Mesoamerica a few centuries later did end up having the density required for disease transfer as history shows, but it was also helped along by the Spanish's active invasion. If the Spanish hadn't ever set foot on shore and the Mesoamerican society was allowed to develop, they would likely have developed their own diseases and the subsequent immune response, which may have helped fight Smallpox. But the Spanish got there before they had that opportunity.
If the Spanish invasion had been replaced by a smaller troupe of Viking traders, I would be interested to see what would happen, and you might be right if you only change that one variable. But who knows?
Indigenous Americans didn't carry over many of the serious diseases from the old world and the animals that were there mostly didn't contribute serious new ones. There are a few cases where we can see things like tuberculosis (from seals), but they're limited and evidence of them largely hasn't survived in extant populations. Likewise, Icelandic populations were isolated and relatively healthy. Those that survived the long trip to Greenland and the Americas would have been even more so.
Aren't syphilis and Lyme disease of New World origin?
As for Borreliosis, there are many variants of it endemic to Europe and spread by ticks. No evidence that it came from the Americas.
Neither of those spirochetes are zoonotic.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyme_disease#Transmission
I had never heard the term until today, so take the claim with a pinch.
"Ötzi the iceman" had it 5kya: https://www.utoronto.ca/news/u-t-researchers-find-ancient-ic...
An ancestor to that bacteria was found in a tick that lived 15Mya: https://www.livescience.com/46007-lyme-disease-ancient-amber...
Missing a single erroroneous instance of a word that won't get caught by spell check may be embarrassing, but it's hardly material.
> ("Española Island…a part of the Galápagos Islands")
https://www.galapagos.org/about_galapagos/about-galapagos/th...
What is the error here?
note: Spain was unified in 1491.
Citation needed?
I always find the slightly emotional charge discussions (and subsequent downvotes) odd. There seems to be a very strong interest in certain groups to downplay or deride either the colonized, or colonizing side on measurements such as perceived development.
Obviously the land area of Spain has "always" existed. I think referring to "Spain's existence" as the socio-political entity established during the Reconquista is a reasonable position for a throw-away line during a HN discussion.
Not really. Old World societies had access to many more domesticated animals, a key reason that they also had major diseases.
The most charitable reading of this is "if cowpox, monkeypox or some other zoonotic pox virus had an opportunity to spread through Mesoamerican society, they might've fared better with smallpox."
A less charitable reading is "they might've faired better with smallpox if they had some other disease exposure prior to invasion."
Either of these cases seems implausible. I don't know of any pox virus from the Americas that provides immunity to smallpox. In Europe we know that cowpox provided immunity among milkmaids. We also know that it didn't spread between people. There's no reason to believe that the only missing element was time for some other pox to emerge. As for the less charitable reading, prior infection with a pathogen is unlikely to provide any benefit against an unrelated pathogen. In the decades after smallpox swept through Aztec society the Cocoliztli epidemics killed twice again as many people.
Fundamentally the problem was the introduction of a virus with a high mortality rate to an immunologically naive population. There's a major difference between a disease killing 50% of your under 12 population and 50% of everyone. The former is a disaster, the latter will collapse society, particularly one already fighting against an invasion.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cahokia#Decline%20(13th%20an...
> The population of Cahokia began to decline during the 13th century, and the site was eventually abandoned by around 1350.
>That's like saying the Roman and Carthaginian empires both fell around the same time, and thus were part of the same event.
Not trying to say they were caused by the same event but it does seem to be a trend that Native America had issues sustaining permanent population centers like you saw in other parts of the world.
Okay, this is just plain false. The Classical Maya collapse could be compared to the Fall of Rome or the end of the Han dynasty (although perhaps I should use Tang instead for historical proximity). That is to say, the Maya didn't disappear. Completely the opposite--the Classical Maya collapse is actually reflected in the rise of the Yucatec and other lowland Mayan city centers, notably Chichen Itza, which would itself decline a few hundred years later, before the city of Mayapan rose to prominence, again declining again a hundred-ish years later. Mayan city states remained independent and following Mayan cultural and religious practices even after the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs, with the last Mayan kingdom falling only in 1697. Even then, while no longer independent, Mayan culture still persists to this day.
There are civilizations that are hard to trace. What happened to the people of, say, Cahokia or Teotihuacan are still a mystery to this day. But the Maya are absolutely not one of those.
I’m not read up on Cahokia, but it’s probably more similar to the dissolution/dispersal of the (lowland) Maya vs something like a mass die off.
Pre contact population centers were additionally in Mesoamérica & northern South America, where most of the total post contact population drop occurred.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_trans-oceanic_co...
If Europeans became deathly ill in the Americas, they were probably left in the Americas to die rather than being taken back to Europe. The First Peoples from the Americas were not on average traveling to Europe and staying there for months, years, or lifetimes. They were staying among people in the Americas where they could continue to spread the illnesses. Healthy young soldiers, sailors, and merchants could bring both asymptomatic and presymptomatic cases of illness across an ocean to populations who weren't traveling nearly as much in the opposite direction. When entire colonies of mixed ages, genders, professions, and social roles moved permanently from Europe to the Americas, likewise the trips back to Europe also for former Europeans were far less common and included far fewer than the number of people continuing to interact with others in the Americas.
In short, it was probably easier for mass migrations of Europeans to spread one or more cases of a disease to the Americas where it then spread from more prolonged contact with the population than it was for a European to contract a serious illness in the Americas and take it back to Europe on a military or merchant ship.
As to the Norse and smallpox, the Crusades of the late 11th century and the 12th century were a big part of its spread to most of Europe. There's a very good chance I think there was little risk of a Norse ship spreading it in the early 11th century. As you said, it could be a very different world if they had.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newfoundland_(island)#First_in...
Of course, if the native population died off around them, the Vikings would probably have expanded their settlements and perhaps ruled North America instead.
Now you might think of Iceland and Norse Greenland as a counter example. But Norse Greenland never really thrived, and was eventually abandoned. Iceland however thrived, but it is so much closer to Norway about 7 days at see with the potential to stop at the Faeroe Islands.
The voyage between Greenland and Iceland is similar (only a bit longer + sailing up the west coast of Greenland). And finally you need another week or two to cross the Labrador sea from Greenland. However that route is much harder in the winter then between Iceland and Norway, and Greenland is not nearly as populated as Iceland or Norway and don’t generate enough surplus food which they can supply to a potential colonies on the North American mainland.
So the logistics of supplying a colony in North America without help from the people already living there must include a summertime only supply line from Iceland with enough supplies to last the whole year. Where each voyage from Iceland is going take maybe a month, maybe more, just one way. These ships are still pretty small and not a lot of room for cargo, so you’ll need a few of them. I’m not sure the economy on Iceland could have afforded such an expensive endeavor.
There seems to be a need for a minimum primary settler population and a decent amount of native assistance- it's fairly easy to build a new town 10 miles from your last but I am not aware of any long distance unsupported settlers.
So if the natives around the Mayflower had all died, so would the Founding Fathers. If the Norse diseases had killed off the locals they might not have made it through winter.
The Narragansetts were the most powerful tribe in the southern area of the region when the English colonists arrived in 1620, and they had not been affected by the epidemics. Chief Massasoit of the Wampanoags to the east allied with the colonists at Plymouth Colony as a way to protect the Wampanoags from Narragansett attacks. In the fall of 1621, the Narragansetts sent a sheaf of arrows wrapped in a snakeskin to Plymouth Colony as a threatening challenge, but Plymouth governor William Bradford sent the snakeskin back filled with gunpowder and bullets. The Narragansetts understood the message and did not attack them.
There were 18 years between the European settlement of Pitcairn island and the next visitors - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitcairn_Islands#European_sett... .
Your constraints are pretty strict. There aren't many places which could be settled (in recorded history) where there weren't already people living there, and where there was a reason for not continuing contact with the place of origin.
Another possibility is Te Pito O Te Kainga / Rapa Nui / Easter Island. The first explorers met one person already there (Nga Tavake), then they go back to Hiva, and a double canoe returns to Easter Island carrying the settlers. They left "because a rising tide was destroying their land" and/or a power struggle with the Hanau Eepe, if I read http://archive.hokulea.com/rapanui/hotu.html correctly. In either case, the oral history suggest little continued connection with Hiva.
Hunting and fishing shouldn't be very different in Newfoundland compared to Norway/Iceland. Bring a few chickens along, and you have another food source.
I assume/guess the vikings were better at this stuff than the Mayflower crowd.
Not least of all, Leif Eriksson was a Christian, a Catholic in modern terms. It's reasonable to assume most of his followers were, too. He had gained the epithet "the lucky" due to his habit of coming across and rescuing castaways at sea. To the Norse, luck was evidence the cosmos was on your side, and one of the most important attributes a leader offered to potential followers was a share in this cosmic luck. This probably helped Leif the missionary securing a lot of conversions!
But the heart of Christianity at the time was in Rome. They were already profoundly cut off from the mystical fellowship of believers, the communion. How much worse wouldn't it be for their sense of self if they were not only to go off in an impossibly distant land, but to live as the savages there?
Reality is more complex and challenging than Farmville or AnimalCrossing.
The settlements in Greenland never really reached that point. The leading hypothesis at this point for why Greenland collapsed was that the Arctic trade routes dropped far-off Greenland from their destinations--and without that trade, the settlements couldn't sustain themselves and collapsed. Newfoundland may be a more hospitable place than Greenland, but from a trade situation, it's even worse: it's not offering any trade goods to Europeans that Greenland or Iceland could be providing (at much shorter journeys), but it's still probably not able to tap into the North American trade network--I think you have to make it to Nova Scotia or New Brunswick to do that.
Ten generations is completely sustainable by my standards.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Greenland#Norse_set...
And of course the Greenland colony wasn't really sustainable, which is why it died out when a couple of hard turns came their way (climate change and getting cut off from trade for a few years).
Surviving winter solo or in a small group is damned near impossible.
But then again farming populations can expand really fast with low population pressure. The 13 colonies were seeing their populations double every generation just from natural fertility even before immigration.
For settling uninhabited locales you've got Shetland, Mann, the Isles, Iceland and some seasonal settlements on Greenland.
You might also check out the podcast History of Byzantium. Although you'll have to go many hours before encountering the Norse, in the form of the Varangians.
And I also recommend the excellent book Children of Ash and Elm for a very recent overview of Viking history.
It's not much, but it's a start.
Are you calling Normandy one settlement? As they certainly spent most of the Viking age colonizing from Iceland to Sicily.
Viking was a lifestyle or temporary occupation, not a people. The people were the Norse, and they did a massive amount of settling in the Viking Age.
Further, the europeans making these journeys were typically young and fit individuals who, again, could survive long voyages at sea and the difficulties of setting up new colonies. The elderly and infirm stayed in Europe. Thus the europeans were far less likely to suffer an outbreak of disease simply by virtue of having fewer human incubators. For the natives, however, there was nothing to prevent their most vulnerable from being exposed, nor any way to stop isolated cases from blowing up into large scale pandemics.
The only ways for a counter plague to get to Europe would be for either large numbers of natives to successfully cross the atlantic, which is unlikely when their population is simultaneously being decimated by disease, or for the Europeans to pick up a disease that took a long time to cause serious problems and thus could survive the return journey, which may have been the case for Syphillis. Either way, an "America Pox" is highly unlikely.
Then, in many cases, they made natives fight each other, and they recruited "auxiliary indians".
The siege of Tenochtitlan involved 200,000 Tlaxcalans fighting on the European side.
In other cases, such as the Battle of Cajamarca, they used their horse + armor advantage to kidnap the leader and ask everyone else to stand down.
If natives had fought together as an alliance since the beginning, they would have time to adapt and catch up. Like the Mapuche did (they won the Arauco war).
And also the Eurasian geography made trade, and exchange of both culture and domesticated animals, and also diseases, easier in the east-west direction. Because in east-west direction the exchange happens inside the same climate zone. Cow, horse, pig, sheep, goat, donkey, chicken, duck, goose, cat, dog, these didn't all originate in a single location. But in Eurasia, people were able to adopt domesticated animals and plants from their eastern and western neighbors.
The geography in the Americas makes it more easy to travel and trade in the south-north direction. But this is less useful, because you would only get access to domesticated plants and animals from different climate zones.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel#Outline...
This is almost trivially refuted by reading a climate map. Traveling along the Silk Road takes you from a Mediterranean climate into a semi-desert alluvial flood plain, into mountains and high steppes, then back into desert, then low steppes, then mountains, then high desert, then more mountains, and then rich alluvial flood plain of East China, without deviating all that much in latitude. Travel north from West Texas, and you start with high altitude steppe, then continue with high altitude steppe until you reach Edmonton. Indeed, looking at a climate map of the Americas, you'll notice that it's pretty much a smooth gradient in latitude.
Now Eurasia does have some similar climatic belts on an east-west axis--namely the tundra, taiga, and steppes of Russia. Which are regions that are not known as being founts of civilization.
Indeed, if you actually look at the history of the Americas versus the history of Eurasia, there's good evidence for transfer of what we might term foundational technologies of civilization along the north-south axis of the Americas (metallurgy, pottery, and most importantly of all, maize), while there's not really any evidence of such transfer between the Mediterranean and Chinese worlds in Eurasia.
Also, Europeans colonized other regions where they did not have as great a disease or technological advantage.
It's easy to forget that most of the Indigenous peoples in North America didn't die simply from "catching" diseases but were directly and intentionally killed or worked to death. Most people are hopefully familiar with the extent of the genocide in what is now the US (with everything from "plague blankets" to eradicating the bison to literally paying bounties for dead Indians) but Columbus' treatment of the Natives was also so violent and brutal that other Spanish colonialists complained about it.
In other words, the problem wasn't so much settlers bringing their diseases with them than settlers capturing the natives, working them to death, destroying their livelihoods and then actively trying to genocide them.
Having some level of immunity to smallpox or other diseases wouldn't have changed much.
- Atlantic. Windy and coldish climate, with lots of rain. Like the UK, or worse.
- Continental Mediterranean. Hot Summers (over 40c) and cold Winters (below 0).
- Mediterranean. Overall a warm climate with a few days of slight cold in Winter, with OFC some spots of cold winter depending on the location.
- On top of that, the mountain climate, chill and always snowy in winter.
Then the Archipielagos (Canaries/Balearics) are their own thing, and Iberia has several distint microclimates and terrains everywhere because the highly mountainous orography distorts the overall climates a lot.
Think of Spain as a micro-condensed US, where you have near every climate in the Earth.
And the diseases were only a small factor in the outcome of the colonization. Guns being a much larger factor, for example.
I don't know how you get there. I'm pretty sure diseases went ahead of the colonists in many cases and wiped out entire civilizations before the colonists ever made contact. Even if it didn't wipe out literally everyone, it would have significantly destabilized or collapsed all significant political or economic systems.
Relatively speaking, any advantages of guns versus bows and arrows seem small. If I were inclined to make arguments about military technology, I'd speculate that plate armor and horses were more significant advantages than guns, but all of these pale in comparison to contagion.
Logistics wins wars. With exception of WW1 and WW2, soldiers didn't really die in large numbers to the enemy. Soldiers died to the cold, to disease, and deserted due to lack of food / supplies / morale.
There are occasional exceptions where large numbers of soldiers died in battle... but those exceptions become remembered for centuries. It certainly wasn't a regular event (except in WW1 / WW2, which truly were horrific).
..with a lever action, effectively fighting a US army lead by battle hardened civil war veterans.
The natives weren't military slouches. What they lacked was the population and material resources to field fighting forces that could go toe to toe with the Europeans.
As a strategy, you could do a lot worse than Liberty ships and a lot of Russians.
But I know that Medieval English Longbowmen were only given something like 6 arrows per battle. And even that was enough to stretch the capacities of Medieval Britain's supply chain. 10,000 Longbowmen x 6 arrows is 60,000 arrows per battle.
IIRC, it was said that during wars, there wasn't any gooses or ducks to be found in all of Britain. They've all been killed, and their feathers plucked for the war arrows.
IIRC records for Henry in the Tower of London show a total of 3/4 Million arrows paid for and collected for the invasion that lead to Agincourt. With an estimated 5,000 archers at Agincourt.
Modern reconstructions show about 6 arrows per minute - and again IIRC ten minutes of volley fire against the French lines - something like 60 arrows per archer, or around 300,000 arrows. Even in plate armour that shits gonna hurt.
This is absolutely what happened to the Incan empire predatory to its subjugation to a few hundred conquistadors led by Francisco Pizarro. For those interested check out Last Days of the Incas.
I know the imperialists weaponized their diseases and intentionally tried to spread it and that may be the difference.
Usually the smallpox theory is presented in a way that removes agency and culpability from the conquerers. It's always struck me as remarkably convenient and quite unbelievable; they were an idyllic people in some wondrous land without their own disease. Oh really now ... we're talking the Caribbeans here.
Even the Wikipedia page on the matter (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influx_of_disease_in_the_Car...), does it cite epidemiological sources with someone looking at like bone sample DNA? No. It's economic and social science. Excuse me for questioning the qualification of economists for being able to authoritatively make confident statements about historical virology.
It may be true but I'd like more evidence than convenient stories by the descendent of a conquerer about how by sheer coincidence his/her ancestors were actually not guilty of genocide and as of by miracle, North America became a land without people; it just happens to follow Frederick Jackson Turners Frontier Thesis a little too closely to be called a coincidence.
If we're just speculating though, I wonder if the fact that one group was traveling by boat could have insulated the disease transfer a bit. Most really bad diseases would run their course by the time a sailing ship made it back across the ocean and certainly people knew to quarantine ships with sick people on them in Europe. For a disease the ship crews were resistant to reach the Americas they just had to visit a village, where to go the other way it had to survive an in built month plus quarantine which is plenty of time for most diseases to show up
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_syphilis :
The first recorded outbreak of syphilis in Europe occurred in 1494/1495 in Naples, Italy, during a French invasion ...
Also it's generally believed that syphilis didn't exist in the Old World before 1492, so there's at least one disease that probably made the opposite journey.
However, the disease narrative doesn't absolve the Europeans. Nobody forced the European powers to colonize the Americas. If they'd packed up and gone home, even if the Americas had still been decimated by smallpox, they would have bounced back, given the opportunity. Human populations tend to do that.
(The Black Death is sort of an exception, it suppressed European population for a long time, because it kept coming back, killing a bunch of people, and then going away again. But- Europe thrived during that period, the Renaissance was coterminous with very bad bubonic plague outbreaks)
They did: syphilis! But the Europeans had far more diseases to share because there was far more animal domestication going on in the Old World. And most of our diseases came as a result of that animal domestication, so they had already spread through the population which developed immunity in the millennia between the first human infection and the Columbian Exchange.
> Usually the smallpox theory is presented in a way that removes agency and culpability from the conquerers. It's always struck me at remarkably convenient and quite unbelievable; they were an idyllic people in some welder land without their own diseases, oh really now ... we're talking the Caribbeans here
Typically I hear "the smallpox theory" presented as "Europeans killed 90% of Native Americans including by disease" as though Europeans collectively set out to exterminate Native Americans. To be certain, there was a lot of brutality and genocide and even some deliberate spread of disease, but no European could have credibly believed that the disease would spread throughout the new world to such effect.
Certainly not, but once they figured out what was going on, they certainly aided and abetted the spread of these new diseases.
Maybe someone could help me understand -- with such a prolific practice it must have been diaried and such? What are the best primary/secondary sources detailing the practice.
I've heard the "they gave blankets but they knew the blankets had smallpox infection". But we presumably know who the they were.
Presumably a lot of the colonists were sick as well. But not sick enough that the indigenous population noticed and stayed away.
I guess people's capacity for evil is always greater than one can imagine.
https://www.history.com/news/colonists-native-americans-smal...
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3qslhq/where...
If we ignore this example, we still have dead and infected bodies/livestock being catapulted into cities.
But Europe, Asia, and Africa combined was a much bigger population pool, so more opportunities for mutation and transmission leading to more types of infectious diseases.
Not all diseases are equally harmful, right? Perhaps the indigenous populations of the Americas simply lacked a disease as deadly as those brought by the Europeans.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk
In short, you need cities to develop these types of viruses. Cities where the virus can just keep killing, without ever hitting a dead end.
The far left says it's a cop out on racism, blaming white evil on natural conditions. The far right says that it's too PC, that plenty of other places had the right conditions and gives no credit to culture or innovation.
So both the far left and far right want to take credit from chaos and put it on the people: either to hate them, or to take pride.
This in and of itself is not proof of anything. But if something pisses off far left and right at the same time, I tend to think of it as a green flag.
* Jared Diamond posits an explanation of megafauna extinction in North America that's heavily predicated on the Clovis-first hypothesis and the overextinction hypothesis. The former hypothesis is very thoroughly discredited, and the latter is also generally disfavored, especially in the it's-the-primary-cause way that Jared Diamond uses it. (Specifically, it should be noted that the megafauna extinction in North America also coincides pretty closely with the Younger Dryas, whose climatic effects were most pronounced in North America).
* The primary north-south/east-west transmission hypothesis doesn't actually hold that well up to evidence. The two things I'd note are a) local topography has a major effect on climate that's not accounted for, and b) if you look at the transmission of cereal crops, there's very little transmission between the Mediterranean/Mesopotamian basin and China basin but universal spread of maize along the vertical axis of the Americas--the complete opposite of what the theory predicts.
* I don't have a link handy, but I've seen someone more versed in the history of infectious diseases point out that the killer diseases that Diamond identifies don't appear to have actually become epidemic in the manner that Diamond asserts.
* Diamond also places way too heavy on emphasis on the unreliable accounts of the conquistadors in explaining how the Spanish conquests happened.
In short, the main problem with Guns, Germs, and Steel is that... it gets the facts wrong. And people have brought these complaints to Diamond previously, so it's not like he's aware that there are facts which destroy his thesis, and Diamond's response is to double-down on the thesis without trying to explain why the countervailing facts might be incorrect interpretations or whatnot, or providing other nuggets of insight to bolster his thesis, just continually reassert that he's right.
Try reading Charles Mann's 1491. It goes into more well-researched explanations of pre-Columbian cultures that would help you understand why Diamond's thesis is wrong.
They do negate some of the spurious theories, but the central theory (IMO) is that there's a whole lot of luck involved in global domination, and that luck is not evenly spread.
The one about germs being less of a killer is definitely very interesting though. That's totally central, though -- if not germs doing the killing -- it'd just fall back onto guns. If you happen to dig up the link, I'd love to read through it.
Centuries, actually. Indigenous peoples in the Americas were able to hold out against European, and later successor state, attempts to acquire their territory until around 1900.
Actual academics have problems with it
There's definitely plenty of holes in the theories of GG&S, if that's what you mean by "academics have problems with it" === "it is not a perfect theory."
But overall, it seems most of the points hold more than enough water to be worth merit. None of them perfect, but vastly better than throwing the whole thing out.
-----
Also, holy crap I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt here, but the first few threads I went into were... blatantly far left (as Reddit tends to be). Seriously though: spiraling into tangents of communism, your classic woke/sassy "dunk" lingo, clearly had some external bias bone to pick. I'm not sure r/badhistory is a community worth considering the acme of academia, only based off my short interactions with it. But maybe the worst just came up first?
While I think you are probably more likely to sympathize with restricteddata than anthropology_nerd, I do think that anthropology_nerd's comments may be able to elucidate a little bit why GG&S provokes such hostility among academics.
I think both parties are talking passed each-other, having missed a very, very important statement:
> You recommended people read GG&S with a grain of salt, but the vast majority of casual readers lack that salt when it comes to understanding the flaws in the book.
Whether or not this salt is there seems like the addition / omission from which each side argues. With salt, it's a fine enough book. The broad strokes are close enough. Without salt -- as in "I'm a professional because I read this book" -- it probably gets really, really annoying.
I definitely agree that nuance is important, and the book should put more effort into not presenting itself as fact. But it's pop-history. It wouldn't be pop if it didn't, and what would be pop would be even worse IMO.
Like, sure there's probably a bias to the left but it's not the hellhole of r/badphilosophy for instance there. They won't advocate for nonsense stuff,just use the terminology from social sciences
But a large part of the problem with r/badhistory, and r/AskHistorians as well, is that it seems like most of the users don't realize that being better at history than most of Reddit is an extremely low bar. There's certainly some good stuff that ends up there (well, in r/AskHistorians, less so in r/badhistory), but there's still a lot of junk as well, and too many people act as if the stuff there is equivalent to published work by professional historians.
Being a wildly successful popularizer is always risky for an academic. The most serious criticisms I've seen have been about tangential stuff.
Cities are a breeding ground for diseases. America wasn’t densely populated at the time.
It should also be noted that human populations are incredibly resilient to epidemics. In the absence of "other things", populations suffering catastrophic virgin soil epidemics will typically rebound to pre-epidemic levels in decades. It's not a sufficient explanation for the centuries-long decline of indigenous American populations. The black death was no less severe and successor epidemics continued throughout Europe in the 15th century, yet we see nothing like the demographic collapse of the Americas post-contact.
We have a more recent example in Hawaii. Hawaii was not subjugated by any foreign power until the 1890s. That being said, the Native Hawaiian population pretty much collapsed from a high of 300,000 in 1770 to 20,000 in 1920.
That's quite the claim to toss out. I can certainly imagine gunless conquistadors taking over New Spain in a slightly longer span just by waiting for people to die.
Though by the same token it could also have produced a plague that was devastating to the conquistadors, and might then have been carried back to Europe for Black Death Round 2, devastating the imperial powers and generating a long-lasting fear of New World contact. Lots of interesting AU scenarios to consider here.
The colonization of North America would have gone quite differently with that many folks to contend with.
1. https://www.businessinsider.com/climate-changed-after-europe...
One point of comparison would be Ireland. They didn't suffer from colonist-brought diseases, because obviously they had all the same diseases already, but they did suffer a precipitous decline in population.
Another example would be the west coast of Africa, which was similarly colonized from early modernity on.
That was a TIL for me, because I was about to say tat the "precipitous decline in population" only happened in the mid-19th century, i.e. a couple of centuries after Cromwell's campaign (the point where the English power over Ireland really became a colonial one), but then I skimmed through the History section of the Ireland wikipedia page [1] and I read this:
> This control was consolidated during the wars and conflicts of the 17th century, including the English and Scottish colonisation in the Plantations of Ireland, the Wars of the Three Kingdoms and the Williamite War.
and
> Physician-general William Petty estimated that 504,000 Catholic Irish and 112,000 Protestant settlers died, and 100,000 people were transported, as a result of the war.[66] If a prewar population of 1.5 million is assumed, this would mean that the population was reduced by almost half.
Again, I personally had no idea that Ireland's population was reduced by almost half immediately after the English conquest that happened during Cromwell's time, that's kind of gruesome and imo not studied enough outside of Ireland and the UK (I suppose that this subject is studied in there).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ireland#The_Kingdom_of_Ireland
These estimates vary wildly, by more than a factor of 10.
One large source of error is the accounts by Spanish Conquistadors. They are suspected of greatly inflating the numbers they conquered, in order to boost their prestige back in Spain. It also seems doubtful their censuses were more than just wild guesses.
I'm not so sure about that. Writing gave a huge advantage to the Western forces. By that I mean military men had access to a couple thousand years of military tactics books. Having advanced weapons is one thing, knowing strategy and tactics is quite another.
For example, there are battles where the Romans were outnumbered 10:1 and still defeated a better armed barbarian army. The Romans were organized, disciplined, and trained to fight as a unit. They would just slaughter the barbarians who fought as individuals.
Remember, guns at the time were muzzle-loading, and had some rube goldberg contraption to light the powder. They were unreliable, inaccurate, and very slow to reload.
The biggest significant factor for Spanish people was getting the support of the local population. It was not foreign powers against local powers. But local powers against local powers.
And that was because local empires were terrible with the subdued tribes. There was human sacrifices with subdued tribes and they were slaves. Under Spanish rule those who supported the Spaniards were soon considered Spanish citizens, a huge improvement.
And Rome usually worked the other way around. Rome did outnumber everybody and squashed any opposition. First they did because mandatory Conscription ("the draft")in the army, an army of peasants that was way more numerous than anybody else and a population that will replace casualties much faster than anybody else.
The Army of peasants did fight against elite warriors that were much better trained and equipped but were way less numerous, for example against the Macedonian Army,and they won.
Finally, after growing and organizing themselves much more, Rome will use infrastructure that only they had like the Mediterranean sea and specially roads to move massive amounts of soldiers very fast from one part of the Empire to another.
This was the equivalent of the train that will make it possible for Germany, Russia or the US moving so much people to the war front fast.
It was the Romans those who did outnumber everybody else concentrating the army at one point, defeating the enemy and moving the Army to another place.
And it was Julius Caesar who wrote "divide et impera" because that was the Roman way of doing things, dividing their enemies, and fighting them isolated with a much bigger army.
I didn't say they were. I said they lacked writing. Writing preserves orders of magnitude more information for others than oral tradition possibly can.
Yes, I know the Mayans had writing, and their books were burned by the Spanish. But the Spanish conquered the Inca and the Aztecs, not the Mayans.
The ideas of recruiting the locals to your side, and divide and conquer, are part of western military tradition. If the Aztecs and Inca used such tactics, I'd be interested if you have sources.
There were battles that the Romans fought and won against the barbarian much greater numbers. That isn't going to happen without superior organization, discipline, training and tactics.
And finally, the Roman idea of conquest was to assimilate, not exterminate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defeat_of_Boudica
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Alesia
And, of course, this triumph of discipline, tactics, organization and training:
If memory serves me correctly, military tactics didn't really become a genre until the late 16th century, after the Spanish conquest of the Aztec and Inca empires. And during the early 16th century, it's quite likely that most of the soldiers (including the commanders!) would have been illiterate and thus not really able to read any extant military tactics books, especially whatever survived of Greek or Roman military texts.
The way they operated was clear evidence of military sophistication.
And why couldn't, say, the Inca draw on the Wari, who could draw on the Moche, who could draw on the Chavin, who date back even before the Greeks?
The problem with claiming the utility of writing in developing military tactics is that Western Europe doesn't have a tradition of discussing military tactics in written texts until the Early Modern period. There's nothing like Sun Tzu's Art of War that keeps getting passed down and talked about; any transmission of tactics is going to happen via practical experience in a kind of apprenticeship--which is exactly the same method of transmission an illiterate society is going to do for military tactics.
Or you could do what the Aztecs did and send all of your boys (rich or poor) to school to learn how to become warriors, come to think of it.
If you've got evidence that the Inca military had organized tactics, like units, feinting maneuvers, flanking attacks, procedures for taking fortified positions, covering fire, strategic retreat, breastworks, defense in depth, etc., I'm interested.
We do know the Inca had no plan for when their leader was captured but not killed. But Pizarro knew about that one, and that's how he defeated an empire. Disrupting the enemy's command and control is a well-understood technique in Western military tradition.
And OFC from their enemies.
It also became clear that the Spanish, despite their superior technology, were so outnumbered that they wouldn't have been successful if it weren't for their local allies. They were nearly all killed in a desperate escape from Tenochtitlan when things went downhill.
Having horses may also have helped. There were no beasts of burden (iirc) in North America until the Spanish arrived.
(Actually, I do think the New World peoples were particularly prolific when it came to domesticating plants… they punched way above their population size in terms of number of today’s staple foods they domesticated… plus chocolate, vanilla, etc…)
> ”Similar argument if you base it off of… number of domesticated animals…”
But again, I think that fact isn’t surprising, either, considering the Old world is much larger and had more wild animals and more humans than the New World.