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It's sad to me how little is known about the native Caribbean peoples. When I read stories about a thriving island population, the Maya and Mexica empires, and
by iamcasen 9y ago
It's sad to me how little is known about the native Caribbean peoples. When I read stories about a thriving island population, the Maya and Mexica empires, and the new discoveries being made with Lidar in the jungles, I just feel a sense of loss.
What would the Americas -- the world -- look like today if the Europeans never came here? Or at least, came and engaged respectfully.
Think about it, much of what is considered traditional european food actually came from the Americas: potatoes, tomatoes, chocolate. Italian cuisine wouldn't exist without the Americas.
And now that the whole world has benefited, where are the people who gave it all to the rest of us? Eradicated from existence.
- CapitalistCartr 9y agoRespectfully would have eliminated a massive amount of atrocities, but the end result would have been similar: most of the native popularion dead in the first 150 years of contact. The Americas went from 50-100 million people to fewer than 5 million natives because of disease.
- abusoufiyan 9y ago>The Americas went from 50-100 million people to fewer than 5 million natives because of disease. Disease which was quite forcefully spread by Europeans as an act of warfare.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_disease_and_epidemics#Disease_as_a_weapon_against_Native_Americans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_disease_and_ep...
- jacobush 9y agoAs atrocious as it was, it was pretty late. The largest pandemics were probably hundreds of years prior. Some believe the herds of buffalo etc was a sign of an ecosystem in great change, where the change was extinction of societies that previously tended the land.
- megaman22 9y agoFor a while, years ago, I was on an "alternative history" fiction kick. Most of it is dreck, but one diamond in that rough was Orson Scott Card's Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus[1]. Without giving too much away, it's about a group of future historians that use time-travel to study past cultures, and discover that they can not only view past events, but influence them as well. It's got a couple of interesting semi-plausible what-ifs of different ways the Columbian Exchange might have worked out, under different parameters. [1] http://amzn.to/2CvPY10 http://amzn.to/2CvPY10
- oh_sigh 9y agoKeep in mind that native American groups were conquering, enslaving, and destroying other cultures as well - but they rarely kept records of it. It is not as if there was universal peace in the pre-Columbus Americas.
- losteric 9y agoNo one's suggesting otherwise. Every culture has blood in their past, "civilization" is the slow process of collectively maturing to avoid those conflicts.
- oh_sigh 9y agoOP was lamenting genocide, and then wondered what the world would be like if the Europeans never came. That seems to me to imply that OP believes Europeans are solely responsible for Indian genocides, which is what I was responding to
- losteric 9y agoIndian? You mean native Americans? Europeans are solely responsible for bringing new diseases to South America - that wiped out most of the population, far more than swords and guns. Britain also killed a lot of people in India, but they didn't commit genocide.
- wavefunction 9y agoOf course the actual Indians had their own genocidal maniacs, like Ashoka the Great
- oh_sigh 9y agoI never said Europeans weren't responsible for genocide. And "Indian" is an accepted, defined way to reference Native Americans. See: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Indian https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Indian
- spicymaki 9y ago