1491: New revelations of the Americas before Columbus (2005) | Hacker News Reader

1491: New revelations of the Americas before Columbus (2005)

kirkusreviews.com

72 pointswalterbell77 comments

The book was an expansion of the essay Mann wrote for The Atlantic, and you can read that essay online [1]

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/03/1491/30...

Also recommending this essay: https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/democracy/hiding-plain-sigh... - in reference to

> the present worldwide movement toward democracy owes not to Locke or Newtonian physics, but to Indians, “living, breathing role models of human liberty.”

Of special interest is the man Kandiaronk, a native american.

Edit: Just noticed Graeber is bickering with Mann in that essay!

“Native Americans were as active in shaping their environments as anyone else. They built great and wealthy cities; they lived, for the most part, on farms”

“He closes with a provocative thesis: namely, that the present worldwide movement toward democracy owes not to Locke or Newtonian physics, but to Indians, “living, breathing role models of human liberty.””

Oh lord. Revisionists begetting revisionists.

I had a buddy in college who insisted that Natives were ‘almost as technologically advanced as europeans’ and if not for a few miscalculations in battle, would have effectively flung them off and advanced to a society beyond our wildest dreams.

Of course, he failed to respond when I mentioned that there were no modern weapons and the mystical technology he assumed to exist amounted to little more than what Europeans had had for tens of thousands of years.

It’s really sad how much hyperbole gets thrown into the revisionism of prehistoric civilizations. It’s not doing the descendants of these people any favors to make up fictitious reinventions of their technological advancements.

You may be right about technology, but the political system in the US and its Constitution was based on, among other things, that of the Iroquois Confederacy. The premise that Native Americans influenced the global spread of democracy by way of US political hegemony isn't entirely revisionist.

How exactly did you tie the US constitution to democracy and then that to US hegemony influencing spread of democracy?

Democracy as a concept has nothing to do with US. US had one of the first constitutions, but the concept did exist before.

The US was an early example of the idea of a democratically elected government, and just so happened to come about by fighting, then winning a war against not only a monarchy, but arguably the most powerful monarchy that has ever existed. Before that, democracy seemed perhaps a good idea, but you're going to have naysayers who want to see a proven example. Proven track records are why anyone listens to anybody when it comes to influence.

By the time of the US war of independence, Parliament had been supreme in Britain for about a century, since the glorious revolution.

Britain certainly wasn’t yet a democracy as the franchise was so limited, to the few percent who owned property or met various other criteria.

The answer to that question was in the first sentence, and you could easily look up articles that explore the idea in greater detail. Here is one: https://www.pbs.org/native-america/blogs/native-voices/how-t...

>“Native Americans were as active in shaping their environments as anyone else. They built great and wealthy cities; they lived, for the most part, on farms”

These farms didn't look like European farms, but it's hard to think of, for example: settlements in the Amazon being anything less than a living, breathing, fruit orchard. The eastern seaboard of the US had huge groves of nut trees, as well as cleared out hunting grounds. The farms were just sustainable, and worked within the environment instead of against it (example: planting in a desert, piping in massive amounts of water, and obliterating entire country-sized hydrology systems.)

Perhaps what you are in, is "denial".

> example: planting in a desert, piping in massive amounts of water

The pre-Columbian Pima had irrigation agriculture in what is now Phoenix (aka "a desert").

Compare the pre-Columbian Pima and the contemporary Americans and describe the differences in scale. You have taken my sentence out of context by removing, "and obliterating entire country-sized hydrology systems."

The argument that contact with and spreading knowledge about Indian (as Mann settles on calling them, after evidently being repeatedly dressed down by actual indigenous folks for trying to use more currently-PC terms) societies and systems of government played a major role in kicking off enlightenment political thinking isn't so far fetched.

I don't recall his claiming that they had military tech that was anywhere near as developed as Europeans, and most of his coverage of thriving, complex, urbanized (by the global standards of the time) societies in the Precolumbian Americas is focused south of the Rio, for the simple reason that that's where most of those seem to have been (though he does cover Cahokia and related sites in the modern US, as well)

The closest I recall him coming to claiming Native Americans were more advanced than Europeans was that Europeans simply failed to recognize some patterns and practices as deliberate and well-considered, as was the case with certain crop management patterns in the Eastern forests and heavy use of fire-as-a-land-management-tool all over the continent. But that's not exactly a claim that they were more advanced. Oh, and he does mention repeated contemporary reports that the natives seemed remarkably tall and able-bodied compared to Europeans, and makes some efforts to figure out why that might have been (and some of that does tie back into government and social structures)

I'm fairly sensitive to bullshit revisionism of the "noble savage" and/or "ackshually Europeans were the backwards primitives" sort, and didn't get either vibe at all from Mann's 1491 or 1493. In fact he explicitly counters the former in a lot of ways, similar to what you see in anti-noble-savage works like War Before Civilization.

Regarding military power, Mann does argue, IIRC, that the gap wasn’t as large as might be supposed. He also argues that the conquest of the Aztecs and the Incas by small forces of Spanish conquistadors was not enabled by military superiority but rather by upsetting existing political balance. In both cases, the conquistadors aligned with subjugated factions within the existing imperial systems to overthrow the dominant power. E.g., in Mexico, Moctezuma had captured and imprisoned Cortez and his forces and could have easily wiped them out. The emperor’s delay ultimately allowed Cortez to align with vassal states, and that alliance overthrew the empire. That’s not to say that the Aztec empire’s military was the equal of Spain’s, but Cortez’s small band of conquistadors would not have defeated the Aztecs head-to-head.

Right. It's not that the military tech wasn't better, it's that, given the massive logistical advantages of indigenous Americans (consider what a supply chain looked like for even a tiny European force in the Americas!), the role of disease-induced chaos putting much of indigenous society & politics into something resembling death convulsions before many of them even saw Europeans, plus some straight realpolitik "heads I win, tails you lose" moves from the Europeans, it was a pretty minor factor in the whole thing. Just the weapon-tech advantage wouldn't have been anywhere near enough for the conquest to go even as smoothly as it did, thanks largely to the logistics disadvantage of the Europeans (and the conquest wasn't terribly smooth, anyway—Europeans lost plenty of battles over a span of centuries before mostly subjugating the Americas).

There is a great account of the conquest of Mexico in "Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España" by one Bernal Díaz del Castillo, who was a member of Cortés' troop of conquistadores:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historia_verdadera_de_la_conqu...

I think this is probably recounted by other sources but he talks also about the "noche triste", the night that the conquistadores had to run for their lives from Tenochtitlan, pursued by a mob driven to rage after the murder of the emperor Moctezuma:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Noche_Triste

Although on that night the conquistadores were probably at a disadvantage, for being weighed down with all the gold they tried to take with them as they ran. Encumberance is a bitch.

In general, it seems true that the Spanish survived by the skin of their teeth, driven by their lust for richess and mainly thanks to the support of the local vassal states like the Tlaxcalans. Military superiority is not just who has the best weapons and even in the Old World battles are not always won by the most technologically advanced society. For example, see the Battle of Isandlwana:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Isandlwana

That might be revisionism from the perspective of the history you get from Disney movies but I don't think Mann is at all out of mainstream history here and I think you're doing him a disservice by comparing him to your friend. I'd hope anybody doing an american history course in US high schools these days would know that, say, the Iroquois practiced farming though the bits in 1491 about the way they burned out underbrush to encourage large animals deeper into the forest or tried to encourage Chestnut trees over others was new to me.

And people like Ben Franklin certainly wrote about Indians as models of liberty, in his case in contrast to the Germans he though were subservient by nature. And Rousseau certainly had a lot to say about them. What ended up being the US political system had many influences. I think the Corsican 1755 constitution is an underrated influence but also the lack of hereditary nobility among the natives. I think it's easy to underestimate how natural a nobility seems when all the societies you know have it, until you meet one that doesn't.

This really shook up my worldview when I read it. American history as told in my schooling was about a vast empty with an occasional violent native.

This is not what happened

I read this book twice. I recommend 1493 and his latest book ‘wizard and prophet’ as well. His twitter is also interesting

In my American schools we did learn more about North American natives though it was often through the point of view of European explorers and colonists. We got the usual stories about interactions with Jamestown/Pocahontas and Mayflower colonists /Squanto. There was more about Ponce de Leon and Coronado and the peoples they encountered. We got more details about the Aztec, Maya, and Olmec. I also remember sections about the mound builders and the Iroquois Confederacy. There were lessons on the American westward expansion and the conflicts that caused though I suspect that was downplayed a bit. The only South American people we studied were the Inca.

Obviously that misses whole sections of the continents.

Given that European epidemics literally decimated the native population and the military marched many of the remaining natives to reservations that is the reality that most settlers encountered.

The spread of disease was guaranteed to happen sooner or later. Europe and the middle east went through the same thing, just earlier in time

Not nearly as bad in Europe. The Black Death killed 1/3. Pandemics may have killed 95% in America.

Other pandemics were raging across Europe for the thousand years before that. For example, the Antonine plague and plague of Justinian

What’s the bit about the Aztec and Mayans not having Markets?

A chilling realization that follows from this picture is that the inhabitants of North America encountered by most of the Europeans who came later were more or less the post-apocalyptic remnants of once large civilizations that had already collapsed in a continent wide pandemic.

Graeber and Wengrow have a different interpretation than "post-apocalyptic". More like they underwent a successful revolution to overthrow their hierarchical society and create radically egalitarian societies instead

The early European colonists came across these groups and that's pretty much the origin of the myth that "the natural state of man" is this radically egalitarian society. In reality it's an explicitly political culture that came about as a reaction to their lived experiences with "civilization"

Rather than "post-apocalyptic" they can also be seen as "post-civilization"

If Europe's luck had been a little different, the Mongols might have arrived after the black death and stayed rather than immediately leaving because of internal dynastic struggles. I can't even imagine how different the modern world would be if people had spoken Mongolian in Paris and Stockholm for the last half millennia. It could easily have been Turkish or Arabic too!

That being said, one thing Mann pointed out in 1491 that is worth stressing is that population estimates of the Americas before contact are highly controversial. Most current estimates are based on assumed mortality rates and observed post-contact bottleneck populations rather than archaeological remains. Change the assumed mortality rates just a little and the pre-contact population estimates fluctuate by tens of millions. It's likely the new diseases had a range of different mortality rates in different regions, just as the Black death killed wildly varying proportions of the population in different parts of Europe. While it's clear that the Americas were not empty and waiting to be colonized, we should not make the equal and opposite mistake of assuming all parts were densely populated prior to contact. We just don't know.

Quibbling over numbers aside, 1491 and 1493 do a brilliant job of explaining how breaking the isolation imposed by the ocean transformed both the Americas and the rest of the world. In 1493, Mann recounts a song in the Philippines he likens to their version of "Home on the Range". It's an old song, meant to depict the ideal house and garden before the modern world changed everything. Practically none of the plant species it mentions are native to the Philippines and many originated in the Americas. The world we now live in is more novel than we realize.

>It could easily have been Turkish or Arabic too!

Yep, during the rise of Islam, they caliphate almost captured Constantinople and could've ended up pushing into Europe had they been successful. They eventually made it into Spain and Sicily.

Its also possible that had the Persians or Byzantines been able to defeat the caliphate early, we might consider a good chunk of the middle east and north Africa to be "European".

Your first paragraph is something like the premise of The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson.

I was walking in the New Mexican desert this Christmas and finding painted pottery shards that date to a little before Columbus arrived. It felt so powerful to touch something that existed before then and think what their lives must have been like before the arrival of Columbus and everything changing.

Pottery, painted pottery, and mycelium derived materials are all the craze nowadays because it's "green & organic" etc.

It would be interesting to consider other aspects from pre-Columbus times that we should consider integrating in our daily life.

It has surprised me that the majority of pottery shards I find in the New Mexico desert are painted. The unpainted ones are the exceptions. So these must not have been special ceremonial pots, but for every day use. The fact that the pueblo people put such a high value on decoration for everyday objects is fascinating. I think of aboriginals as utilitarians struggling to survive. But if you're taking the time to decorate normal pots, survival must be relatively assured.

I'd like to exchange lives with someone who made those pots for a for a few weeks, and compare notes. I wonder if I have more or less free time than they do.

>I think of aboriginals as utilitarians struggling to survive.

Grouping all pre Colombian Native Americans into one bucket is akin to talking about “Africa” as one indistinguishable place today. There was a massive diversity of societies and cultures that spanned the continent with trading networks that crisscrossed the continent as well.

Most European account of initial contact tend to describe a life of relative abundance, people certainly weren’t struggling to survive any more than your average 15th century European.

I feel the same. Nearly every shard we found had painting on it. These people were decorating their daily lives and tools, celebrating them with art. My brother is a potter and it was fascinating to listen to him talk about how they did the polychrome pots. For anyone reading this far, here is the kind of pots we are discussing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Lazaro_archaeological_site

I keep wondering how these civilizations might have developed if we'd discovered them in, say, 1900 instead of 1500s.

Or what if Columbus did land on the American shores, but never made it back to Europe, and the native Americans got their hands on European technology and figured out how to recreate it.

The outcome is the same. They lacked our weapons and immunizations- it would have been hard to catch up in parallel with the Western world. Look at Japan in the 1850s. The isolation of the prior few centuries hurt them.

Were there any positive effects of the long isolation in the case of Japan?

In an indirect way. (warning: following is highly speculative)

- being isolated made Japan backward. Also, Japan does not have natural resources, and is not an agricultural powerhouse. This meant Japan was not a juicy target for the colonial powers.

- Still, given enough time, one of them would surely have snatched it

- Japan figured out the point above, and decided to not become a colony. It industrialized at a furious pace until it became a half-decent military power

- huge stroke of luck, or something else, but Japan destroys a Russian fleet at Tsushima in 1905, and leapfrogs into the ranks of Great Powers

- they further gain a lot in WW1 by sitting on the sidelines, and eventually joining the winning side

- this goes to their head, and they proceed to do the most foolish thing at Perl Harbor, and pick a fight with the 800 pound gorilla

- this fight does not go well, predictably, so Japan ends up under US occupation for 7 years

- another huge stroke of luck: US, instead of sending Japan back to the stone age in retribution, decides to help Japan rebuild, and pumps massive amounts of aid

- Japan goes through a second incredibly fast bout of industrialization

This story ends around 1990.

> huge stroke of luck, or something else .. Tsushima

This is very much underselling how outclassed the Russians were on every level of this engagement, except in terms of sheer number of ships (they had more), and technology, which was roughly on par.

I think the 'isolation' was pretty advantageous in the sense that they managed to preserve their governmental and cultural structures for a very long time without the disruptive influence of western money and might. I imagine if they had let the Europeans in, the eventual fall of the Shogunate, partly caused by a proxy war between the French and the British (who supported different Daimyo), partly caused by public dissatisfaction about foreign incursion, would have been much earlier.

That would have put them in a much less coherent and consequently weaker postion to resist European colonization efforts in the modern era.

Sister comment was made about Tsushima

>- this goes to their head, and they proceed to do the most foolish thing at Perl Harbor, and pick a fight with the 800 pound gorilla

We in the US knew we would be getting involved in the war and had done things like oil embargo/trade disruption. The reason Japan attacked Pearl Harbor was because Yamamoto thought the only chance they stood against the US was to win such a decisive battle that we would not be able to fight them. He was trying this again at Midway(I believe) but we had broken their Coms so we were able to out maneuver them.

Edit Add: As to if their isolation was helpful or not, I think that it allowed them to preserve and strengthen their culture both the good and bad aspects of it.

I think that if a country was to close themselves off and turn inward, it could result in good things as long as they have an internal forces that prevents stagnation.

Or to put it another way, progress only seems to happen when there are driving forces, such as competing groups. A strong government i.e. Dictator by nature has to wield control in order to stay in power, in doing so any competing groups must be eliminated as they a a threat to power. This brings about stagnation.

> - huge stroke of luck, or something else, but Japan destroys a Russian fleet at Tsushima in 1905, and leapfrogs into the ranks of Great Powers

> - this goes to their head, and they proceed to do the most foolish thing at Perl Harbor, and pick a fight with the 800 pound gorilla

This summary reeks of the nationalist tendencies of Americans when describing historical events.

> This summary reeks of the nationalist tendencies of Americans when describing historical events.

Maybe. But it's also a fact.

The US warned Japan before the war that if they attacked, the US will strike back and will absolutely crush Japan. And it did happen, just as predicted. In 1945, the Japanse were preparing to defend their homeland with spears. Against soldiers coming in with machine guns, tanks, and, well, atomic bombs.

I don't know. If you manage to take over North America, you tend to win Risk, whoever you are. It's harder to do than the Australian strategy, but you do win if you manage to pull it off. And the United States has basically done it.

>huge stroke of luck, or something else, but Japan destroys a Russian fleet at Tsushima in 1905, and leapfrogs into the ranks of Great Powers

It wasn’t luck, Russia was way behind the other western powers at the time and greatly underestimated Japans capabilities.

> this goes to their head, and they proceed to do the most foolish thing at Perl Harbor, and pick a fight with the 800 pound gorilla

“Pearl Harbor” is American revisionism. What actually happened that day was one of the most successful coordinated attacks of the entire war spanning across the pacific, against both the British and American empires simultaneously. The Japanese had imperial ambitions and was up hemmed in by the USSR, Britain, and American in basically all directions. They captured not only the Philippines from the US but also dug in deeply into British SE Asia while destroying basically the entire pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor in the same day.

They ended up overextending themselves, but it was necessary from a strategic standpoint to secure the natural resources they needed from those colonies.

Japan is still and independent country full of Japanese people, who held their own against Western militaries within decades of opening. That's a very different from the apocalyptic collapse followed by replacement of the New World.

Of course, there's a huge difference between the two: Japan always had some contact with the Old World, and with Old World diseases in particular. America would probably have faced the same wave of disease, even if discovery had happened much later.

More limited contact could have potentially alleviated some of the overall population loss from disease. If they only got 2 european diseases instead of a dozen, had it sweep through them, then had another 50 years before contact again, it may have made a big difference. It could have been possible to have multiple contact events over a 200 year periods to allow disease resistance to form without losing what may have been 90% of their population in one relatively large swoop.

You may enjoy "The Years of Rice and Salt," by Kim Stanley Robinson.

They would still likely suffer heavy losses due to disease and infection they have no immunity for.

> I keep wondering how these civilizations might have developed if we'd discovered them in, say, 1900 instead of 1500s.

(presumably unpopular opinion, people love to signal)

This honestly feels like mashup of "i think colonialism/columbus is bad" signaling and that Africa is a tech hub in parallel universe pipedreaming.

There's a pile of recently discovered cultures in Amazonia and they're not exactly competing with NASA... which begs the question why you'd expect anything resembling a hockey stick progress for that hypothetical, aside from doubling down on columbus bad thesis.

"Columbus bad" isn't really a "thesis", it's a fact.

But yeah, it's against the evidence to think native american societies could have posed any meaningful defense or offense against old world countries.

Have you read 1491 and 1493. I have, and they are a couple of the most eye-opening books I have read.

They most likely would have become insular like china and stagnated similarly. Best scenario would be something like a south vs north dual empire constellation, locked into a cold war that eggs them ever onward.

But we will never know, because they did not produce a culture that could compete. Even with time to prepare, alot of these cultures abandoned advanced tech (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearms_of_Japan) and supressed the "foreign" as the local elites felt there oligarchies threatened by those strange foreigners. I guess the usual attempts were made to encooperate the threat, by offering small kingdoms, slaves and positions within the ruling religion. It did not really work out, as disease crumbled the civilizations to dust.

The other "prepared" culture (north american indians who met the vikings) did not take any lesson from that encounter either, because the tales of strange boats with christian raiders were not kept in writing and information was not exchanged with neighbors, with which they were locked in ritualistic inter-tribal warfare. Which is the main problem. The lack of information storage and exchange, due to a missing central culture.

Africa had the longest time to acclimate to western intrusion, and did so by selling its own people as goods. The few things they did take over were weapons (used for slave trading and inter tribal warfare), the only candidates for organized resistance was the islamic world (who had writtings, a specialized labour system (industrial precursors) and centralized structures), but they were & are locked in by thee own cultural problems. Only exception were the persians, which were and are the france/us of the region.

The chinese almost colonized africa, but then gave it up as a foolish endeavor, due to internal problems (starvation caused unrest) which was mostly due to there industrial revolution never reaching critical mass, which was mostly due to centralized culture/geography preventing technological competition aka harmony).

There is good fiction on the topic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Years_of_Rice_and_Salt, but you need basically a geographical reactor europes eternal boiling empire pot, with a progress state saving device attached (netherlands and england, some italian states were the scientists fled towards and from), to reach the critical mass. The ingredients were omnipresent, but the permanence of the societal reaction was hard to get critical.

Amerindians were highly vulnerable to European diseases while Europeans were similarly vulnerable to African diseases. Certain parts of Africa were known as "White Man's Grave".

Displacement by settlers in Africa was limited to areas with suitable climate. In the other areas, the natives were pretty left on their own as long as no exploitable resources were present.

> "Columbus bad" isn't really a "thesis", it's a fact.

Bad compared to who? Whatever faults you'd lay at his feet were not only de rigueur for both Europeans and Muslims of his time, but exceeded in many dimensions of savagery by the indigenous cultures he encountered. At any rate, disease and lack of immunity was far and away the agent of the demise of the natives, not Columbus or those who followed him over the centuries.

> Have you read 1491 and 1493. I have, and they are a couple of the most eye-opening books I have read.

Have you read Rousseau? The man never met a native American, and what accounts he read of their lives were certainly exaggerations, if not fabrications. In his own life, he was notoriously irresponsible. He fathered and abandoned for the orphanage -- a death sentence in those days -- five children. He was habitually leeching off friends and nobles who were susceptible to his charms, until he exhausted their patience and good will, including by e.g. seducing their wives at times.

In short, he was a scoundrel, and he saw in the the story of the natives something which he desperately wanted for himself, but which wasn't there: the possibility of a life free from societal constraint, obligations to be decent, to use one's life productively, to be responsible for others, to live morally. The man confabulated for the natives a lifestyle free of the bonds under which he chafed in France -- and we have been laboring under his romantic "noble savage" delusion ever since.

I mention all this to say, anyone who would read about the lives of natives would do well to read a little Rousseau, then read a little about the man, and mentally subtract his influence which is virtually omnipresent in all subsequent popular thought about natives.

TLDR; nobody wants to consider that the colonel may have been the good guy in Avatar, and Sully a delusional loner.

> Whatever faults you’d lay at his feet were not only de rigueur for both Europeans and Muslims of his time,

No, they weren’t, which is why he was known as a notoriously cruel administrator by contemporary Europeans, which was a substantial factor in his being removed as governor, arrested, and returned to Spain in chains.

This is also generally a fabrication. Columbus was a fanatic. This is how he was viewed and the claims of his cruelty were unsubstantiated allegations made by his enemies and the crown to avoid paying him the 10% that he was contractually owed. This was the reason for his removal as governor. Columbus returned in chains at his own insistence that if he were to be recalled to defend himself then he was a prisoner and it should be known that he was treated as such and afforded no special privilege.

Columbus the Four Voyages by Laurence Bergreen details this and many many more extremely interesting details about Columbus.

In addition to Europeans, the contemporary set I mentioned also includes

1. Arab slavers who made eunuchs of their captured (kidnapped) slaves, and

2. the Mesoamerican civilizations whose religious imperative was to keep their sacred pyramids constantly covered in flowing human blood

The corollary of your point, even if it was a fair and accurate assessment of Columbus' affairs, would be that Europeans were otherwise moral judges -- although by today's standards I'm sure you'd also condemn them just the same.

Columbus was a product of his times, as were the slavers and the natives.

“de rigeur for <X> and <Y>” means “required by current fashion for all of X and Y” not “practiced by some subset of X and Y”.

You seem to be retreating from the claim that Columbus’s behavior as governor was in line with the universal practice of his time to the much weaker and less controversial claim that it was both in some way influenced by the social context of his time and not uniquely bad in the contemporary (overlapping) “European and Muslim” world.

Which, sure, nice motte and bailey, Columbus was quite possibly not the single most abusive European and/or Muslim territorial governor of the late 15th Century.

(You also seem to want to argue about claims about Mesoamerican civilizations which I did not argue against, for whatever reason.)

Correct. Columbus's behavior was de rigueur for X=[those European engaged in exploration, settlement, and the slave trade]. It was also better than the equivalent behavior when X=[non-Europeans engaged in the same]. And the slave trade, conquest, and settlement was de rigueur for X=[civilizations].

Therefore "Columbus was bad" can't be meaningfully correct, unless we're presupposing a moral frame that stands outside of one's time and one's contemporaries -- and if we're doing that, I'll have a lot of other comments.

> Bad compared to who? Whatever faults you'd lay at his feet were not only de rigueur for both Europeans and Muslims of his time, but exceeded in many dimensions of savagery by the indigenous cultures he encountered. At any rate, disease and lack of immunity was far and away the agent of the demise of the natives, not Columbus or those who followed him over the centuries.

Even if Columbus's badness was within the range of average for his time, it's still a fact that he was bad lol.

I don't know why you're singling out Europeans and Muslims, btw--every society and group had (and has) its cruel bigots, its tyrants, its zealots, etc.

> But yeah, it's against the evidence to think native american societies could have posed any meaningful defense or offense against old world countries.

But they did pose a meaningful defense. The Mayans weren't fully conquered until the early 1800s, the Mapuche the late 1800s--effectively, it took Spain (and later Chile/Argentina) over 300 years to conquer the Native Americans. Quite frankly, the main reason they succeeded was not that the indigenous peoples were inferior, but that the Europeans could afford to wage a low-grade war for centuries, and stomach the surprisingly frequent setbacks, whereas the indigenous peoples couldn't.

> The Mayans weren't fully conquered until the early 1800s

I don't know anything about Mayan history, but Wikipedia says the Spanish conquered the Maya by 1697.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_civilization#Contact_peri...

Ya, but the Mapuche (as fierce warriors as they were) were unconquered largely because no one cared about Patagonia enough to live there. Kinda hard to conquer an area larger than France with a few thousand men.

What you may not be accounting for is the influences of the Americas on the rest of the world leading to their advancements. In particular in food production. Without corn and potatoes there may have been significantly less development in the old world over the last 500 years.

> I keep wondering how these civilizations might have developed if we'd discovered them in, say, 1900 instead of 1500s.

there are plenty of cultures in e.g. The Amazon basin that are deliberately undisturbed. You can infer from these I suppose

> I keep wondering how these civilizations might have developed if we'd discovered them in, say, 1900 instead of 1500s.

Reality check: pre-columbian americans did not have iron metallurgy, in this sense they were thousands years behind Europe and even Africa.

That's true, but their food production capabilities were generally far more advanced.

They also surprisingly did not have the wheel, or to frame it in the silliest way possible, the aztecs had the wheel, but never use it for it's mechanical properties.

The sequel "1493", about the local and global impacts following Columbus' landing, is even more fascinating.

One of my favorite history books, as well as it's sequel 1493.

The book is great but pretty old now. Can anyone comment on how it holds up to new discoveries/advances in knowledge we’ve made in the last 20 years?

A good introduction but there has been much work since this came out. See these more recent books by an historian that looks at things through the lens of two prominent North American nations:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44310208-lakota-america?...

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3304956-the-comanche-emp...

The Vikings arrived in North America in 1021AD…. long, long before Columbus.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-58996186.amp

https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/4-the-greenland-viking...

Or:

https://youtu.be/lmbY-GrM8pI

Uh..yeah? What does that have to do with anything? This is about the European arrival, which had a significant historical impact, not about who was first.

I'm learning about the byzantine empire right now, and I find it so fascinating that the roman empire finally fell less than 40 years before the Americas were "discovered".

A Russian author quoted by Kissinger in Diplomacy claims that Russia is the continuation of The Roman Empire, not sure this is just nationalism or a grounded thesis.

Going with The Meme[0], Constantine XI[1] was the last Byzantine emperor until his death and the Fall of Constantinople in 1453. The line of succession, ignoring dead empires and bought titles, is supposedly brother (Thomas) > nephew (Andreas, son of Thomas) > niece (Zoe, sister of Andreas) > Grand Prince of Moscow (Ivan III, through marriage with Zoe) > Tsar of the Russian Empire (grandson of Ivan III)

[0] https://i.imgur.com/tolQ9ih.png [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantine_XI_Palaiologos

So the tsar is derived from caesar. Interesting!

Along the same, er, vein, check out The Open Veins Of Latin America - it's a painstakingly well-researched and fiery book on the colonization and exploitation of Latin America for its resources, under the guise of "taming the primitives". It also documents the attempts of the US in sabotaging popular, labour-led/socialist movements, nearly always successful and often involving the use of violence, all in the name of "fostering democracy".

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