It’s pretty easy to imagine an American continent where the “Five Civilized Tribes” weren’t ethnically cleansed, but were treated as human beings.
It certainly is true that conquering groups throughout history have conquered lots of places, and treated the conquered people in various ways. Some of those ways amount to genocide. Other choices are slavery, expulsion, absorption, or becoming the new ruling class of a more or less intact conquered society.
If we look at the colonial history of Mexico compared to the East coast of North America, there are a lot of differences. It’s easy to imagine that just as Mexico in 2016 is a largely mestizo country, what is now the United States might also be largely mixed. The difference is that Mexico had a much higher population density and thus a much larger number of survivors of the epidemics, and the different colonial aims of Spain vs Portugal vs France vs Britain.
The original British colonies hoped to repeat the incredibly lucrative Spanish conquests. They wanted to find native kingdoms stuffed with gold that could be conquered and the gold shipped back home. But this failed, there was very little gold and the native tribes at a much simpler level of social organization. And so the British conquistadors with dreams of coming back to England loaded with gold mostly died broke. It was only after the disastrous failure of the conquistador model that people started thinking about moving to the Americas to set up farms.
And those colonial farms mostly succeeded because they were established literally on top of native american villages that had been destroyed by disease. Given another century or two to rebuild population levels and the colonies would have to displace existing people, not move in to abandoned farms and immediately start working them again.
Also of note is that the conquests of the Americas were the culmination of European expansion. The Spanish had finally conquered the entire peninsula. The Turks were being pushed back. The Russians were expanding. The English were absorbing Scotland and Ireland. The French kingdom was finally being centralized. So there was a pre-existing source of military and political experience that could be turned to the Americas.
Still, it’s easy to imagine the success of the Spanish Armada, knocking England out of the ranks of first rate powers, meaning the colonization of North America takes another century, which means a much more mestizo resulting culture and the survival of politically independent native societies into the modern era.
I know there’s wild-assed speculation that China visited the Americas. Totally unproven though. And the Aztec empire would probably have fallen apart sooner or later, it was a very unstable setup. Of course there was what was probably a kingdom level civilization in the Mississippi valley at Cahokia, but it had collapsed by the time European explorers arrived.
The very early explorers of North America reported densely populated country crowded with villages and fields. The later explorers a hundred years later reported mostly wilderness with scattered settlements.
As an Englishman I just can’t regret the initial English colonization of North America because it led to the creation of the United States of America, a country which saved our bacon in WWII and overall is a powerful force for good in the modern world. Would most Americans, however sympathetic to the plight of the Native Americans, really want past events to have transpired differently?
The problem with “what if?” games is that we can all play them to the advantage of a particular point of view. In this case, there’s a particular consistency to the point of view that is sympathetic to the North American indigenous peoples. It’s hard to imagine a European culture with such values ever tolerating Hitler for even a moment, yet in actuality his rise to power was tolerated and condoned by a variety of nations including elements in Britain itself and in the United States. Had this maniac not been venerated as a savior in Germany and condoned by major nations, Hitler would have been languishing in prison instead of leading a nation to the takeover of Europe and your bacon would not have needed saving. And incidentally, the US didn’t come in to save it until three years after you were already at war.
So, yes, I could well hypothesize an alternate history in which I wish many events had transpired differently. Nor is there anything to suggest that a more humane attitude to the native peoples would have produced any lesser a nation. Indeed, perhaps there would not have been the same level of interest in capturing black people in Africa and bringing them over as a free source of labor, and everything that that has subsequently entailed.
It’s easy to say that this is the best of all possible worlds. And if history were different then we wouldn’t exist, and it’s hard to be in favor of your own extinction. The colonization of the Americas and Australia wasn’t inevitable, but because of their relative isolation from Afro-Eurasia they were at a severe structural disadvantage that lead to their demographic replacement. Other sorts of demographic replacements have occured over history, but most of them have been of the Mexico type, leading to a mestizo successor population.
you’re forgetting about the fact that North America WAS fully populated until the apocalypse occurred and diseases wiped out 90% of the inhabitants.
Prior to that, various folks (vikings, etc.) had tried to move in and were repelled by the annoyed people already living there.
It was the most horrific apocalypse in human history and most people try to pretend it didn’t happen.
After it happened, people moved in. For example, Plymouth Rock was selected for inhabitation because it was a fully built, developed village with farms that had no living people left in it.
It was inevitable given the understanding of disease at the time. Sooner or later mass contact between old world and new world was going to happen and then the old world diseases would run rampant and devastate the America’s. Doesn’t matter if the Chinese or the Europeans did the contacting or even the west africans sailing to Brazil and it doesn’t matter how noble the intentions of the contact is. It’s still going to kill 90 percent of the population and that leaves a lot of empty land.
Yes the contacting power could have treated the survivors of the plagues with more dignity, but the decimation of the old world plagues was inevitable.
Interestingly, a similar debate has just blown up in Australia over a recently publicised university guide saying that Australia was “Invaded” rather an “Settled” (among other dangous PC nonsense claims)
Rather a lot of people on the progressive side of things seem to be under the delusion that, had the British not shown up, no-one else would have eventually bumped into Australia and said “What’s this? A giant continent? And only sparsely inhabitated by a stone age tribal people?”
Australia was both invaded and settled, obviously.
And, for the record, the British weren’t the first to show up. The Dutch had been many times, as had Macassans from what we now know as Indonesia, and people from New Guinea. And possibly the Portuguese and the Spanish, although this is uncertain (the Spanish) or doubtful (the Portuguese). The French also showed up before Captain Cook did (though not before all Englishmen; Dampier had already been by the time the French came).
So, no, the English weren’t the first to show up. They were the first to invade and settle, though. Which makes the point that finding your way to Australia isn’t inevitably followed by invading and settling it.
I’m surprised the Koreans, Japanese, or Chinese didn’t settle since their ships were just as good as Europeans for many centuries. or even the Polynesians who settled Hawaii.
Lets face it nearly every Pacific island had a native population on it when Europeans got there and some of those had replaced previous populations.
Ignoring the validity of the original claim, your argument as stated here is utter nonsense. Whether or not it would have been invaded/settled by someone else had not the British invaded/settled is utterly irrelevant to determining whether it should be called an invasion/settlement.
To a surprising extent, the humorous scenario (of 'hardy settlers venturing into unoccupied new lands") actually played out - not to minimize the actual dispossessions and ethnic cleansings (like the “trail of tears”), but the actual population density of much of North America plummeted in advance of European settlers actually showing up. What remained were societies in deep shock and with limited ability to resist encroachments from outsiders.
Much, but not all, of that was due to epidemic diseases; some was due to wars among the natives themselves, triggered by massive economic dislocation brought on by trade with Europeans that had impact far into the interior of North America, long before any Europeans showed up (as in the “Beaver Wars”).
Some was due to social collapse for reasons unknown - for example, the collapse of the massive native American city of Cahokia remains a bit of a mystery (though environmental factors probably played a role): it was abandoned mid-13th century.
In fact, early explorers (like Hernando de Soto) reported massive native populations and burgeoning towns in what is now the southern US. Much of that was gone by the time Europeans showed up to settle. Some estimates put the depopulation at up to 90%, but no-one really knows (in contrast, the Black Death is estimated to have killed off 30% of Europe, over a longer period of time). It is difficult to imagine any society recovering from a 90% die-off, particularly when then faced with an invasion of technologically superior invaders.
It is also interesting to reflect on just how little is known, other than their bare existence, of pre-Columbian Native society and history - most Americans don’t even know the Native Americans had actual cities … in fact, Cahokia was the largest US city to have existed, until around 1800 or so.
Good points. I’ve seen colonialism split into “settler” colonialism and “resource” colonialism.
Settler colonialism was what happened in North America, Australia, and Argentina. Very large numbers of Europeans moved to the settler colonies in order to acquire cheap farmland. This established a primarily European-based culture that attracted more and more Europeans later. In many cases, the European populations that came were the ones that were already socially ostracized in Europe (convicts to Australia, religious fundamentalists to the USA), so you ended up with a culture that was similar but slightly different to the “motherland”.
Resource colonialism is what happened in India and in many African countries. A small European elite set themselves up as the government and heads of industry in order to extract resources from the local environment. Settlement by Europeans was minimal due to lack of opportunities for “random white people” in the area.
Some areas where a hybrid colonialism seems to have happened include Bolivia and New Zealand, both countries with large settler populations but also large “native” populations.
Perhaps the population density upon colonization and the effect of disease upon the native population is a big factor driving the type of colonialism that happens. In India, there were simply too many people there already and there wasn’t “room” for vast numbers of European peasants to come and set up their own farms the way that there was space in North America. If the native population of the Americas had been higher and/or if there hadn’t been so many deaths due to European diseases, we could have ended up with an India-like USA populated mostly by a federation of native tribes each with its own language.
You can run the experiment in real life by looking what happened in Mexico, where population densities of Native Americans remained relatively high even after the impact of epidemic diseases.
There, you got a colonial solution different yet again from India: a cultural and racial mixture, in which those of “pure” European descent, for centuries, attempted to hold onto the highest caste status: the so-called “Criollo” culture (as opposed to the majority of the population, the “Mestizos”), under the “casta” system.
In effect, it looks somewhat like what India would have looked like if Europeans had joined in the caste system for a few centuries, and in greater numbers.
What’s your point? That it doesn’t count as an invasion because somebody else would have done it? Or that it’s not an invasion because the island was sparsely populated? An invasion is an invasion whenever you disposess, kill or subjugate the natives. The fact that it was also settlement does not make it otherwise.
And yet there was little or no direct contact between Europeans and Indians before de Gama. Was the indirect trade enough to ensure that Indians were resistant to European diseases (or vice versa)? Or was it because both sides essentially had the same domesticated animals?
There were mass resettlements more or less from the beginning of European colonization. I don’t know what you think “a large level” is but to me the resettlement of the Cherokee, Seminole and other tribes from Georgia (to use one well-known example) certainly qualifies as a genocide.
Diseases had no problems sweeping over the entirety of Eurasia. For example, it is now thought that the reservoir of the Black Death was ground-dwelling mammals in Mongolia.