You quote some fascinating statistics, I’d love to know their source.
I live in Arizona, which has a substantial population of Native American people. There is the massive Navajo Nation, the Hopi, and even one of the smaller Apache reservations.
I, myself, am one-eighth Alaskan Native.
~VOW
Germs are not the only way that Native Americans were killed off. I’d be really surprised that it represented 95% of the deaths.
Forcing Native Americans off their lands, killing their food supply, and just flat out killing them whenever the opportunity arose were quite popular whenever the Native Americans were living in places that might be profitable to a European imperialist.
The first faulty premise has been addressed already: latinos/hispanics are not a subset of native people.
But also, a huge part of why there seem to be few Native Americans around is that as recently as the 70s the US government was stealing Native American children from their families in order to place them with good, white, families and intentionally kill off native culture and identity.
Smallpox was every bit as bad in Central America as it was in the current US. It’s little to do with disease resistance.
The simple fact is that Spanish colonies have more natives because Spain didn’t kill/exterminate them all like we did in America. Spain decided to rule over them like a conquered enemy, letting them keep their existing society, but stealing economic output. By contrast, the US kept forcefully expelling them from their habitat until they mostly died out from attrition.
I don’t really know why Spain took a different tack. Certainly it wasn’t out of mercy. I suspect the Central American civilizations were already a hierarchical society with centralized power structures, so it was easy to say “your king is dead; now your grain taxes go to our king”. People were already used to that, so it worked.
Just to clear up some terminology that is confusing to a lot of people:
Latino: refers to geography, i.e. “latino” people are people who are from Latin American countries.
Hispanic: refers to language, i.e. “hispanic” people are people who speak Spanish.
A person can be latino but not hispanic, or hispanic but not latino, or both, or neither.
That is all. Please continue.
Smallpox in a population like the new world had proved to be devastating. History of smallpox - Wikipedia
I actually wonder how bad a reintroduction of that virus to the current world would look.
A huge percentage of native American people were already dead from exposure to European diseases before colonization. Traders and explorers brought those diseases, in the 17th century. The history of the Americas would have been very different if the population hadn’t already been decimated when the colonists arrived.
This is not to say that Europeans were otherwise blameless, obviously not. But disease did most of the work for them.
The history of Latin America (colonized by Iberians) is different for several large cultural reasons. One, as already stated, is that generally families did not emigrate, only men, who then intermarried with native women. Another is Catholicism, which had different ideas about non-Christians than did Protestantism. It was perfectly acceptable to forcibly baptize all ages from newborn on up, and once baptized they were saved souls. Versus Protestantism, in which most sects repudiated infant baptism and required consent. This sounds better but in practice, it led to the dehumanizing and subsequent murder of the godless natives.
Spain and Portugal skipped the Enlightenment. They brought a medieval worldview to Latin America.
I suspect the “Why” is right in what you posted and I highlighted. My impression is that the Spanish folks who came over to the Americas did so with the intent of becoming rich, allowing them to live like kings when they went back to Spain. Whatever permanent settlements they created were secondary to this purpose, and only gradually evolved as places that they actually lived, largely because lots of them didn’t get rich enough to move back to Spain. Consider the image of the Spanish Treasure Galleon carrying tons of gold back to Spain. Keeping the people on the land helped with extracting this wealth; none of the Spaniards wanted to do the mining work themselves.
The French and English settlements were very different. They came with their families, with the intent of creating new homes almost from the beginning. What things they did export to Europe were a means to an end - they raised money to support the colonies, the colonies weren’t seen merely as a source of revenue. They sent pelts, wood and tobacco, and brought back gold and manufactured goods. Thus, taking the land was the whole point.
I don’t think this is the best description. Spain did sometimes allow local regimes to stay in place but it was only seen as a short term situation. The policy was that local rulers could remain in token command in order to enforce Spanish orders. But they were displaced as soon as sufficient Spaniards had arrived on the scene to eliminate the need for local administrators and enforcers.
In Mexico, for example, the Spanish abolished the Aztec regime within two years of first contact. In Peru, the Incan regime was abolished after only a year.
True, I was referring more to the non-ruling class. They largely escaped extermination and land theft; they just got new Spanish administrators, enforcers, husbands, etc.
The 17th?
As has been alluded to, the Spanish incorporated the conquered peoples into their societies. They might have been subject to forced labor, or form an underclass, but they were recognized members of the same community as the conquerors. In contrast, in English colonies they were considered to belong to separate nations, outside of civil society. They would either be pushed out of the settled areas, or corralled into reservations where they would be kept separate.
Disease wiped out the majority, and you are correct that there was a determined effort at genocide for those who remained. It’s one of the most shameful actions in the history of our country. Slavery gets the most attention, but there was a systematic effort to wipe out every last Native American almost from the earliest colonial times. The Second Amendment was written specifically to legitimize the formation of citizen militias to assist in accomplishing just that end.
It was a pretty big shift. The locals saw their government abolished, their religion eliminated, their military disbanded, their language replaced, their economy transformed, their city torn down, and the majority of their people dead. The society that existed in 1528 was very different from the society that had existed in 1518.
Smallpox did quite a number on the Khoe-khoen of the Cape in 1713 and 1755, whereas the east coast Bantu had had contact with Arab traders for centuries, and also cowpox was endemic there but not in the Khoe-khoen cattle, so they were likely quite resistant (although they were affected by later epidemics).
IOW, the Spaniards and Portuguese simply continued the same policies which had taken place on the Iberian Peninsula since the Roman conquest, combined with that new idea that “everybody must be the same religion as their ruler.”
Musing: I’m not sure why, but a lot of people never seem to realize that this “convert everybody” thing was a Renaissance concept, not a medieval one. Not every concept that’s new turns out to be particularly good, and sometimes a concept which works well for a certain culture has different consequences in a different one.
In Spain, maybe. But it was definitely a large component of the mediaeval Baltic Crusades.
No maybe about it, and it was a general novelty through SW Europe.
Many Latinos are mestizos, a term for those of mixed European and Native American descent. They’re the descendants of Native Americans who survived those diseases, and of Europeans who already had genetic resistance.
From what I can tell, in most Latin American countries, there are people of “pure” European descent, mestizos, and native… In some countries, Europeans are the most numerous. In others mestizos are. In none are the Native Americans the most numerous.
Because both Africans and Indians had contact with Europeans beforehand. The Black Death supposedly traveled from India to Europe, but also to China, Korea, and Japan, and when it reached Egypt (by land) and Eastern Africa (by sea, as there was a lot of contact between the Arab world and Kenya) would have ravaged Africa. The survivors were those genetically resistant. The same could be said of smallpox (which struck China before the Three Kingdoms period, with the population declines having an enormous impact and playing a role in the rise of the Yellow Turban Rebellion). If that smallpox epidemic happened the first time during the 1800s or so, the history of China would be remarkably different (it likely would have been conquered by Europeans).
Groups wiped out by diseases generally lived in the “New World” without sustained indirect contact with the “Old World”. So I suspect many Australian Aborigines were also killed by plague.
Ironically Africa was the home to many “tropical” diseases, which are carried only by local mosquitoes. So while European diseases weren’t having much impact on the already genetically resistant Africans, many Europeans were falling to exotic diseases. (And then it turns out, for some reason, that South American mosquitoes can carry some of these diseases…)