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The Louisiana Purchase was paid with gold. The people who sold Manhattan may not have understood the selling of territory, or been good representatives of all
by rz2k 6y ago
The Louisiana Purchase was paid with gold.
The people who sold Manhattan may not have understood the selling of territory, or been good representatives of all of Manhattan's residents, but I don't think beads are entirely the problem.
Napoleon sold inhabited territory he didn't control, and had no intention of wearing all of the gold. He was going to trade it away for useful goods and services necessary to take Britain by force.
What were the plans for the beads?
Let's say you have no prospect of sourcing the same beads (or therefore no need for a deep water port either) yet there is an entire continent west of you that has been depopulated by disease, and the remaining population has even less access to beads.
My point is that vanity and status confer real value on beads and gold, because it makes them tradable goods. Likewise legalistic notions of owning land are different than de facto control. I think the discomfort comes from the dynamics of a deal made when one party has more power.
- AlotOfReading 6y ago> ...yet there is an entire continent west of you that has been depopulated by disease... This is a rather popular myth, but most academics reject the virgin soil thesis as some combination of incomplete and simplistic. Europeans were intimately involved with precipitous population declines where they occurred in North America.
- rz2k 6y agoThough 1491 was published 15 years ago, it seemed both well-sourced and restrained in its claims. Whereas there may have been dense towns up and down the east coast in the 1400s, by the 1600s when the pilgrims arrived, and when Manhattan was sold, Europeans were encountering populations with their own politics and a societies suffering from collapses and multiple catastrophes.
- AlotOfReading 6y ago1491 is generally a good book, but this was not the mainstream consensus when it was written and the information available has changed somewhat in the intervening decades. There are a lot of reasons to think that virgin soil thesis specifically is an insufficient explanation. I keep a link to Livi-Bacci's [1] essay to recommend on this topic. It remains approachable without having become severely outdated. Another good (though increasingly dated) critique is Jones' Virgin Soils Revisited [2], which unfortunately goes into quite a bit of detail about the biomedical issues with VST. [1] https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1728-4457.2006.00116.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1728-4457.2006.00116.x [2] https://doi.org/10.2307/3491697 https://doi.org/10.2307/3491697