Plus, modern medicine and sanitation. We just don’t have as many fatal disease organisms living in our population as our ancestors did, and they don’t have as easy a time of spreading.
There may have been a decent number of natives before white diseases came along - but it definitely was nowhere near the rolling meadows where once mighty forests stood, like the countrysides of France, England or Germany. The natives of the east coast obtained their meat from hunting, not herding. They were maybe on the brink of full time farming but lacked the tools to clear the gian forest beyond their basic slash and burn cycles, and had to keep moving every few years. Their villages were more like clearings in the forest.
Keep in mind they were numerous, to the point where for example there were large federated organizations like the Five Nations.
But from the European perspective the land was essentially unoccupied.
Contrat this with the situation in the tropics, where population could be denser because there was no winter to have to store food for, but a year-round growing season. On the islands, when the Spaniards eliminated the bulk of the locals, that was it. In the giant continental agricultural settled areas, the land was taken, and the locals could not easily be forced off one mile and one village at a time like new England.
The Spaniards did not try to push the locals off the land. When Cortez beat the aztecs, he used allies among the locals who were happy to fight them. His armoured, armed cavalry were simply the extra secret weapon. Pizzaro tried to use mainly his own men, but still had local help and succeeded by taking out the leader in a bold move. The conquistadors on the mainland simply performed a coup and took over the government, then set about transforming it. The islands were more easily converted to plantations.
The Spanish and Portuguese, especially the Spanish, conquered most of the large, densely populated regions of the Americas from 1492 to 1598 or so. The French, English, and Dutch made a few forays into the Caribbean basin and along the Atlantic coast before 1600, but largely started after 1604…and really didn’t migrate in very huge numbers until later in the seventeenth century. By this point, the Spanish and Portuguese colonies were over 150 years old.
On some level, Mexico, Peru, Cuba, and Brazil simply had a long head start on racial mixture … what will the United States look like in 150 years?
Also, the role of the Spanish and French in shaping North America - north of the Rio Grande - is often neglected in Anglocentric histories. The Spanish Jesuits created failed missions in Virginia a generation before Jamestown - they failed from Indian resistance and malarial conditions in marginal swamps. The Jamestown colony almost met this fate, but the Virginia colonists prevailed in their wars with the Powhattan Confederacy with the “help” of epidemic disease.
The Spanish also had a similar role in early groundbreaking missions in the Carolinas and Georgia. They also engaged in slave trading along Cape Cod and Long Island. Squanto famously greeted the English Pilgrims in their own language, as he had been taken captive by Spaniards, and found his way to London before returning to his homeland in Massachusetts. Basically, my argument is that the divisions between Spanish and English spaces are not easy to make. The English largely came later, and faced a different set of possible outcomes.
English colonists in places like New England and Virginia behaved surprisingly similar to Spanish colonists at first. They intermarried at times, and created missions (praying towns) and sought to convert chieftains like Opechancanough and Metacomet to Christianity and rule through them. They sought Indian labor in plantations, gold mines, and other enterprises. However, the English faced confederacies of a few thousand people in rural villages - the Spanish had empires with several million people.
And anyone who thinks the Spanish were simply more benevolent than the English should read the history of the Apache-Spanish or Mapuche-Spanish Wars. And ideas concerning race and caste emerged in Spanish and Portuguese colonies.
The Puritans had very active missions (Praying Towns), led by men such as John Elliott, who translated the Bible into Algonquian languages. The Virginia colonists were eager to convert the Powhatan. Later, during the Great Awakening, Baptist, Methodist, and Moravian missionaries reached the Cherokee and other large southeastern tribes. In short, the English had as much of a mission frontier as the Spanish and French. The main difference is they had a very pluralistic approach to conversion, without the tight relationship between royal officials and the missionaries on the ground.
That explains why India and China are overwhelmingly populated by the English.
Hey!
Wuz we discriminated against by the English but (those other) Indians and Chinese weren’t? Why, if I ever get my hands on the smarmy bastids …
Oh no! I like Downton Abbey, Sherlock, Mr. Selfridge. What are they tryin’ to pull?
OMG! My SO of 26 years is English. Insidious!
(I use a lot of exclamation points, don’t I!)
The reason the model worked in the Americas but not in the Old World is because then native peoples of the Americas were decimated by introduced diseases, while those of India and China were resistant to those diseases and remained too numerous be pushed out.
I’m going to blame climate too. When three quarters of your town or nation is wiped out by disease, probably also disrupting agriculture and ruining the food supply, it probably helps if you don’t also have to fight blizzards in the ohio valley. The mound builders may have been almost as big a civilization as the Aztecs (depending who you believe) but adding Midwest blizzards to social collapse probably didn’t help.
Regardless. The east coast was semi nomadic semi hunters, the English and French took it one mile at a time. The civilized areas of Mexico and South America were too dense to try to take one area at a time. Texas and California, much easier, no large population. It could be made into ranches.
That’s the difference. A hundred at a time, the English could take. A million at a time, even after three quarters died, the Spanish could not take on. The surviving natives lived in large farming areas, or impenetrable jungles. The less fertile areas became ranch, as the locals were mostly small groups that could be pushed off bit by bit.
Compare this to South Africa… Same idea, semi nomadic herder groups slowly forced off the land. India, China, too populous. Australia, nomads again easily forced off the land.
America or Canada won’t be like Latin America for exactly the reason- the local indigenous population was and remains too small. What will make them more “mixed” is immigration from elsewhere.
And that is precisely the OP answer. The north started with a much smaller local population and a lot more immigrants and has increased that differential…
Haven’t you been reading this thread at all?:dubious: No it wasn’t. They were mostly sedentary agriculturalists.
That’s part of the answer, but not all of it. As has been said, the cultural differences between English and Spanish colonization also played a role. There was much more mixing between the Spanish and indigenous people even in areas of Latin America where the population was sparse.
No separation of church and state, but quite a few jews moved Over There, some of them directly during the expulsions. A quick search tells me that the oldest standing synagogue in the New World is in Curaçao and dates from the 17th century (the community started in 1651 and bought the first synagogue in 1673). The muslims had large muslim countries right across the Med, so a lot less incentive to go across the Atlantic; protestants were very rare in the Peninsula.
No they were semi-nomadic. The Iroquois and others in the northern East coast were scattered villages practising slash-and-burn agriculture in clearings near their villages. Despite the “bury a fish in the mound” lore, they had to move every few years when they exhausted the soil. Without domestic animals, they relied on hunting for meat. The majority of the land was still forest, hunting grounds. This is why (as mentioned above) the locals did not begrudge the newcomers a few square miles. By the time they realized the difference in occupancy, the newcomers were numerous enough to take on the individual villages and tribes one at a time.
Perhaps the best example of the Americans practising Spanish tactics was the confrontation with the Cherokee. They were south enough and agricultural enough and numerous enough to be an impediment. Yet even there, there was enough space between settlements to allow the immigrants to create farms in and around them. When push came to shove, it was when the Americans had the manpower and firepower to make their point.
Whereas the established tropical civilizations were intensively agricultural; all the good land was occupied for agriculture already, and for the Spanish it was not a matter of pushing people off the land a few hundred at a time. They would have to take on a million at once. It was easier and more productive to simply take over the leadership and collect the tithes. The locals were a means to riches rather than an impediment.
The French and Spanish (think Inquisition) were very intolerant of religious dissent. They did not have groups like the puritans, persecuted enough to want to leave but tolerated enough to openly build up the size and finances to split off and establish colonies. IIRC New England and Pennsylvania were both established by groups looking for more freedom. Spanish colonies were overrun with priests bent on converting the locals; certainly I have heard no similar stories of dissident religious groups being allowed to move into colonies. Maybe that’s a side effect of the concentration on Anglo-centric European history; but I have heard the stories of the Huguenots, who certainly were not allowed to move to French colonies as an option.
Um, again, while they brought priests and there was religious conversion, the Spanish conquest was primarily military, religion conversion was much secondary. They did not go out of the way to kill the natives because they weren’t of the same religion, they killed the natives because they wanted access to the gold, mines, and lands. And those they didn’t kill, they used as slaves/cheap labor. And they intermingled with the locals (by force or not) because they were mostly young single men and not families who came to colonize a new land.
And again, many missionaries were some of the most vocal opponents of the treatments the natives were receiving from the other Spaniards.
Errrm, no. Unless you mean specifically the SW corner of South Africa, where smallpox did its dirty work on the Khoe-khoen, on behalf of the Dutch (not English). But most of South Africa was (a) settled agrarian cultures and (b) not forced out by colonists that way. Colonists came in to live side by side with Bantus, and totally conquered and ruled over them in the end, but they didn’t depopulate them.
The Dutch and English didn’t do to the Zulus what they did to the Iroquois etc. As for the Xhosa, any depopulation there was partly their own doing.
You’re right, not French colonies…
That doesn’t qualify as “semi-nomadic.” They may have shifted fields but didn’t shift villages very often. Soil in the northeastern US is much more fertile than in tropical areas where shifting agriculture is practiced, but even there people don’t move villages that often and aren’t semi-nomadic. Europeans left fields fallow as well to let them recover fertility; that doesn’t make them semi-nomadic.
Also, one of the reasons the native peoples of the Northeast didn’t mind the Europeans moving in at first was because the land had been depopulated by European disease–that’s why there was plenty of room to accommodate them. It wasn’t because the locals were “nomads” with no fixed address.
Exactly.
Some of the pilgrims / puritans spent 30 years in Holland IIRC before giving up on that and going to New England. The Dutch had a different tack, they mainly banned the Catholic church - sort of.
http://www.ontarioarchaeology.on.ca/publications/pdf/oa13-2-noble.pdf
Just the opposite of the “we wiped them out with disease” theory. By 1700’s, the Indians were combining tools, crops, domesticated animals and other European advantages in their local villages, also switched to more agricultural-based food sources and the result was much much larger villages than observed (archeologically) in the pre-Columbus era.
John Cabot first explored the St Lawrence in 1497; French explorers wandered the coastline and Quebec in the 1530’s, de Soto supposedly infected the central USA by 1540… Traders were wandering the coast for decades. By the time of the Plymouth settlement in 1620, the locals would have had almost a century of regular exposure to western diseases.
Wikipedia:
25,000 people is a far cry from meso/south American agricultural civilizations numbering in the millions.
Did European explorers and colonists know they were likely going to kill everyone with disease everywhere they went?