The settlement of North America by "outsiders" was inevitable.

[Latro]

@Really_Not_All_That_Bright

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?

This is incorrect. There has been contact with India since for ever.
Via the Persians and via the coast of the Arabian peninsula.
Who’s to say that some of the plagues that swept the Roman Empire didn’t come from India?

[Bryan_Ekers]

@kurtisokc

Something about that sounds vaguely familiar. :dubious:

My original title was Billy and the Colonial-saurus.

[DrDeth]

@Really_Not_All_That_Bright

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.

"Genocide is the* intent to systematically eliminate* a cultural, ethnic, linguistic, national, racial or religious group. "

About 17000 Cherokees were relocated , and about 4000 died, due to “Most of the deaths during the journey were caused by disease, malnutrition, and exposure during an unusually cold winter.”

Not intentional. Not systemic. Mind you, there were some* individuals *who took it upon themselves to make the relocation as bad as possible.

Horrible and a black mark sure, but not *genocide. *

[Really_Not_All_That_Bright]

@Latro

This is incorrect. There has been contact with India since for ever.

Direct contact.

[DrCube]

@Latro

This is incorrect. There has been contact with India since for ever.

Even if there wasn’t, no European has to directly contact an Indian for European diseases to spread there. A European just has to be in contact with someone, who is in contact with someone else, who is in contact with someone else … so on and so forth until you get to India.

What prevented the spread of European diseases to America wasn’t the fact that Europeans didn’t have direct contact, it’s that there was a huge ocean on all sides that prevented anyone from bringing their diseases to America. If the Bering strait land bridge had still existed, someone from Mongolia, or Kamchatka or Siberia could have brought European diseases to America. An actual European is not necessary.

[Malthus]

@Really_Not_All_That_Bright

Direct contact.

Direct contact wasn’t necessary for epidemic disease transmission - as long as there was a continuous chain of contact from population to population, that was enough. Each population would infect the next in the chain.

Edit: ninja’d.

[Tamerlane]

@DrDeth

"Genocide is the* intent to systematically eliminate* a cultural, ethnic, linguistic, national, racial or religious group. "

Horrible and a black mark sure, but not genocide.

The Pequot War on the other hand was ultimately genocidal ( both on the part of the New England colonists and their native allies ). So one can certainly find examples.

@Really_Not_All_That_Bright

Direct contact.

Direct contact was not necessary ( though you might be underestimating some of those contacts ). Eurasia was more or less a common pool in terms of disease reservoirs and microbes happily migrated and mutated from one end to the other in their assorted hosts. The Americas’ isolation was vastly different.

ETA: Double-ninja’d.

[Malthus]

As for displacement and genocide - a lot of that occurred primarily as a result of tensions between native American nations themselves, with only limited direct European military involvement (except as traders and arms suppliers). For example, large parts of what were to later become the settled portions of Upper and Lower Canada were, in effect, depopulated prior to and during the so-called “Beaver Wars”, during which the Iroquoian Confederacy nearly obtained supremacy over both trade and territory in those parts of the world.

This effect depopulated what became the foundational area of the colony of Quebec:

The expeditions of French explorer Jacques Cartier in the 1540s made the first written records of the Native Americans in North America. French explorers and fishermen had traded in the region near the mouth of the St. Lawrence River estuary a decade before then for valuable furs. Cartier wrote of encounters with a people later classified as the St. Lawrence Iroquoians,[1] also known as the Stadaconan or Laurentian people, who occupied several fortified villages, including Stadacona and Hochelaga. Cartier recorded an ongoing war between the Stadaconans and another tribe known as the Toudaman, who had destroyed one of their forts the previous year, resulting in 200 deaths.

Wars and politics in Europe distracted French efforts at colonization in the St. Lawrence Valley until the beginning of the 17th century, when they founded Quebec in 1608. When the French returned to the area, they found the sites of both Stadacona and Hochelaga abandoned, completely destroyed by an unknown enemy.[2]

Based on analysis of political and economic conditions at the time, some anthropologists and historians have suggested that the Mohawk Nation of the Iroquois Confederacy destroyed and drove out the St. Lawrence Iroquoians.[2] When the French returned, they found no inhabitants in this part of the upper river valley. The Iroquois and the Iroquoian-speaking Huron[2] used it as hunting ground.[1][3] The causes remain unclear. (Iroquois oral tradition, as recorded in the Jesuit Relations, speaks of a draining war between the Mohawk and an alliance of the Susquehannock and Algonquin sometime between 1580 and 1600). This was perhaps in response to the formation of the League of the Iroquois (NABoI puts this as taking place about 1570[2]).

A similar event drive the Huron out of what was to become southern Ontario:

In 1648, the Dutch authorized selling guns directly to the Mohawk rather than through traders, and promptly sold 400 to the Iroquois. The Confederacy sent 1,000 newly armed warriors through the woods to Huron territory. With the onset of winter, the Iroquois warriors launched a devastating attack into the heart of Huron territory, destroying several key villages, killing many warriors and taking thousands of people captive, for later adoption into the tribe. Among those killed were the Jesuit missionaries Jean Brebeuf, Charles Garnier, and Gabriel Lallemant. Each is considered a martyr of the Roman Catholic Church. The surviving Huron fled their territory to seek assistance from the Anishinaabeg Confederacy in the northern Great Lakes region. The Odaawaa Nation (Ottawa) temporarily halted Iroquois expansion further northwest. With the Hurons’ withdrawal, the Iroquois controlled a fur-rich region and had no more native tribes blocking them from the French settlements in Canada.

Beaver Wars

[DrDeth]

@Tamerlane

The Pequot War on the other hand was ultimately genocidal ( both on the part of the New England colonists and their native allies ). So one can certainly find examples.

.

That was a war. The Pequots lost. Not genocide. Note that the Narragansett and Mohegan tribes did a lot of the heavy lifting there.

[Tamerlane]

@DrDeth

That was a war. The Pequots lost. Not genocide.

A main goal of the war as it developed was to eliminate the Pequot as a distinct people, which it more or less did. To me it is splitting hairs to say that wasn’t a genocide. Wars that end up with one group essentially eliminated ( women and children included ) count as far as I’m concerned.

Note that the Narragansett and Mohegan tribes did a lot of the heavy lifting there.

Oh, to be sure - I’m not saying the Indians were merely passive victims. They were perpetrators as well. It’s never a bright line of “good” vs. “evil” - people are people.

[Lemur866]

If you don’t consider the Trail of Tears “genocide” it certainly rises to the level of “ethnic cleansing”.

[smiling_bandit]

@Lemur866

If you don’t consider the Trail of Tears “genocide” it certainly rises to the level of “ethnic cleansing”.

Certainly true. This does raise an important point, though - this was seriously divisive. Had Henry Clay been in office, it’s likely the outcome would have been very different.

[Martini_Enfield]

@UDS

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 well aware the Dutch had been to Australia long before the British. Ditto the Indonesians/Malays, and possibly the Chinese depending which theories you subscribe to. The Portugeuse came very close too (sailing through the Torres Strait without managing to see Cape York, which is quite an achievement).

None of them got around to visiting Australia’s East Coast, though (the bit Captain Cook discovered, from the British perspective). That’s the bit of Australia most people live in nowadays, and has most of the farmland, the least of the desert, and the suitable climate etc.

@naita

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.

I’m not using the “Someone else would have done it if the British didn’t” thing to say “it wasn’t an invasion” (although I don’t think it was an invasion, especially by the standards of the times) - it was a separate observation and one I believe to be fundamentally correct. The French were sniffing around both Australia and New Zealand at the time as well - part of New Zealand’s South Island would have been French territory if the British hadn’t beaten them to it by literally a couple of days.

@Really_Not_All_That_Bright

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.

My point is it wasn’t an invasion because there wasn’t an organised, settled, cohesive society living in Australia with defined, established borders to be invaded and control of that territory asserted with a military goal.

Australia is enormous and we’ve got even fewer people living here than Canada does. You only have to drive for an hour or so outside most of the major cities and you are likely to be in the middle of fucking nowhere. Rewind to the mid-17th Century and you’ve got maybe a million people across the entire country, the majority of whom were leading a nomadic existence.

Much of the country was uninhabited, or so sparsely inhabited that it may as well have been, at least from a European perspective. (Obviously the Aborigines viewed the subject differently!)

There wasn’t a great stone city on the shores of Botany Bay which the British pummelled with cannon then set fire to. There wasn’t a complex of pyramids on the Murray River the British looted. There was nothing of any military strategic value here for the British Army to march in and capture for Crown and Country.

That’s not to say - and this is extremely important - that the British didn’t do horrible things to the Aborigines. They did. The Aborigines were treated appallingly in many cases, and shamefully not even arguably considered human until the 1960s. It’s embarrassing and even I’m not going to defend that element of Australian history.

But an invasion requires far more than “a lot of people showing up somewhere and deciding to live there”, in my view. Otherwise the current refugee situation in Europe is an “invasion” and I don’t think many people here on the boards are going to agree with that definition somehow.

I’ve always considered invasion to require a deliberate planning and a military element as well. Germany attacking Poland in 1939 was an invasion. Ditto attacking Russia a few years later. And D-Day was an invasion. 1000 people - most of whom didn’t really want to be there and the overwhelming majority of whom were unarmed - showing up in a small fleet of sailing ships and deciding to live on the shore of a harbour in a nearly empty country isn’t an invasion, it was colonisation.

Whether it was right was another matter, which is where my “If it wasn’t the British it would have been someone else” thing comes into play.

[naita]

@Martini_Enfield

I’m not using the “Someone else would have done it if the British didn’t” thing to say “it wasn’t an invasion” (although I don’t think it was an invasion, especially by the standards of the times) - it was a separate observation and one I believe to be fundamentally correct. The French were sniffing around both Australia and New Zealand at the time as well - part of New Zealand’s South Island would have been French territory if the British hadn’t beaten them to it by literally a couple of days.

Pardon me for assuming you structured your post in a meaningful way. If it was just a list of random bold assertions with no arguments the correct response would of course have been just a shrug.

[DtypeJag]

As a point of interest here is the mass burial of 3000 to 5000 California Indians at one of the Missions (can’t recall which). I was told they died mainly of pneumonia contracted when they didn’t remove their European clothes after getting wet. They had to wear these clothes to cover up their naughty bits. But, hey, at least their souls were saved.