certainly not to this day what with airplanes and all.
I don’t believe we know how well different Native American ‘Indian’ tribes in the 1400’s could work together.
Well into the 1800’s they did not get along. They battled against each other. The Arapaho where somewhat docile. The Comanche, not so much.
A very good book about NA’s is Empire of the Summer Moon. “a stunningly vivid historical account of the forty-year battle between Comanche Indians and white settlers for control of the American West, centering on Quanah, the greatest Comanche chief of them all.”
It’s not for those of week stomach.
Indeed. The Portuguese were only a few voyages away from landing in Brazil, and sooner or later fishers would have ventured out far enough in the North Atlantic to reach Canada.
If they didn’t kill every European who found their way to the Americas before they could return to Europe then nothing would be slowed down in the least. Each new ship arriving would be better armed and the indigenous people would have fallen even faster.
what if (in an alternate history) the Polynesians had arrived around 500 years before Colombus, in greater numbers than they did, and introduced Eurasian diseases? Then the population collapse and recovery would have happened earlier than they did, the indigenous people would have been in a better demographic position to hold off the invaders long enough that they could start modernizing their own societies.
Not to mention that the belief in a flat Earth was not nearly as widespread as many still believe. Virtually all educated people at the time, and even centuries before, knew the Earth is spherical. None of the people who financed or navigated the expeditions would’ve believed that Columbus had sailed off the edge of the Earth had he not returned.
Yes but they would possibly have felt that he ran out of provisions or run into a nasty storm.
I think we would have had a situation similar to India (irony given the name). India was not a country, but a swarm of small states with different cultures, languages and often religions. The United Kingdom in particular defeated them piece by piece until they had conquered the whole region. There weren’t huge plagues associated with the contact, so India’s population did not fall.
None of the states were strong enough to defeat the British, and they didn’t even see themselves as “Indian” (an essentially artificial ethnicity). The British co-opted some groups, giving them foreign power but also leaving them vulnerable to reprisal, forcing these groups to rely on the British.
Conquering them all and putting them in the same province helped the Indians to see themselves as one country. Gandhi formed a non-violent movement to overthrow the British and did so.
I could picture an American history like that. If so, most people in the Americas would have Polynesian and native blood, with a lot of European influence on their culture and technology.
I’ll assume this is a joke.
In case it isn’t, NOBODY in Europe thought the Earth was flat. Everyone knew that, hypothetically, you could reach Asia by sailing West. But everybody knew the Earth was much larger than Columbus assumed, and that he was likely to run out of supplies long before he reached Asia.
Probably doesn’t work, I’m afraid. Though less isolated than the Americas in some senses, the Eastern Polynesians in particular were still isolated objectively speaking and apparently lost a lot of resistance to continental disease over time. The arrival of Europeans on most Pacific islands led to devastating declines to disease. For example estimates ( challenged in both directions, granted ) are that ~25 years after first contact ( in 1778 ) the population on Hawai’i had dropped by roughly half.
In addition another problem is that disease-causing agents mutated and changed all the time, as we see with our ever-morphing flu strains. A single introduction might help a tad, but it still isn’t a cure-all. You need regular contact to really build a robust immune defense.
Europe wasn’t united either. If an indigenous polity like the Incas had been in a stronger position demographically, they might have allied with one European power in order to defend themselves against another (e.g., allying with the English or maybe later the Russians to resist Spanish expansion).
The magnitude of the demographic collapse from foreign disease is hard to really get our minds around. I saw an estimate somewhere that it wasn’t till around 1965 that the population of Peru equaled what it had been in 1535.
Try the book 1491 by Charles Mann.
There was no unity among the tribes in America. None of the fictional natives living in harmony until the very bad European guys showed up.
They were constantly at war. Small, tribal wars. Because of the huge expanse of the country there was little pressure to resolve these minor skirmishes and unite. It was the very definition of tribalism. That provided much of the social interaction between tribes.
Steal the few resources, the women, and enslave a few captives. And a few years later your opponents will return the same to you.
The societal pressure to resolve conflicts, settle differences, and maximize limited land and resources did not exist. These things come with the realization of confined space and limited resources. You eventually need a central form of government. There was no such societal pressure in the unlimited expanse of the Americas. So the tribal unity or federation was not possible.
Even as the Europeans arrived some of the tribes simply got out of the way and let the white man come in. Because there was plenty of everything.
Some sources I’ve seen claim the natives quite successfully resisted the Vikings. When the Europeans invaded, the people and their civilization was in a state of total collapse due to the introduced diseases. If not wiped out by disease, I suspect they might have resisted for awhile before becoming subject states, similar to what happened in parts of Africa invaded by the British empire.
The Europeans had a more difficult time in parts of Africa because of tropical diseases that local peoples had at least some resistance to.
A person with one gene for sickle cell anemia, for example, has greater resistance to malaria.
Beating a dead horse, but the effect of disease on warfare and invasion can’t be stressed enough.
Even among the European powers, it wasn’t until the 20th century that combat took over as the #1 cause of casualties over disease. Even then, the USA lost more personnel to disease than combat in WWI, mostly due to the flu pandemic of 1918.
Or for that matter, consider the plague. The Black Death included, of course, but the plagues struck the world more than once. This almost destroyed civilizations, and that came in multiple, but far less deadly, waves than the diseases which struck the New World. The OP is onto something though. None of these diseases were European, specifically. Most of Europe has a relatively cold climate, with regular frosts which tends to prevent particularly nasty diseases from developing and spreading. The most dangerous diseases we know tend to come from a tropical or subtropical clime.
There is a theory that Syphilis was actually a mild New World disease tolerable to the indigenous population, but mutated and spread after being introduced to Europe. Most researchers don’t believe this likely, and point to records of diseases that sound similar even before contact with the New World. It’s still possible that contact with the New World one way or the other caused it become more a dangerous disease.
Edit: I apologize. Crossed this thread up with the one specifically on diseases.
Political organization is a type of technology. So getting millions of people to work together on a common goal instead of killing each other is very difficult.
History is full of examples of people from poorer less advanced regions coming in and conquering richer people. The Mongols ravaged China, the Macedonians conquered Persia, the Turks conquered the Byzantines and so on and so on.
And this is fundamentally a problem of political, social and economic organization. How do you equip and feed and transport and command and control your army? What makes your army fight? How is the enemy army equipped and fed and commanded, and what makes them fight?
If you can solve these problems then technology doesn’t matter, except that technology creates the preconditions for all of the above.
So look at the case of the Aztecs. They were vastly superior numerically to the army of pirates that Cortez commanded. So why weren’t they able to wipe out the Spaniards? Again, it was a question of organization. They weren’t just fighting the Spaniards, they were also fighting a coalition of states that had allied with the Spaniards against the Aztecs. So why did these guys help the Spaniards murder the Aztecs? Because they fucking hated the Aztecs.
And you can’t handwave that away. Why would people who had been conquered and enslaved by the Aztecs help them resist the Spaniards? If aliens suddenly appear in the middle of WWII, is everyone going to stop the war and ally together to fight the aliens? Germans and Jews and Russians and French and British and Americans and Chinese and Japanese and Phillipino, all drop with they are doing and forget the war and become fanatically determined to fight the aliens as the greater threat?
OK, we can look 100 years after the Spanish conquest of Mexico and see that the guys that helped the Spanish against the Aztecs also ended up under Spanish rule. So they should have helped the Aztecs against the Spanish? Why is Spanish rule worse than Aztec rule? OK, the Spanish weren’t particularly enlightened, on the other hand they didn’t line up thousands of captives on top of a pyramid and cut out their hearts with obsidian knives. So it’s not a given that if you could show those guys a vision of two futures, one under continued Aztec rule and another under Spanish rule that they’d choose the Aztecs over the Spanish.
I am curious as to what would have happened had the Iroquois confederation had more time to consolidate its political structure, in the absence of the Europeans. The direction they were working towards could have been interesting.