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Parallel evolution of two strains of smallpox might have meant still no immunity to the Spanish version several centuries later. And the diseases were only a s

Parallel evolution of two strains of smallpox might have meant still no immunity to the Spanish version several centuries later. And the diseases were only a small factor in the outcome of the colonization. Guns being a much larger factor, for example.

irrational 5y ago
Is that true? I've read that 90+% of the population died from diseases, the vast majority without ever knowing about the European conquerors (that is, they never saw a gun). Imagine if 90% of the people in your nearest city died. How difficult would it be for a new group, immune to whatever killed almost everyone in the city, to move in and take over?
- kristopolous 5y ago
  I've always wondered why this wasn't a two-way street. Wouldn't native people also have diseases to share? 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_Caribbean 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.
  - gameman144 5y ago
    From what I've read, native populations had less frequent interactions with livestock (through which many diseases arise) and less concentration in poor-sanitation settings (e.g. urban centers without sewers), both of which gave European settlers more exposure to transmissible pathogens in the centuries before settlement.
  - dleslie 5y ago
    > Wouldn't native people also have diseases to share? 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.
    - handrous 5y ago
      IIRC a lot of Eurasian diseases were a result of long-term close contact with domesticated animals. Guess which side of the Atlantic didn't really have domesticated animals....
  - michaelbuckbee 5y ago
    IIRC that certain aspects of how livestock were raised in Europe contributed to a long history of more virulent illnesses so that when the European population eventually met the North American it was the North American that suffered.
  - not2b 5y ago
    It's possible that syphilis was brought back to Europe from the New World by the Spanish. That hasn't been proven though. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_syphilis 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 ...
  - roywiggins 5y ago
    The usual explanation is that the Europeans lived in much closer proximity with livestock... smallpox probably came from cows, etc. 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)
- AlotOfReading 5y ago
  This is not accurate. Individual epidemics did not have mortalities even approaching the 90% range. What actually happened were dozens of epidemics over decades or centuries. Moreover, outside the Northeast, Columbian epidemics are closely associated with persistent European contact and colonization. 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.
  - caethan 5y ago
    More than 90% collapse in Mexico from 1520 to 1580, mostly from three epidemics. Starting from ~22m, 8m (37%) dead from a 1520 smallpox epidemic, 12-15m dead (~80%) from a 1545 cocolitzli epidemic, and another ~2m dead (~50%) from a 1576 cotolitzli epidemic. Mexican population didn't recover to its previous highs until the 20th century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocoliztli_epidemics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocoliztli_epidemics
  - irrational 5y ago
    Isn't that because Europe was able to bounce back while in the Americas, the diseases were immediately followed up by the European colonizers who didn't give them time or space to repopulate?
    - AlotOfReading 5y ago
      That's exactly the point. Epidemic disease alone is an insufficient explanation for the demographic collapse of indigenous Americans.
      - bobthepanda 5y ago
        Is it not? 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.
Y_Y 5y ago
> And the diseases were only a small factor in the outcome of the colonization. Guns being a much larger factor, for example. 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.
- Robotbeat 5y ago
  Also, the guns the conquistadors had kinda sucked and at that time not massively better than bow and arrow (they required less strength and skill, but skilled archers were just as good, and the conquistadors could’ve sent them instead). Arguably the steel swords and armor, plus horses, were much more important.
  - jjk166 5y ago
    Fun fact, the battle of Tenochtitlan was one of the last times trebuchets were used in war.
thehappypm 5y ago
It would also mean smallpox would spread the other way. It’s interesting that the transfer of disease was so heavily one-sided.
- Robotbeat 5y ago
  It’s not surprising at all. If you assume naively that development rate of a novel disease is proportional to population, then the World, which had a 6:1 greater population would have 6 times as many communicable diseases. Similar argument if you base it off of land mass, number of wild animals, number of domesticated animals, etc. (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…)
  - thehappypm 5y ago
    I’ve read that most human viruses jumped from domesticated animals. The pre-Columbian American peoples notoriously had almost no domesticated animals, with I think just one exception being the llama. So I think that’s supposedly the primary factor, less so raw population.
    - Robotbeat 5y ago
      Indeed, I even mentioned that. ;) > ”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.
  - ProjectArcturis 5y ago
    You also had millions of years for diseases to evolve to infect people in the Old World. Then there were fairly small populations that traveled to the New World. If they didn't bring the diseases with them, there was only about 10,000 years for disease evolution, and a much smaller population for much of that time.
wbsss4412 5y ago
Source? Guns of the period weren’t very effective in that period. Most accounts I’ve seen attribute the conquistadors success to disease and political instability.
- Swizec 5y ago
  If I'm remembering Guns, Germs, and Steel correctly, a popular/pluasible theory is that even without the disease conquistador swords and armor were so much better than the natives, they'd eventually win regardless. Something about more advanced metallurgy. Having horses may also have helped. There were no beasts of burden (iirc) in North America until the Spanish arrived.
  - LudwigNagasena 5y ago
    Well, there were around 3000 Spanish conquistadors. Could they really conquer the whole Aztec empire (5 mln people) without alliances with local tribes?
    - Robotbeat 5y ago
      Without local tribes? Probably not, but that’s almost always how conquering actually happens (by exploiting existing fault lines). The situation with Alexander the Great is kind of representative. Alexander the Great had an army of about 30,000 people and conquered the Persian Empire which had a population of about 50 million. The Conquistadors had 3000 and conquered the Aztec Empire which had a population of 5 million, although the Conquistadors also had the benefit of disease traveling before them and not just better tactics but also far superior metallurgy. It doesn’t necessarily take an enormous advantage to conquer large territories, and the Conquistadors had numerous advantages.
      - tick_tock_tick 5y ago
        The biggest advantage the Conquistadors has was everyone else in the area fucking hated the Aztec. They were horrible to have as neighbors and when any chance to fuck them over, the Spanish, came everyone jumped on board.
throwaway894345 5y ago
> 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.
- dragontamer 5y ago
  In the context of military technology, ships and wagons are the big thing. Ships and wagons to carry food to troops and establish supply lines. 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).
  - runarberg 5y ago
    Even in WW2 it can be argued that the Allies biggest advantage on the western front was the USA build Liberty ships, which were built really quickly and mainly used for supply.
    - lostlogin 5y ago
      > Allies biggest advantage As a strategy, you could do a lot worse than Liberty ships and a lot of Russians.
  - bakuninsbart 5y ago
    Was this generally the case for the native populations of the Americas? I'd actually be very interested in some works on native american supply line( problem)s.
jnwatson 5y ago
Between “discovery” and permanent settlement of the continental US, an estimated 55 million Native Americans died of disease. [1] 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-europeans-killed-indigenous-americans-2019-2 https://www.businessinsider.com/climate-changed-after-europe...
- kibwen 5y ago
  In particular we can imagine it might look more similar to how China, India, Africa, etc. turned out, with subjugated local populations serving under foreign imperial governors. The eventual collapse of the empire might then result in most of the Americas being populated by ethnically Native American states.
  - pasabagi 5y ago
    Not sure. China, India, Africa etc were colonized for much shorter periods of time. 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.
    - paganel 5y ago
      > but they did suffer a precipitous decline in population. 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ireland#The_Kingdom_of_Ireland
kibwen 5y ago
> Parallel evolution of two strains of smallpox might have meant still no immunity to the Spanish version several centuries later. 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.
- queuebert 5y ago
  That's a very good point.
WalterBright 5y ago
> And the diseases were only a small factor in the outcome of the colonization. Guns being a much larger factor, for example. 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.
- bumbada 5y ago
  People in America were not stupid, there were not repetition guns yet, like Repeating rifle or early machine guns. 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.

irrational 5y ago

Is that true? I've read that 90+% of the population died from diseases, the vast majority without ever knowing about the European conquerors (that is, they never saw a gun). Imagine if 90% of the people in your nearest city died. How difficult would it be for a new group, immune to whatever killed almost everyone in the city, to move in and take over?

kristopolous 5y ago
I've always wondered why this wasn't a two-way street. Wouldn't native people also have diseases to share? 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_Caribbean 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.
- gameman144 5y ago
  From what I've read, native populations had less frequent interactions with livestock (through which many diseases arise) and less concentration in poor-sanitation settings (e.g. urban centers without sewers), both of which gave European settlers more exposure to transmissible pathogens in the centuries before settlement.
- dleslie 5y ago
  > Wouldn't native people also have diseases to share? 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.
  - handrous 5y ago
    IIRC a lot of Eurasian diseases were a result of long-term close contact with domesticated animals. Guess which side of the Atlantic didn't really have domesticated animals....
- michaelbuckbee 5y ago
  IIRC that certain aspects of how livestock were raised in Europe contributed to a long history of more virulent illnesses so that when the European population eventually met the North American it was the North American that suffered.
- not2b 5y ago
  It's possible that syphilis was brought back to Europe from the New World by the Spanish. That hasn't been proven though. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_syphilis 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 ...
- roywiggins 5y ago
  The usual explanation is that the Europeans lived in much closer proximity with livestock... smallpox probably came from cows, etc. 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)
AlotOfReading 5y ago
This is not accurate. Individual epidemics did not have mortalities even approaching the 90% range. What actually happened were dozens of epidemics over decades or centuries. Moreover, outside the Northeast, Columbian epidemics are closely associated with persistent European contact and colonization. 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.
- caethan 5y ago
  More than 90% collapse in Mexico from 1520 to 1580, mostly from three epidemics. Starting from ~22m, 8m (37%) dead from a 1520 smallpox epidemic, 12-15m dead (~80%) from a 1545 cocolitzli epidemic, and another ~2m dead (~50%) from a 1576 cotolitzli epidemic. Mexican population didn't recover to its previous highs until the 20th century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocoliztli_epidemics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocoliztli_epidemics
- irrational 5y ago
  Isn't that because Europe was able to bounce back while in the Americas, the diseases were immediately followed up by the European colonizers who didn't give them time or space to repopulate?
  - AlotOfReading 5y ago
    That's exactly the point. Epidemic disease alone is an insufficient explanation for the demographic collapse of indigenous Americans.
    - bobthepanda 5y ago
      Is it not? 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.

Y_Y 5y ago

> And the diseases were only a small factor in the outcome of the colonization. Guns being a much larger factor, for example. 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.

Robotbeat 5y ago
Also, the guns the conquistadors had kinda sucked and at that time not massively better than bow and arrow (they required less strength and skill, but skilled archers were just as good, and the conquistadors could’ve sent them instead). Arguably the steel swords and armor, plus horses, were much more important.
- jjk166 5y ago
  Fun fact, the battle of Tenochtitlan was one of the last times trebuchets were used in war.

thehappypm 5y ago

It would also mean smallpox would spread the other way. It’s interesting that the transfer of disease was so heavily one-sided.

Robotbeat 5y ago
It’s not surprising at all. If you assume naively that development rate of a novel disease is proportional to population, then the World, which had a 6:1 greater population would have 6 times as many communicable diseases. Similar argument if you base it off of land mass, number of wild animals, number of domesticated animals, etc. (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…)
- thehappypm 5y ago
  I’ve read that most human viruses jumped from domesticated animals. The pre-Columbian American peoples notoriously had almost no domesticated animals, with I think just one exception being the llama. So I think that’s supposedly the primary factor, less so raw population.
  - Robotbeat 5y ago
    Indeed, I even mentioned that. ;) > ”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.
- ProjectArcturis 5y ago
  You also had millions of years for diseases to evolve to infect people in the Old World. Then there were fairly small populations that traveled to the New World. If they didn't bring the diseases with them, there was only about 10,000 years for disease evolution, and a much smaller population for much of that time.

wbsss4412 5y ago

Source? Guns of the period weren’t very effective in that period. Most accounts I’ve seen attribute the conquistadors success to disease and political instability.

Swizec 5y ago
If I'm remembering Guns, Germs, and Steel correctly, a popular/pluasible theory is that even without the disease conquistador swords and armor were so much better than the natives, they'd eventually win regardless. Something about more advanced metallurgy. Having horses may also have helped. There were no beasts of burden (iirc) in North America until the Spanish arrived.
- LudwigNagasena 5y ago
  Well, there were around 3000 Spanish conquistadors. Could they really conquer the whole Aztec empire (5 mln people) without alliances with local tribes?
  - Robotbeat 5y ago
    Without local tribes? Probably not, but that’s almost always how conquering actually happens (by exploiting existing fault lines). The situation with Alexander the Great is kind of representative. Alexander the Great had an army of about 30,000 people and conquered the Persian Empire which had a population of about 50 million. The Conquistadors had 3000 and conquered the Aztec Empire which had a population of 5 million, although the Conquistadors also had the benefit of disease traveling before them and not just better tactics but also far superior metallurgy. It doesn’t necessarily take an enormous advantage to conquer large territories, and the Conquistadors had numerous advantages.
    - tick_tock_tick 5y ago
      The biggest advantage the Conquistadors has was everyone else in the area fucking hated the Aztec. They were horrible to have as neighbors and when any chance to fuck them over, the Spanish, came everyone jumped on board.

throwaway894345 5y ago

> 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.

dragontamer 5y ago
In the context of military technology, ships and wagons are the big thing. Ships and wagons to carry food to troops and establish supply lines. 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).
- runarberg 5y ago
  Even in WW2 it can be argued that the Allies biggest advantage on the western front was the USA build Liberty ships, which were built really quickly and mainly used for supply.
  - lostlogin 5y ago
    > Allies biggest advantage As a strategy, you could do a lot worse than Liberty ships and a lot of Russians.
- bakuninsbart 5y ago
  Was this generally the case for the native populations of the Americas? I'd actually be very interested in some works on native american supply line( problem)s.

jnwatson 5y ago

Between “discovery” and permanent settlement of the continental US, an estimated 55 million Native Americans died of disease. [1] 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-europeans-killed-indigenous-americans-2019-2 https://www.businessinsider.com/climate-changed-after-europe...

kibwen 5y ago
In particular we can imagine it might look more similar to how China, India, Africa, etc. turned out, with subjugated local populations serving under foreign imperial governors. The eventual collapse of the empire might then result in most of the Americas being populated by ethnically Native American states.
- pasabagi 5y ago
  Not sure. China, India, Africa etc were colonized for much shorter periods of time. 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.
  - paganel 5y ago
    > but they did suffer a precipitous decline in population. 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ireland#The_Kingdom_of_Ireland

kibwen 5y ago

> Parallel evolution of two strains of smallpox might have meant still no immunity to the Spanish version several centuries later. 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.

queuebert 5y ago
That's a very good point.

WalterBright 5y ago

> And the diseases were only a small factor in the outcome of the colonization. Guns being a much larger factor, for example. 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.

bumbada 5y ago
People in America were not stupid, there were not repetition guns yet, like Repeating rifle or early machine guns. 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.