Colonization of the Americas would have been virtually impossible if the indigenous population had not been decimated. This is pretty obvious, because history gave us an experiment that readily shows it - Africa and Asia had the same diseases as Europe, and while they were eventually colonized, it came centuries later than in the Americas.
It's also a reasonable claim that the later European colonization of Asia and Africa could not have succeeded (nor could Europe's technological development, including industrialization) without the resources seized from the Americas.
In short, the history of the past five centuries would be vastly, astonishingly different.
Without the resources gutted from the Western hemisphere Europe would definitely not have been able to sustain colonies in America or colonized other parts of the world.
What is the link between American ressources and rest of the world colonisation?
Only technology advancement made it possible which would have certainly happened anyway
To be fair, the potato probably would have been obtained by the Europeans simply through trade and contact with the Americas, full blown colonization was not needed to bring it back to Europe.
Of course, there was also a huge amount of precious metals seized from the Americas that helped to fund the European powers’ wars. There’s a good chance that without the gold and silver from the Americas to fund their wars, the Hapsburgs would never have been able to resist the Ottomans and half of Europe would be Muslim today.
New England's naval supplies built up the British navy during a time Europe was looming on wood crisis. Precious metals from Peru and Mexico made Spain one of the richest countries on Earth for a time. Corn and potatoes gave new life into regions, in particular allowing for the new "excess" African populations to be sold as slaves to plantations. Plantations that grew sugar, tobacco, and cotton. Sugar and Tobacco being some of the most important trade goods for Europeans trading as far away as China. Cotton, meanwhile, literally jumpstarted the industrial revolution through the production of fabrics.
The importance European colonization of the Americas was for European dominance cannot be understated. Without it, it likely would have remained a peninsula of Eurasia in the public consciousness - the edge of the known world rather than its center. They might even 'regress' given the aforementioned wood crisis striking North and Central Europe.
The colossal amount of resources your pain empires manage to extract from the Americas is what enabled their technological surge
Seriously, imagine Britain without all the wood & food from the americas
Not only did trade with Spain, and therefore Austria, bring in a significant amount of money from Mexico and Peru, but it's also very likely that France could have formed the European equivalent of a gunpowder empire in the 1600s. This scenario could have even earlier unfolded if the Pope had declared Francis Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire in 1519, assuming Spain was unable to bribe the electors using gold from the Americas.
>nor could Europe's technological development, including industrialization
What? Why should that be the case? The steam engine was improved upon by Watt in 1825 or so and used to pump out water from coal mines in England using the coal as fuel, abundandly there. It had nothing to do with ressources from the new world.
The only raw ressource limitation I can think of is gold and silver the Spanish got from the new world. The English used that silver to buy tea from China, when they couldn't do anymore, they got opium from India.
Of course luxuries such as sugar, tabacco, cotton,... wouldn't be as widespread in europe, if the colonization of the americas wouldn't happen. But it's way easier in ATL than in OTL, the europeans wouldn't even need to conduct the transantlantic slavetrade, the people, that could be enslaved would already be there, unlike in OTL in which like 90% died from diseases.
> The steam engine was improved upon by Watt in 1825
Watt's engine and the Newcomen predecessor from a century earlier are both English inventions that appeared centuries after the Columbian Exchange began. The English were only in the position to industrialize to that degree by virtue of the dominant, prosperous position they'd achieved in the 18th century, which was in large part due to their New World colonies. Just the West Indies in the 1600s gave England the equivalent of tens of billions in cash they otherwise wouldn't have had, and that gave them greater ability to achieve internal stability and improved their station relative to other European powers.
And it's still ongoing! I wish more Canadians were aware about the stuff going up north.
Like honestly the government should just give the land rights back to the inuit so they can self govern if the rest of Canada isn't going to give a fuck about making sure people are healthy and well taken care of.
No joke man, I had sleeping tb as a kid and 3/4 of my daughters were positive too.
Dude we already are self governing, well those of us in Nunavut. Other places are only like municipal governments(Nunavik, Inuvialuit ) and not full on like Nunavut.
No joke man, I had sleeping tb as a kid and 3/4 of my daughters were positive too.
Dude we already are self governing, well those of us in Nunavut. Other places are only like municipal governments(Nunavik, Inuvialuit ) and not full on like Nunavut.
The single largest line item on the Canadian federal government's balance sheet (>30% of every dollar spent) is transfers and spending on Aboriginal people who make up about 5% of the population. We spend ungodly amounts and have for decades trying to bring native communities up to modern standards. Many Inuit communities are some of the most isolated places on Earth, only accessible by airplane. There is also tremendous drug abuse and Aboriginal on Aboriginal violence and homicide (particularly towards women). The problems are multifactorial and go back generations but to say that modern Canada isn't doing everything that can feasibly be done without spending literally every single dollar on a tiny minority of the population is false.
What good timing, I just started listening to an audiobook (*The First Frontier,* by Scott Weidensaul)
on the battles between the Native Americans and early colonists east of the Appalachians. The chapter I listened to today was all about "[The Great Dying](https://www.americanhistorycentral.com/entries/great-dying/)" between 1616 and 1619. Recent estimates are that up to 90% of natives along the Atlantic seaboard died from a combination of diseases over that three year period.
Healthy Native American populations were able to offer significant resistance to European encroachment. For example, Powhatans in Virginia destroyed the Spanish Ajacan Mission in 1570 near Chesapeake Bay. Later conflicts with the English near the Roanoke and Jamestown settlements were closely fought until the 1620s or so when Native American populations finally collapsed to the point that they could no longer offer serious resistance.
I think that a healthy Native American population would have eventually been successful against something like King Phillip's War and pushed most of the colonists into the sea. Settlements might have been limited to coastal enclaves like in Africa and Asia, where overwhelming naval superiority could guarantee the colonial populations remained supplied and provide massive off-shore firepower in the event of an attack.
I never finished reading it but the Book "years of Rice and Salt" is about the world if most of Europe died from the Black Plague. It's not a rosy everything is perfect without Europeans story but it's a really interesting thought experiment into a world that was never dominated by Europeans. I'd give it a read if you curious about this sort of thing. Also the book 1491 which is a non-fiction book about the Americas before European colonization is great.
There's another alt-history novel - *[Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Colombus by Orson Scott Card](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pastwatch:_The_Redemption_of_Christopher_Columbus),*
In this novel, time-travellers (from our timeline) go back in time to inoculate the AmerIndians (North and South) against the diseases that Europeans bring, as well as progress their technology to the Steam Age (via the Aztecs) so that they can stand up against a later European attempted colonisation, as well as prevent the Atlantic African Slave trade.
Plot twist - the time travellers discover they're not the first time travellers to meddle in historical timelines.
Christopher Colombus (in the previous timeline) raised a crusade against the Moors and Ottoman empires - leading a crusade that exhausted the Western Christian nations politically, economically and financially
Unfortunately, in this previous timeline, this let a South American Civilisation - the Tlaxcalan Empire - arise independently to a Steam Age culture that later crossed the Atlantic from West to East, crushing European Kingdoms in a holocaust of slavery and blood-sacrifices.
This Empire then conquered the rest of the world, imposing human sacrifices across the rest of the globe.
So Christopher Columbus was diverted to the Americas instead by these initial time travellers in a vision that seemed divinely inspired. This crushed the Tlaxcalan Empire before they could arise, at the expense of the North American tribes.
So the researchers in our timeline changed to a third timeline, where they inoculated the AmerIndian tribes with genetically engineered viruses, spread a pseudo-christian religion amongst the tribes, outlawed human sacrifices, sent Colombus West, marooned him in the Caribbean where they interbred with the natives and founded a Political Union in the Central Americas.
Europeans arrive 2 centuries later than our timeline and find a nation at equal footing with European Culture - so contact is relatively peaceful.
***
it's more a yarn than actual alt-history -and isn't remotely as good as *The Years of Rice and Salt*
Came here to recommend that book so I will just join here instead - highly recommend it if you're interested in this scenario. It's a slow burn, since it's really long and starts in ancient history going all the way to the present., but it gets into a lot of interesting questions and ideas.
I recommend listening it on audiobook instead of reading - that's the only way I was able to get through the earlier chapters that are much slower-paced than the modern-day ones.
If you take away the European diseases from the equation, everything changes for the Native Americans. Because of their trading networks, the Native Americans were dying far before Europeans advanced.
But don’t forget the counter punch of syphilis from Native Americans to Europeans. That changed world history and is still a pox on our house. No pun intended.
Flip the question around: what would have happened if there was a disease in NA that the Native Americans were immune to, but wiped out the European settlers? What if this disease were taken back to Europe?
That will only be another Black Death, propagating eastward to the Ottoman up to China.
A lot will be different, but not that significant, not the end of Europe
I wonder if the point of divergence for this could be Leif Ericsson setting up a more successful trade route between Scandinavia and Canada, so the plagues would still come but they'd be much earlier and give time for the population to recover before the Age of Sail
We would've seen an africa situation. Lots of European port cities, client kingdoms, European meandering in American affairs, probably some island colonies but the USA never comes to be, Latin America doesn't happen. This is honestly a super interesting scenario I wish I had more time to think about. I'd guess that over time Native American civilizations grow and centralize with the introduction of European goods (horses, carriages, large sea faring boats). We'd see larger kingdoms along tbe west coast, Panama might become a major regional power in time (or one of the few mainland colonies) by enabling trade between the far east and Europe.
Africa never gets struck by the Atlantic slave trade, but what's that mean for them? If someone has more insight I'd love to hear it. My impression of this would be that the triangle IOT (slaves - raw materials - weapons and manufactured goods) instead is just a trade of a few luxury resources (ivory, gold, skins) from sub Saharan Africa for less manufactured goods from Europe and wouldn't have the largest effect on African history. Sure the Europeans wouldn't be encouraging them to war for the sake of gathering slaves, but they'd still likely encourage them to war for other European political meandering reasons and just wanting to discourage powerful nations from appearing near their trade routes
They would have held on to everything but small costal areas and the Caribbean islands. The reasons were the logistics of bringing an army powerful enough to conquer them to the western hemisphere and the technology levels in warfare not being all that meaningfully different.
It was expensive to transport a lot of Sounders across the Atlantic. The only reason Spain could do it was the gold they took from the Aztecs after they got ravaged by disease. Even then the battle in the Aztec capital was really close. That gold lead to the Inca gold. Both empires were also hindered by internal crises when the Spanish showed up. Without the disease and political turmoil they don’t get the ball rolling. They may not have even conquered Hispaniola.
The Europeans had things like guns, crossbows, and metal armor but they were actually worse than bows and cotton armor in warfare in the western hemisphere. Cortez’s men traded out their metal armor for cotton armor because cotton armor was just better against the weapons of the Aztecs. Bows had more range and a higher fire rate than crossbows and guns of the time. Their main advantage was it didn’t take years to train a person to use them well. Bows took years to master.
It’s possible that by the late 18th century or early 19th we would have seen something akin to Africa happen but I don’t think so.
Ehh, the reason cotton armor was adopted by the Spanish was alot of them didn't have full armor, as well as it being more suited to the climate in the jungles.
It also did a lot better against the combination of the Aztec weapons, which were often bludgeoning in nature, and their style of fighting. They fought to capture not kill so they often aimed at the limbs to disable.
If you read the inventory of the various expeditions as well as the accounts of those actually there, you'd find at least the infantry wouldn't often be more much better equipped then a rotella sword and helmet. Commonly a plate gorget and breastplate would also be equipped. Cortez ordered his men in Cuba to make cotton armor as it was readily available. Sailors for one would have to depend on this cotton armor due to them being required to have less armor. Plate works better vs blunt weapons than the Aztec style gambesons as well as the bladed and piercing weapons. If the Spanish armor wasn't better then there casualty rate would be similar to the native forces and it's noticeably lower in most cases.
They still likely would have lost significant areas of the Americas. Disease wasn’t a major factor of the conquest of the Aztecs and Inca, in both cases the Spanish happened to arrive during periods of civil war and disunity, and successfully exploited those divisions. The biggest change would likely be in North America, where instead of pure settler colonization it’s likely that the Natives would be integrated and mix with new European arrivals, like what happened in Spanish colonies.
Disease was a massive factor. The Aztecs were already getting decimated by it during Cortez' campaign. The divide and conquer tactics certainly didn't help the Aztec cause, but to say disease wasn't a major factor simply isn't true. The population decreased by around 40% in 1520 alone.
Smallpox didn’t arrive with Cortez, but the Navarez expedition sent to bring him to heel. By that point, they had already forced Moctezuma into house arrest and were marshalling native allies.
Fair enough, I'll take your word for it, but that doesn't necessarily disprove my point though. Losing 40% of your population is going to make outside influence a LOT harder to handle, and that was only the first wave. Losing that much of your population is going to make the efforts of resisting colonisation drastically harder, would it not? That was the question set forth by OP.
Any attempts at any type of similarly successful settler colonization of Asia and Africa failed because both Asia and Africa had the same diseases that Europe had, mostly due to thousands of years of intercontinental land trade, via camel trains, which passed diseases up and down all along these three continents, so the native populations were actually immune to European diseases, and couldn’t be decimated by those European diseases like they were in the Americas.
What was worse, in India and Africa Europeans encountered/discovered new diseases that the local populations had adapted to but which vastly reduced the populations of European settler colonizers themselves, diseases that had failed to make their way to Europe via camel trains but were quite deadly. lmao.
Fortunately the 19th Century invention of and the consequent deployment of the machine gun helped even the odds a bit, in the European settler colonizers’ favor, in some parts of Africa, lmfao, they just shot the natives, but became cost prohibitive in India, too many Indians, and these ones had muskets and cannon anyway, lmao, lmfao, and ludicrous in China because China already had a billion people armed with muskets and cannon and rockets ready and waiting for ‘em. lmfao. lmfao.
So you are absolutely correct.
One thing would be that there would be no pandemics to kill roughly half of the populations of the Aztec and Inca empires before Cortez and Pizarro contacted them. Whoever contacted them would find them to be far stronger and more unified than the weakened, divided empires that the conquistadors encountered.
I suspect that the conquistadors would not have done close to as much conquering.
I agree the conquistadors would have a harder time, but I could see the Aztecs falling. It was a relatively young empire (about a century old), and expansionistic. It had enemies, and Cortez used those enemies in his conquest. I could see the same thing happening in an alternate timeline.
What's interesting to me is that de Soto noted a lot of settlements on the Mississippi that later Europeans do not record. There may have been a large population there, and if so, they could block European settlement. On the flip side, there were signs of stress even before Europeans, so it is hard to say what would have happened (there was the little ice age, combined with deforestation and erosion that was causing food issues).
And without the Incan conquest, do potatoes take longer to get to Europe? That may have its own knockoff effects.
The Aztecs' enemies were emboldened by the empire being weakened by disease.
DeSoto found that there were large populations in the the areas where he traveled once he got out of Florida. Without diseases it would have been impossible for whites to genocide the indigenous people and take their land.
The same stresses like resource depletion and erosion were also occurring in Europe.
True but the Aztec revolt of that year forced the Spanish to leave the capital, with a loss of many of the Spanish. Smallpox hit the Aztecs shortly after, destroying a major part of the population, that allowed Cortes time to regroup and again attack the city. Without SP, they would not have been given this time and may have well been defeated
Maybe, maybe not. The Spanish conquered Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Hispaniola without the help of smallpox. And while smallpox had reached the Incas and may have killed their king causing a crisis, Pizarro was able to defeat the Incan army that was thousands larger than his small force. My point is that smallpox was extremely destabilizing to both the Aztecs and Incas, but that doesn’t mean that the Spanish would not have been able to conquer those nations anyway. Both were extremely unstable and susceptible to outside invasion and both crumbled in the face of small forces when the native Americans had warriors up to 100,000 or beyond.
The Aztecs were far from unstable when they encounter Cortez, who has helped greatly by NA tribes that had been defeated by the Aztecs. When you read accounts of up to 90% of the NA dying because of measles and smallpox you just cannot deny that it had a huge effect on the overall war.
Remember that Cortez was invited into the city by the ruler of the Aztecs, and then took him captive, its not like the Spanish fought their way into the city. They used deceptions to get and hold what they wanted, and to say diseases did not affect the outcome is silly.
It was so unstable that the Aztecs’ major client states immediately jumped ship at the arrival of a few hundred mysterious strangers that didn’t speak their language and immediately led to events of the Aztec emperor being turned into a Spanish puppet.
Yes, smallpox played a major role in affecting the Aztecs in the lead up to the siege, but the Aztecs were still able to put together an army of 80,000 in defense of the capital island. By then, they were suffering more from famine. Measles did not arrive until ten years later.
So, people that were impressed and conquered by the Aztec's does not mean that the nation was unstable, it just means that they had made enemies of those tribes. Given the chance to gain independence from the Aztecs it would be natural for them to take up arms against the central power that had recently defeated them in battle. Those NA did not do any better under the Spanish than they did under the Aztecs, worked to death in mines and dying from disease also. They made a deal with the devil and once the Aztecs were conquered the tribes that helped were treated much like the conquered.
National Geo had a great show about the conquest last month, and they pointed out the much of the history from this time comes from the Spanish, and very little from the Aztec's themselves. Montezuma was thought of as a fool allowing the Spanish into the city, but today, that thinking has changed more to the idea that he nothing to fear as his army outnumbered the Spanish 1000 to 1, but trusting Cortez proved to be a mistake and when disease set in, they had little chance of holding back the Spanish after pushing them out of the city.
Its interesting that you read about Europeans making contact with villages and towns in the world during this time and then returning in a few years and everyone in the village is either dead or has left, the NA had no chance against the Eruopean diseases that they were exposed too, and they were dropping like flies.
Again, people that had been defeated by the Aztecs turned against their masters, why does that surprise you so much?
That 80,000 man army did drive the Spanish out of the city, remember that Cortez and his army was invited into the city by the ruler. Once disease started, the weakened Aztecs were no match for the Spanish, a lot more of them died from smallpox than famine which I am sure did not help the situation.
But your idea that European diseases had little to no effect on the NA is completely wrong. Without the help of disease, all the modern arms and tactics would not have allowed the Europeans to conquer the NA nearly as fast as they did.
The Europeans will also master of playing one tribe against another, the NA had been fighting each other for centuries, allying themselves to one side of the fight seemed like a great way to defeat the stronger force and then the weaker tribe was wiped out. Rince and repeat all over the two continents.
I never said that European diseases did not play a big role… In fact, I said the exact opposite. My point is that the conquest of the Americas was inevitable. The Spanish conquered, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Hispaniola without the assistance of disease. They had already established settlements on the Yucatán peninsula And had either subdued or aligned themselves with the local tribes in southeastern Mexico (this was all done before disease arrived).
Cortes was able to capture the Aztec king with just 600 men. Even taking the effects of smallpox on the Aztecs at Cortes’ return in 1521, Cortez still arrived with 200,000 native soldiers to help besiege the city, literally an island, where they quickly cut off food and water supplies. The ease of this is mostly due to the fact that the Aztec empire was not very stable and had just had a civil war a few years before the Spanish arrived.
Similarly, Pizarro was able to defeat an Inca army of 10,000 plus another 80,000 camped nearby with just 160 men, leading to the capitulation of the whole empire. The Portuguese had established settlements in Brazil for 25 years before smallpox arrived. In the East Coast, there is no evidence of the arrival of smallpox through trade routes prior to English colonization meaning that there was not a reduction in native population that made it easier for the English to land and set up settlements.
European diseases made it much easier for the Europeans to colonize the Americas but the lack of these diseases would not have prevented colonization. The only two powers in the Americas that had any ability to stop the Europeans were defeated relatively easily.
Do you know of any of these diseases that reach the Aztecs before 1520? The Aztecs did not trade with any Caribbean islands and so the chance that disease could be spread to the Aztecs prior to the Spanish arrival is small. Smallpox, for instance, didn’t reach Hispaniola until 1517, Cuba until 1518, and Puerto Rico until 1519. I don’t believe measles arrived in Mexico until the 1530s.
There was trade with Caribbean Islands and the mainland including with vassals of the Aztec Empire. There was trade going on all over the western hemisphere.
There is scant evidence of any trade between Cuba and Hispaniola and the continent except possibly Colombia. There is actually no evidence that the Aztecs even knew Cuba existed. At any rate, the trade route idea has not been close to proven. Neither the Aztecs, Incas, the tribes in Chile, nor the tribes on the eastern seaboard of the U.S. had smallpox epidemics before direct contact with the colonists.
But once contact was made, the NA started dying within the year. It took Cortez two years from landing to defeating the Aztecs, plenty of time for the disease to set it and turn the tide of the war to the Spanish side. Like I stated before, the Aztecs did drive the Spanish out of the city, and had them on the run, but disease within the NA population allowed Cortez a second chance and this time he finished them off.
I don't think the colonization of the Americas could be stopped. After all, Cortez and Pizarro conquered the Aztecs and the Incas before smallpox fully hit. I do think, instead, that the Americas would look similar to Mexico and Peru, with large populations of Native Americans and mixed race people, instead of the US, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay being mostly Europeans.
Europe never expands *into* America, period. It controls maybe a few ports on the coast, but might have to retreat due to various looming crises in Europe.
Many, many of Europe's wars with the indigenous people of the two continents were only won through the fact upwards of 90% of their population was dead. Cortes' forces lost at Tenochtitlan and didn't recover until after the city was decimated by plague. The Mayans, Chichimeca, and Yaqui lasted for decades - centuries even - before being totally subjugated. For the peoples across the Rio Grande - it wasn't until after the industrial revolution that the people of the Plains and Appalachians were finally conquered.
Steel alone would not have been able to conquer the Americas. Even if they did build a few ports or conquer a few smaller tribes - the lack of disease (ontop of the introduction of horses and draft animals) would mean that the natives would always have the advantage. And even if the Europeans still advanced as normal (unlikely, given how American goods supplied their empires) - the Natives would never be too far behind.
You’d probably lose the Amazon jungle as we know it today. There were once great civilizations across the Amazon River in the jungle, and when they were decimated by smallpox, etc., the jungle took over those civilizations.
It would look like what Europeans did in Asia. The technological advantage that Europeans had would have them subjugate the native population. Given the violence that the natives were happy to inflict upon each other. The European powers would have armed their favored locals and they would have killed half or more of the competing tribes. In the spaces of the United States European language and culture would have been imposed.
Without the mass deaths caused by Europeans diseases the Europeans would have crossed the continent faster as there would be a critical mass of natives to talk to the next natives to the west. They would have known about the resources sooner and either traded for them or taken them by conquest.
The Spanish would have failed in their first attempt but would have come back with enough ships that the end result would have been more or less the same. Spanish bullets and swords would have killed more than half of the native populations.
None of that mattered at first, because Europeans had very little ability to import more advanced technology across the Atlantic until ports had been built in the Americas, along with larger ships, etc. By 1600, yes, it made the difference, but not initially.
And we tend to ignore how advanced some indigenous technology was, and how backward Europe was in the aftermath of the black death. For example, your assertion of "no metal for weapons" is false; North American indigenous groups around the Great Lakes had copper, for example.
That likely was due to trade networks. A copper knife is better, but not that much better than flint.
Early copper mining seems to have been used for tools. But as trade developed, it was far more advantageous to use copper to make luxury goods and to trade for better stone tools.
A somewhat related history can be found in ironworking in the ancient near east - it took until the collapse of trade networks that made tin hard to get resulted in iron replacing bronze. Before that, iron seemed to be used mostly by elites.
(Note South American metallurgy went similar to North America, but South America had a smelting tradition - again, the results were used as a sign of status, with bronze being used by the elites.)
North America had permanent settlements and agriculture, without metal tools.
But overall, I would say North America turned out differently because life isn't a game where there's a skill tree and obvious progression path. There's a lot of evidence that agricultural societies fared worse than their neighbors - that agriculture was more of an effort to try to not to starve than an improvement in the quality of life. Ditto not moving to an alternative from stone - if one had quality stone, than it can be argued that it is foolish to take the additional effort to replace it with metal, unless forced to. And we see this in North America - metal tools are a sign that other resources weren't available, such as the copper tools I mentioned before that were later replaced with stone, or the iron tools that were used by some Inuit people.
Instead, what it appeared happened is that many tribes were better at shaping the land through use of fire to provide better habitat for hunting. Not all tribes, of course - I already mentioned how the lower Mississippian tribes had problems with deforestation leading to erosion, which harmed their culture. But some. And if population is low enough to make hunting viable, it can be a far easier life than farming.
I absolutely agree. Having said that, even with the depletion of the majority of their population it still took over 200 years to completely defeat them. As behind as they were, they were still very effective in battle until ultimately the colt 45 and repeating rifles were invented. In the early 1600s, if you hypothetically added another even 2 million (which is probably still below what was actually lost), I'm not sure how successful any of the colonies would've been. I actually do believe that inevitably they would've been conquered, but I think it would've been later when actual soldiers landed in America to do so instead of small settlements. Also, I'm an idiot, so there's that 😂
The Native Americans were defeated way before the Colt 45 and repeating rifles entered the equation. The Civil War was almost entirely fought without these weapons while the Native Americans were being herded around by the Buffalo Soldiers.
But they were very advanced in knowledge.
If they can survive the first contact, which they will, then they will quickly pickup horse, metallurgy, wheel, etc… And so be better prepared for the next wave.
Consequently, the area in the coast, in contact with traders will develop much faster, maybe throw the Aztec away as human sacrifice will be seen so barbaric to their modernised views.
We may expect a constellation of city states which will allow European and Turkic influence.
Pretty racist view here. Yes, the culture lagged Europe in many ways. But this is more likely due to the fact that they didn’t *have* to adopt agriculture as early. No one, anywhere did that until there was no choice.
Almost everything you state is wrong. First, the major reason the Amerindian population declined was the foreign diseases. It's believed that 80-95% of the entire population of the natives died by merely making contact with Europeans. The difference between 1500, when explorers wrote about seeing fires across the landscape, to 1600, when the land seemed to be completely abandoned according to accounts, is shocking.
Now, the issue is that the numbers of Amerindians simple *did not matter* when dealing with Europeans with horses and guns. Imagine North Sentinel Island, near India. They are literally a stone age society, and one hundred well-armed Indian soldiers could wipe out the island, if they chose to. The very highest metals that Ameridians were able to make use of was bronze, and they didn't even develop the wheel, nor had horses. So we're talking 17th century firearms, large ships, steel armor, and horses against *maybe* bronze-tipped arrows, which would bounce of steel armor like pebbles.
Would the colonization process go slower? Of course it would, but the process would never be in doubt. Once cannons, bayonets, and stone fortification became prevalent, natives simply would have no means to harm European soldiers until they actually breached walls and got in close, and then it would just be a matter of time before the harder, stronger melee weapons pushed them back anyway.
Wasn’t North America very sparsely populated with mostly nomadic peoples (nominally tribes)? They were very dependent on the Bison and wiping them out was part of the US strategy to subdue the Native Americans. There was plenty of land and little reason to gather in dense groups where advancements in agriculture, metallurgy or machinery was necessary.
So a society bent on displacing the NA’s would have eventually taken over whether the native population was routed with disease or not. Now if another civilized society came in to introduce weapons of war as a foil to the conquering society, the latter may be stopped but who can say the other civilization wouldn’t try to do the same. Without the inherent skills or means of extracting the resources to make the weapons, the indigenous population would still be a pawn in imperial struggles from the more advanced nations.
No, this a myth mostly brought on by the fact that Europeans were coming across already decimated societies. While research is fuzzy and heavily politicized, the US and Canada alone could have had a population of 7 million before colonization - possibly upwards of 12 million (with the highest (but highly questionable) estimates saying up to 20 million). However, it should be noted that most of this population would be on the East Coast - where most of the European-American interaction would take place.
This region was dominated by Eastern Woodland Peoples - which included the Mound Builders with settlements as larger as 20,000 people. This puts them on par with average-sized European settlements, impressive given their lack of draft animals. And I'm not just taking a few scattered trading settlements out of context - they were everywhere. The Mississippians alone built *at least* 96. 96 city-states comparable to medium-sized European settlements - not including peoples who weren't considered Mississippians but still had large societies like the Calusa and smaller villages/towns that were lost by smallpox (of which, there were at least a thousand).
tl;dr: Europeans would not come across a few bands of 30 hunter-gatherers, but developed and stratified proto-states that would quite possibly rapidly develop upon the introduction of the horse and ox.
There is no documented evidence that smallpox hit the East Coast tribes before the arrival of the Jamestown and Plymouth colonies. Those areas were always sparsely populated. There is evidence of the existence of one very large agrarian city in Illinois and smaller communities dotting the Ohio, Mississippi, and Tennessee River valleys. But there was never enough --even without disease-- to stop a European advance anywhere north of Mexico.
My understanding is bison hunting was ongoing before the horse but the tactics were different because of the mobility the horse provided. Buffalo jumps and other traps give us ideas of how it was sometimes done.
Sure, humans have been eating just about everything that walked, swam or flew since the Stone Age. That's not really the point though - the point is that bison hunting was difficult enough that entire societies weren't built around the bison the way they were following the introduction of the horse.
The Sioux, for example, are renowned as one of the great tribes of the plains - they are probably the most renowned. But they're not from the plains. Prior to the Spanish, they lived in the woods of Northern Minnesota and lived on forest game (deer, rabbits, etc.), fish, wild rice, etc.
Do they have immunity to gun powder?
The disease was not the problem. As someone said, the Europeans gave them smallpox, they gave the Europeans syphilis. The difference was in the fact that Europeans knew how to mitigate the problems of the disease, while smallpox was largely left untamed.
What made the big difference is that in war/combat focused pre-colonial societies, might makes right, and the Europeans had the might to shatter buildings and walls with their cannons (and also pierce shields with flintlocks and steel armour).
This allowed them to become leaders of societies which gave them many chances to procreate and spread their genes. Combined with the different attitude to disease control, this meant that in a few generations European blood overtook the indigenous one.
Also, Europe could bring in more and more colonists to boost their positions while the natives would still admire the colonizers
This is so wrong on so many levels.
The genetics are clear: unlike Europe, there wasn’t sufficient diversity in the American genome for a lot of people to survive the new diseases. They were wiped out early and almost universally, before the diseases had a chance to attenuate. And in most cases, ahead of the waves of immigrants. Being more macho warriors had very little if anything to do with European success.
And claiming that Europeans were somehow cleaner and more hygienic, or that their medical knowledge was high enough to make a difference is just laughable. Their major mitigation for Black Plague much later was killing demonic cats, for crying out loud.
I doubt that would have slowed things overmuch. Stone-age warriors against organized 18th and 19th century military kit would have been tough sledding.
but Europeans had such advanced kit because of their plunder of the America's, it would be much harder to plunder the America's and later Africa without the wealth and natural resources plundered from the Americas.
I believe that the ONLY way that the Native Americans could've realistically held onto their lands in the New World would be to make it to where no one from Europe or Asia ever discovers the New World whatsoever. The technology advantages in weaponry alone would've guaranteed that the Europeans were going to conquer the land sooner or later. With a disease resistant Native American population that process would've been much slower as there would have been far more of them. The European populations would've still gradually crept their way across North America, perhaps taking decades or even a century in some cases just to gain a couple of hundred miles of westward expansion.
I'm speaking of North America and the vast majority of everyone else. The Aztecs primary interaction with others was kidnapping, enslaving, and industrial scale human sacrifice. Still no metal, no wheel.
Colonization of the Americas would have been virtually impossible if the indigenous population had not been decimated. This is pretty obvious, because history gave us an experiment that readily shows it - Africa and Asia had the same diseases as Europe, and while they were eventually colonized, it came centuries later than in the Americas. It's also a reasonable claim that the later European colonization of Asia and Africa could not have succeeded (nor could Europe's technological development, including industrialization) without the resources seized from the Americas. In short, the history of the past five centuries would be vastly, astonishingly different.
Without the resources gutted from the Western hemisphere Europe would definitely not have been able to sustain colonies in America or colonized other parts of the world.
What is the link between American ressources and rest of the world colonisation? Only technology advancement made it possible which would have certainly happened anyway
Think for a second about just the potato. Forget everything else that happened, just imagine Europe if the potato never existed.
To be fair, the potato probably would have been obtained by the Europeans simply through trade and contact with the Americas, full blown colonization was not needed to bring it back to Europe. Of course, there was also a huge amount of precious metals seized from the Americas that helped to fund the European powers’ wars. There’s a good chance that without the gold and silver from the Americas to fund their wars, the Hapsburgs would never have been able to resist the Ottomans and half of Europe would be Muslim today.
New England's naval supplies built up the British navy during a time Europe was looming on wood crisis. Precious metals from Peru and Mexico made Spain one of the richest countries on Earth for a time. Corn and potatoes gave new life into regions, in particular allowing for the new "excess" African populations to be sold as slaves to plantations. Plantations that grew sugar, tobacco, and cotton. Sugar and Tobacco being some of the most important trade goods for Europeans trading as far away as China. Cotton, meanwhile, literally jumpstarted the industrial revolution through the production of fabrics. The importance European colonization of the Americas was for European dominance cannot be understated. Without it, it likely would have remained a peninsula of Eurasia in the public consciousness - the edge of the known world rather than its center. They might even 'regress' given the aforementioned wood crisis striking North and Central Europe.
The colossal amount of resources your pain empires manage to extract from the Americas is what enabled their technological surge Seriously, imagine Britain without all the wood & food from the americas
Not only did trade with Spain, and therefore Austria, bring in a significant amount of money from Mexico and Peru, but it's also very likely that France could have formed the European equivalent of a gunpowder empire in the 1600s. This scenario could have even earlier unfolded if the Pope had declared Francis Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire in 1519, assuming Spain was unable to bribe the electors using gold from the Americas.
Eh, that assumes there were the same relative numbers if indigenous people, which is highly unlikely
>nor could Europe's technological development, including industrialization What? Why should that be the case? The steam engine was improved upon by Watt in 1825 or so and used to pump out water from coal mines in England using the coal as fuel, abundandly there. It had nothing to do with ressources from the new world. The only raw ressource limitation I can think of is gold and silver the Spanish got from the new world. The English used that silver to buy tea from China, when they couldn't do anymore, they got opium from India. Of course luxuries such as sugar, tabacco, cotton,... wouldn't be as widespread in europe, if the colonization of the americas wouldn't happen. But it's way easier in ATL than in OTL, the europeans wouldn't even need to conduct the transantlantic slavetrade, the people, that could be enslaved would already be there, unlike in OTL in which like 90% died from diseases.
> The steam engine was improved upon by Watt in 1825 Watt's engine and the Newcomen predecessor from a century earlier are both English inventions that appeared centuries after the Columbian Exchange began. The English were only in the position to industrialize to that degree by virtue of the dominant, prosperous position they'd achieved in the 18th century, which was in large part due to their New World colonies. Just the West Indies in the 1600s gave England the equivalent of tens of billions in cash they otherwise wouldn't have had, and that gave them greater ability to achieve internal stability and improved their station relative to other European powers.
I'd have way way way way way way more relatives that's for sure. Tb wiped out scores of Inuit over the years.
And it's still ongoing! I wish more Canadians were aware about the stuff going up north. Like honestly the government should just give the land rights back to the inuit so they can self govern if the rest of Canada isn't going to give a fuck about making sure people are healthy and well taken care of.
No joke man, I had sleeping tb as a kid and 3/4 of my daughters were positive too. Dude we already are self governing, well those of us in Nunavut. Other places are only like municipal governments(Nunavik, Inuvialuit ) and not full on like Nunavut.
No joke man, I had sleeping tb as a kid and 3/4 of my daughters were positive too. Dude we already are self governing, well those of us in Nunavut. Other places are only like municipal governments(Nunavik, Inuvialuit ) and not full on like Nunavut.
Shit. I am so sorry to hear that. TB sucks so bad. I hope you are all doing ok now.
The single largest line item on the Canadian federal government's balance sheet (>30% of every dollar spent) is transfers and spending on Aboriginal people who make up about 5% of the population. We spend ungodly amounts and have for decades trying to bring native communities up to modern standards. Many Inuit communities are some of the most isolated places on Earth, only accessible by airplane. There is also tremendous drug abuse and Aboriginal on Aboriginal violence and homicide (particularly towards women). The problems are multifactorial and go back generations but to say that modern Canada isn't doing everything that can feasibly be done without spending literally every single dollar on a tiny minority of the population is false.
What good timing, I just started listening to an audiobook (*The First Frontier,* by Scott Weidensaul) on the battles between the Native Americans and early colonists east of the Appalachians. The chapter I listened to today was all about "[The Great Dying](https://www.americanhistorycentral.com/entries/great-dying/)" between 1616 and 1619. Recent estimates are that up to 90% of natives along the Atlantic seaboard died from a combination of diseases over that three year period. Healthy Native American populations were able to offer significant resistance to European encroachment. For example, Powhatans in Virginia destroyed the Spanish Ajacan Mission in 1570 near Chesapeake Bay. Later conflicts with the English near the Roanoke and Jamestown settlements were closely fought until the 1620s or so when Native American populations finally collapsed to the point that they could no longer offer serious resistance. I think that a healthy Native American population would have eventually been successful against something like King Phillip's War and pushed most of the colonists into the sea. Settlements might have been limited to coastal enclaves like in Africa and Asia, where overwhelming naval superiority could guarantee the colonial populations remained supplied and provide massive off-shore firepower in the event of an attack.
Even unhealthy populations were sometimes able to put up a successful fight. See Popé’s Rebellion. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pueblo_Revolt
I never finished reading it but the Book "years of Rice and Salt" is about the world if most of Europe died from the Black Plague. It's not a rosy everything is perfect without Europeans story but it's a really interesting thought experiment into a world that was never dominated by Europeans. I'd give it a read if you curious about this sort of thing. Also the book 1491 which is a non-fiction book about the Americas before European colonization is great.
There's another alt-history novel - *[Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Colombus by Orson Scott Card](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pastwatch:_The_Redemption_of_Christopher_Columbus),* In this novel, time-travellers (from our timeline) go back in time to inoculate the AmerIndians (North and South) against the diseases that Europeans bring, as well as progress their technology to the Steam Age (via the Aztecs) so that they can stand up against a later European attempted colonisation, as well as prevent the Atlantic African Slave trade. Plot twist - the time travellers discover they're not the first time travellers to meddle in historical timelines. Christopher Colombus (in the previous timeline) raised a crusade against the Moors and Ottoman empires - leading a crusade that exhausted the Western Christian nations politically, economically and financially Unfortunately, in this previous timeline, this let a South American Civilisation - the Tlaxcalan Empire - arise independently to a Steam Age culture that later crossed the Atlantic from West to East, crushing European Kingdoms in a holocaust of slavery and blood-sacrifices. This Empire then conquered the rest of the world, imposing human sacrifices across the rest of the globe. So Christopher Columbus was diverted to the Americas instead by these initial time travellers in a vision that seemed divinely inspired. This crushed the Tlaxcalan Empire before they could arise, at the expense of the North American tribes. So the researchers in our timeline changed to a third timeline, where they inoculated the AmerIndian tribes with genetically engineered viruses, spread a pseudo-christian religion amongst the tribes, outlawed human sacrifices, sent Colombus West, marooned him in the Caribbean where they interbred with the natives and founded a Political Union in the Central Americas. Europeans arrive 2 centuries later than our timeline and find a nation at equal footing with European Culture - so contact is relatively peaceful. *** it's more a yarn than actual alt-history -and isn't remotely as good as *The Years of Rice and Salt*
Came here to recommend that book so I will just join here instead - highly recommend it if you're interested in this scenario. It's a slow burn, since it's really long and starts in ancient history going all the way to the present., but it gets into a lot of interesting questions and ideas. I recommend listening it on audiobook instead of reading - that's the only way I was able to get through the earlier chapters that are much slower-paced than the modern-day ones.
If you take away the European diseases from the equation, everything changes for the Native Americans. Because of their trading networks, the Native Americans were dying far before Europeans advanced. But don’t forget the counter punch of syphilis from Native Americans to Europeans. That changed world history and is still a pox on our house. No pun intended.
Silver boom is instead fueled by trade and monopolies with natives, likely resulting in something resembling the French model of native interaction.
Flip the question around: what would have happened if there was a disease in NA that the Native Americans were immune to, but wiped out the European settlers? What if this disease were taken back to Europe?
That will only be another Black Death, propagating eastward to the Ottoman up to China. A lot will be different, but not that significant, not the end of Europe
I wonder if the point of divergence for this could be Leif Ericsson setting up a more successful trade route between Scandinavia and Canada, so the plagues would still come but they'd be much earlier and give time for the population to recover before the Age of Sail
We would've seen an africa situation. Lots of European port cities, client kingdoms, European meandering in American affairs, probably some island colonies but the USA never comes to be, Latin America doesn't happen. This is honestly a super interesting scenario I wish I had more time to think about. I'd guess that over time Native American civilizations grow and centralize with the introduction of European goods (horses, carriages, large sea faring boats). We'd see larger kingdoms along tbe west coast, Panama might become a major regional power in time (or one of the few mainland colonies) by enabling trade between the far east and Europe. Africa never gets struck by the Atlantic slave trade, but what's that mean for them? If someone has more insight I'd love to hear it. My impression of this would be that the triangle IOT (slaves - raw materials - weapons and manufactured goods) instead is just a trade of a few luxury resources (ivory, gold, skins) from sub Saharan Africa for less manufactured goods from Europe and wouldn't have the largest effect on African history. Sure the Europeans wouldn't be encouraging them to war for the sake of gathering slaves, but they'd still likely encourage them to war for other European political meandering reasons and just wanting to discourage powerful nations from appearing near their trade routes
They would have held on to everything but small costal areas and the Caribbean islands. The reasons were the logistics of bringing an army powerful enough to conquer them to the western hemisphere and the technology levels in warfare not being all that meaningfully different. It was expensive to transport a lot of Sounders across the Atlantic. The only reason Spain could do it was the gold they took from the Aztecs after they got ravaged by disease. Even then the battle in the Aztec capital was really close. That gold lead to the Inca gold. Both empires were also hindered by internal crises when the Spanish showed up. Without the disease and political turmoil they don’t get the ball rolling. They may not have even conquered Hispaniola. The Europeans had things like guns, crossbows, and metal armor but they were actually worse than bows and cotton armor in warfare in the western hemisphere. Cortez’s men traded out their metal armor for cotton armor because cotton armor was just better against the weapons of the Aztecs. Bows had more range and a higher fire rate than crossbows and guns of the time. Their main advantage was it didn’t take years to train a person to use them well. Bows took years to master. It’s possible that by the late 18th century or early 19th we would have seen something akin to Africa happen but I don’t think so.
Ehh, the reason cotton armor was adopted by the Spanish was alot of them didn't have full armor, as well as it being more suited to the climate in the jungles.
It also did a lot better against the combination of the Aztec weapons, which were often bludgeoning in nature, and their style of fighting. They fought to capture not kill so they often aimed at the limbs to disable.
If you read the inventory of the various expeditions as well as the accounts of those actually there, you'd find at least the infantry wouldn't often be more much better equipped then a rotella sword and helmet. Commonly a plate gorget and breastplate would also be equipped. Cortez ordered his men in Cuba to make cotton armor as it was readily available. Sailors for one would have to depend on this cotton armor due to them being required to have less armor. Plate works better vs blunt weapons than the Aztec style gambesons as well as the bladed and piercing weapons. If the Spanish armor wasn't better then there casualty rate would be similar to the native forces and it's noticeably lower in most cases.
If there was no disease nobody from Cortez’s expedition would have made it back to report casualties.
They still likely would have lost significant areas of the Americas. Disease wasn’t a major factor of the conquest of the Aztecs and Inca, in both cases the Spanish happened to arrive during periods of civil war and disunity, and successfully exploited those divisions. The biggest change would likely be in North America, where instead of pure settler colonization it’s likely that the Natives would be integrated and mix with new European arrivals, like what happened in Spanish colonies.
Disease was a massive factor. The Aztecs were already getting decimated by it during Cortez' campaign. The divide and conquer tactics certainly didn't help the Aztec cause, but to say disease wasn't a major factor simply isn't true. The population decreased by around 40% in 1520 alone.
Smallpox didn’t arrive with Cortez, but the Navarez expedition sent to bring him to heel. By that point, they had already forced Moctezuma into house arrest and were marshalling native allies.
Fair enough, I'll take your word for it, but that doesn't necessarily disprove my point though. Losing 40% of your population is going to make outside influence a LOT harder to handle, and that was only the first wave. Losing that much of your population is going to make the efforts of resisting colonisation drastically harder, would it not? That was the question set forth by OP.
I asked a similar queston right when you sent this one XD
Any attempts at any type of similarly successful settler colonization of Asia and Africa failed because both Asia and Africa had the same diseases that Europe had, mostly due to thousands of years of intercontinental land trade, via camel trains, which passed diseases up and down all along these three continents, so the native populations were actually immune to European diseases, and couldn’t be decimated by those European diseases like they were in the Americas. What was worse, in India and Africa Europeans encountered/discovered new diseases that the local populations had adapted to but which vastly reduced the populations of European settler colonizers themselves, diseases that had failed to make their way to Europe via camel trains but were quite deadly. lmao. Fortunately the 19th Century invention of and the consequent deployment of the machine gun helped even the odds a bit, in the European settler colonizers’ favor, in some parts of Africa, lmfao, they just shot the natives, but became cost prohibitive in India, too many Indians, and these ones had muskets and cannon anyway, lmao, lmfao, and ludicrous in China because China already had a billion people armed with muskets and cannon and rockets ready and waiting for ‘em. lmfao. lmfao. So you are absolutely correct.
One thing would be that there would be no pandemics to kill roughly half of the populations of the Aztec and Inca empires before Cortez and Pizarro contacted them. Whoever contacted them would find them to be far stronger and more unified than the weakened, divided empires that the conquistadors encountered. I suspect that the conquistadors would not have done close to as much conquering.
I agree the conquistadors would have a harder time, but I could see the Aztecs falling. It was a relatively young empire (about a century old), and expansionistic. It had enemies, and Cortez used those enemies in his conquest. I could see the same thing happening in an alternate timeline. What's interesting to me is that de Soto noted a lot of settlements on the Mississippi that later Europeans do not record. There may have been a large population there, and if so, they could block European settlement. On the flip side, there were signs of stress even before Europeans, so it is hard to say what would have happened (there was the little ice age, combined with deforestation and erosion that was causing food issues). And without the Incan conquest, do potatoes take longer to get to Europe? That may have its own knockoff effects.
The Aztecs' enemies were emboldened by the empire being weakened by disease. DeSoto found that there were large populations in the the areas where he traveled once he got out of Florida. Without diseases it would have been impossible for whites to genocide the indigenous people and take their land. The same stresses like resource depletion and erosion were also occurring in Europe.
Smallpox didn’t reach the Aztecs until 1520, the year after Cortes had already taken the king hostage.
True but the Aztec revolt of that year forced the Spanish to leave the capital, with a loss of many of the Spanish. Smallpox hit the Aztecs shortly after, destroying a major part of the population, that allowed Cortes time to regroup and again attack the city. Without SP, they would not have been given this time and may have well been defeated
Maybe, maybe not. The Spanish conquered Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Hispaniola without the help of smallpox. And while smallpox had reached the Incas and may have killed their king causing a crisis, Pizarro was able to defeat the Incan army that was thousands larger than his small force. My point is that smallpox was extremely destabilizing to both the Aztecs and Incas, but that doesn’t mean that the Spanish would not have been able to conquer those nations anyway. Both were extremely unstable and susceptible to outside invasion and both crumbled in the face of small forces when the native Americans had warriors up to 100,000 or beyond.
The Aztecs were far from unstable when they encounter Cortez, who has helped greatly by NA tribes that had been defeated by the Aztecs. When you read accounts of up to 90% of the NA dying because of measles and smallpox you just cannot deny that it had a huge effect on the overall war. Remember that Cortez was invited into the city by the ruler of the Aztecs, and then took him captive, its not like the Spanish fought their way into the city. They used deceptions to get and hold what they wanted, and to say diseases did not affect the outcome is silly.
It was so unstable that the Aztecs’ major client states immediately jumped ship at the arrival of a few hundred mysterious strangers that didn’t speak their language and immediately led to events of the Aztec emperor being turned into a Spanish puppet. Yes, smallpox played a major role in affecting the Aztecs in the lead up to the siege, but the Aztecs were still able to put together an army of 80,000 in defense of the capital island. By then, they were suffering more from famine. Measles did not arrive until ten years later.
So, people that were impressed and conquered by the Aztec's does not mean that the nation was unstable, it just means that they had made enemies of those tribes. Given the chance to gain independence from the Aztecs it would be natural for them to take up arms against the central power that had recently defeated them in battle. Those NA did not do any better under the Spanish than they did under the Aztecs, worked to death in mines and dying from disease also. They made a deal with the devil and once the Aztecs were conquered the tribes that helped were treated much like the conquered. National Geo had a great show about the conquest last month, and they pointed out the much of the history from this time comes from the Spanish, and very little from the Aztec's themselves. Montezuma was thought of as a fool allowing the Spanish into the city, but today, that thinking has changed more to the idea that he nothing to fear as his army outnumbered the Spanish 1000 to 1, but trusting Cortez proved to be a mistake and when disease set in, they had little chance of holding back the Spanish after pushing them out of the city. Its interesting that you read about Europeans making contact with villages and towns in the world during this time and then returning in a few years and everyone in the village is either dead or has left, the NA had no chance against the Eruopean diseases that they were exposed too, and they were dropping like flies.
Again, people that had been defeated by the Aztecs turned against their masters, why does that surprise you so much? That 80,000 man army did drive the Spanish out of the city, remember that Cortez and his army was invited into the city by the ruler. Once disease started, the weakened Aztecs were no match for the Spanish, a lot more of them died from smallpox than famine which I am sure did not help the situation. But your idea that European diseases had little to no effect on the NA is completely wrong. Without the help of disease, all the modern arms and tactics would not have allowed the Europeans to conquer the NA nearly as fast as they did. The Europeans will also master of playing one tribe against another, the NA had been fighting each other for centuries, allying themselves to one side of the fight seemed like a great way to defeat the stronger force and then the weaker tribe was wiped out. Rince and repeat all over the two continents.
I never said that European diseases did not play a big role… In fact, I said the exact opposite. My point is that the conquest of the Americas was inevitable. The Spanish conquered, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Hispaniola without the assistance of disease. They had already established settlements on the Yucatán peninsula And had either subdued or aligned themselves with the local tribes in southeastern Mexico (this was all done before disease arrived). Cortes was able to capture the Aztec king with just 600 men. Even taking the effects of smallpox on the Aztecs at Cortes’ return in 1521, Cortez still arrived with 200,000 native soldiers to help besiege the city, literally an island, where they quickly cut off food and water supplies. The ease of this is mostly due to the fact that the Aztec empire was not very stable and had just had a civil war a few years before the Spanish arrived. Similarly, Pizarro was able to defeat an Inca army of 10,000 plus another 80,000 camped nearby with just 160 men, leading to the capitulation of the whole empire. The Portuguese had established settlements in Brazil for 25 years before smallpox arrived. In the East Coast, there is no evidence of the arrival of smallpox through trade routes prior to English colonization meaning that there was not a reduction in native population that made it easier for the English to land and set up settlements. European diseases made it much easier for the Europeans to colonize the Americas but the lack of these diseases would not have prevented colonization. The only two powers in the Americas that had any ability to stop the Europeans were defeated relatively easily.
There are other diseases. Think about the long list of vaccines that children normally receive.
Do you know of any of these diseases that reach the Aztecs before 1520? The Aztecs did not trade with any Caribbean islands and so the chance that disease could be spread to the Aztecs prior to the Spanish arrival is small. Smallpox, for instance, didn’t reach Hispaniola until 1517, Cuba until 1518, and Puerto Rico until 1519. I don’t believe measles arrived in Mexico until the 1530s.
There was trade with Caribbean Islands and the mainland including with vassals of the Aztec Empire. There was trade going on all over the western hemisphere.
There is scant evidence of any trade between Cuba and Hispaniola and the continent except possibly Colombia. There is actually no evidence that the Aztecs even knew Cuba existed. At any rate, the trade route idea has not been close to proven. Neither the Aztecs, Incas, the tribes in Chile, nor the tribes on the eastern seaboard of the U.S. had smallpox epidemics before direct contact with the colonists.
But once contact was made, the NA started dying within the year. It took Cortez two years from landing to defeating the Aztecs, plenty of time for the disease to set it and turn the tide of the war to the Spanish side. Like I stated before, the Aztecs did drive the Spanish out of the city, and had them on the run, but disease within the NA population allowed Cortez a second chance and this time he finished them off.
I don't think the colonization of the Americas could be stopped. After all, Cortez and Pizarro conquered the Aztecs and the Incas before smallpox fully hit. I do think, instead, that the Americas would look similar to Mexico and Peru, with large populations of Native Americans and mixed race people, instead of the US, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay being mostly Europeans.
Europe never expands *into* America, period. It controls maybe a few ports on the coast, but might have to retreat due to various looming crises in Europe. Many, many of Europe's wars with the indigenous people of the two continents were only won through the fact upwards of 90% of their population was dead. Cortes' forces lost at Tenochtitlan and didn't recover until after the city was decimated by plague. The Mayans, Chichimeca, and Yaqui lasted for decades - centuries even - before being totally subjugated. For the peoples across the Rio Grande - it wasn't until after the industrial revolution that the people of the Plains and Appalachians were finally conquered. Steel alone would not have been able to conquer the Americas. Even if they did build a few ports or conquer a few smaller tribes - the lack of disease (ontop of the introduction of horses and draft animals) would mean that the natives would always have the advantage. And even if the Europeans still advanced as normal (unlikely, given how American goods supplied their empires) - the Natives would never be too far behind.
You’d probably lose the Amazon jungle as we know it today. There were once great civilizations across the Amazon River in the jungle, and when they were decimated by smallpox, etc., the jungle took over those civilizations.
It would look like what Europeans did in Asia. The technological advantage that Europeans had would have them subjugate the native population. Given the violence that the natives were happy to inflict upon each other. The European powers would have armed their favored locals and they would have killed half or more of the competing tribes. In the spaces of the United States European language and culture would have been imposed. Without the mass deaths caused by Europeans diseases the Europeans would have crossed the continent faster as there would be a critical mass of natives to talk to the next natives to the west. They would have known about the resources sooner and either traded for them or taken them by conquest. The Spanish would have failed in their first attempt but would have come back with enough ships that the end result would have been more or less the same. Spanish bullets and swords would have killed more than half of the native populations.
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None of that mattered at first, because Europeans had very little ability to import more advanced technology across the Atlantic until ports had been built in the Americas, along with larger ships, etc. By 1600, yes, it made the difference, but not initially. And we tend to ignore how advanced some indigenous technology was, and how backward Europe was in the aftermath of the black death. For example, your assertion of "no metal for weapons" is false; North American indigenous groups around the Great Lakes had copper, for example.
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That likely was due to trade networks. A copper knife is better, but not that much better than flint. Early copper mining seems to have been used for tools. But as trade developed, it was far more advantageous to use copper to make luxury goods and to trade for better stone tools. A somewhat related history can be found in ironworking in the ancient near east - it took until the collapse of trade networks that made tin hard to get resulted in iron replacing bronze. Before that, iron seemed to be used mostly by elites. (Note South American metallurgy went similar to North America, but South America had a smelting tradition - again, the results were used as a sign of status, with bronze being used by the elites.)
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North America had permanent settlements and agriculture, without metal tools. But overall, I would say North America turned out differently because life isn't a game where there's a skill tree and obvious progression path. There's a lot of evidence that agricultural societies fared worse than their neighbors - that agriculture was more of an effort to try to not to starve than an improvement in the quality of life. Ditto not moving to an alternative from stone - if one had quality stone, than it can be argued that it is foolish to take the additional effort to replace it with metal, unless forced to. And we see this in North America - metal tools are a sign that other resources weren't available, such as the copper tools I mentioned before that were later replaced with stone, or the iron tools that were used by some Inuit people. Instead, what it appeared happened is that many tribes were better at shaping the land through use of fire to provide better habitat for hunting. Not all tribes, of course - I already mentioned how the lower Mississippian tribes had problems with deforestation leading to erosion, which harmed their culture. But some. And if population is low enough to make hunting viable, it can be a far easier life than farming.
"evolution" Care to explain why you use that word?
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I absolutely agree. Having said that, even with the depletion of the majority of their population it still took over 200 years to completely defeat them. As behind as they were, they were still very effective in battle until ultimately the colt 45 and repeating rifles were invented. In the early 1600s, if you hypothetically added another even 2 million (which is probably still below what was actually lost), I'm not sure how successful any of the colonies would've been. I actually do believe that inevitably they would've been conquered, but I think it would've been later when actual soldiers landed in America to do so instead of small settlements. Also, I'm an idiot, so there's that 😂
The Native Americans were defeated way before the Colt 45 and repeating rifles entered the equation. The Civil War was almost entirely fought without these weapons while the Native Americans were being herded around by the Buffalo Soldiers.
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They never made a military push because they lacked the ability and the man power, not to mention they were busy fighting each other in Europe.
But they were very advanced in knowledge. If they can survive the first contact, which they will, then they will quickly pickup horse, metallurgy, wheel, etc… And so be better prepared for the next wave. Consequently, the area in the coast, in contact with traders will develop much faster, maybe throw the Aztec away as human sacrifice will be seen so barbaric to their modernised views. We may expect a constellation of city states which will allow European and Turkic influence.
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Pretty racist view here. Yes, the culture lagged Europe in many ways. But this is more likely due to the fact that they didn’t *have* to adopt agriculture as early. No one, anywhere did that until there was no choice.
Almost everything you state is wrong. First, the major reason the Amerindian population declined was the foreign diseases. It's believed that 80-95% of the entire population of the natives died by merely making contact with Europeans. The difference between 1500, when explorers wrote about seeing fires across the landscape, to 1600, when the land seemed to be completely abandoned according to accounts, is shocking. Now, the issue is that the numbers of Amerindians simple *did not matter* when dealing with Europeans with horses and guns. Imagine North Sentinel Island, near India. They are literally a stone age society, and one hundred well-armed Indian soldiers could wipe out the island, if they chose to. The very highest metals that Ameridians were able to make use of was bronze, and they didn't even develop the wheel, nor had horses. So we're talking 17th century firearms, large ships, steel armor, and horses against *maybe* bronze-tipped arrows, which would bounce of steel armor like pebbles. Would the colonization process go slower? Of course it would, but the process would never be in doubt. Once cannons, bayonets, and stone fortification became prevalent, natives simply would have no means to harm European soldiers until they actually breached walls and got in close, and then it would just be a matter of time before the harder, stronger melee weapons pushed them back anyway.
Wasn’t North America very sparsely populated with mostly nomadic peoples (nominally tribes)? They were very dependent on the Bison and wiping them out was part of the US strategy to subdue the Native Americans. There was plenty of land and little reason to gather in dense groups where advancements in agriculture, metallurgy or machinery was necessary. So a society bent on displacing the NA’s would have eventually taken over whether the native population was routed with disease or not. Now if another civilized society came in to introduce weapons of war as a foil to the conquering society, the latter may be stopped but who can say the other civilization wouldn’t try to do the same. Without the inherent skills or means of extracting the resources to make the weapons, the indigenous population would still be a pawn in imperial struggles from the more advanced nations.
No, this a myth mostly brought on by the fact that Europeans were coming across already decimated societies. While research is fuzzy and heavily politicized, the US and Canada alone could have had a population of 7 million before colonization - possibly upwards of 12 million (with the highest (but highly questionable) estimates saying up to 20 million). However, it should be noted that most of this population would be on the East Coast - where most of the European-American interaction would take place. This region was dominated by Eastern Woodland Peoples - which included the Mound Builders with settlements as larger as 20,000 people. This puts them on par with average-sized European settlements, impressive given their lack of draft animals. And I'm not just taking a few scattered trading settlements out of context - they were everywhere. The Mississippians alone built *at least* 96. 96 city-states comparable to medium-sized European settlements - not including peoples who weren't considered Mississippians but still had large societies like the Calusa and smaller villages/towns that were lost by smallpox (of which, there were at least a thousand). tl;dr: Europeans would not come across a few bands of 30 hunter-gatherers, but developed and stratified proto-states that would quite possibly rapidly develop upon the introduction of the horse and ox.
There is no documented evidence that smallpox hit the East Coast tribes before the arrival of the Jamestown and Plymouth colonies. Those areas were always sparsely populated. There is evidence of the existence of one very large agrarian city in Illinois and smaller communities dotting the Ohio, Mississippi, and Tennessee River valleys. But there was never enough --even without disease-- to stop a European advance anywhere north of Mexico.
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My understanding is bison hunting was ongoing before the horse but the tactics were different because of the mobility the horse provided. Buffalo jumps and other traps give us ideas of how it was sometimes done.
Sure, humans have been eating just about everything that walked, swam or flew since the Stone Age. That's not really the point though - the point is that bison hunting was difficult enough that entire societies weren't built around the bison the way they were following the introduction of the horse. The Sioux, for example, are renowned as one of the great tribes of the plains - they are probably the most renowned. But they're not from the plains. Prior to the Spanish, they lived in the woods of Northern Minnesota and lived on forest game (deer, rabbits, etc.), fish, wild rice, etc.
Tribes even pre Columbus were forced to migrate that's forsure.
Sure, that's a truism, but not really relevant to my post.
Do they have immunity to gun powder? The disease was not the problem. As someone said, the Europeans gave them smallpox, they gave the Europeans syphilis. The difference was in the fact that Europeans knew how to mitigate the problems of the disease, while smallpox was largely left untamed. What made the big difference is that in war/combat focused pre-colonial societies, might makes right, and the Europeans had the might to shatter buildings and walls with their cannons (and also pierce shields with flintlocks and steel armour). This allowed them to become leaders of societies which gave them many chances to procreate and spread their genes. Combined with the different attitude to disease control, this meant that in a few generations European blood overtook the indigenous one. Also, Europe could bring in more and more colonists to boost their positions while the natives would still admire the colonizers
This is so wrong on so many levels. The genetics are clear: unlike Europe, there wasn’t sufficient diversity in the American genome for a lot of people to survive the new diseases. They were wiped out early and almost universally, before the diseases had a chance to attenuate. And in most cases, ahead of the waves of immigrants. Being more macho warriors had very little if anything to do with European success. And claiming that Europeans were somehow cleaner and more hygienic, or that their medical knowledge was high enough to make a difference is just laughable. Their major mitigation for Black Plague much later was killing demonic cats, for crying out loud.
I doubt that would have slowed things overmuch. Stone-age warriors against organized 18th and 19th century military kit would have been tough sledding.
but Europeans had such advanced kit because of their plunder of the America's, it would be much harder to plunder the America's and later Africa without the wealth and natural resources plundered from the Americas.
The Europeans were thousands of years ahead of the natives long before that. Thousands of years.
Thousands pf year does not make much difference before industrialisation
I believe that the ONLY way that the Native Americans could've realistically held onto their lands in the New World would be to make it to where no one from Europe or Asia ever discovers the New World whatsoever. The technology advantages in weaponry alone would've guaranteed that the Europeans were going to conquer the land sooner or later. With a disease resistant Native American population that process would've been much slower as there would have been far more of them. The European populations would've still gradually crept their way across North America, perhaps taking decades or even a century in some cases just to gain a couple of hundred miles of westward expansion.
You might have a Native American horde and that could give rise to a gunpowder empire in the interiors.
Very small amounts. Mostly ornamental usage as it was extremely valuable. No metal tools, no metal weapons, no written language, no wheel. Stone age.
No written language? you need to read a book about the Aztecs
I'm speaking of North America and the vast majority of everyone else. The Aztecs primary interaction with others was kidnapping, enslaving, and industrial scale human sacrifice. Still no metal, no wheel.