What if the Europeans Hadn't Discovered the New World when they did?

[Leviathan]

Racist? I’d refer to ignorance first and foremost, actually, though it could be a factor.

@Dondolee

Send me some decent online links if you can, so I can see wher you are comming from. Like I said American civ is not my strong point, I’ll evaluate from there.

I’d focused far more on the OP more than anything else, actually. But I’d refer to some of the more contemporary literature, with 1491 in particular being a solid starting point.

1491 is not so much the story of a year, as of what that year stands for: the long-debated (and often-dismissed) question of what human civilization in the Americas was like before the Europeans crashed the party. The history books most Americans were (and still are) raised on describe the continents before Columbus as a vast, underused territory, sparsely populated by primitives whose cultures would inevitably bow before the advanced technologies of the Europeans. For decades, though, among the archaeologists, anthropologists, paleolinguists, and others whose discoveries Charles C. Mann brings together in 1491, different stories have been emerging. Among the revelations: the first Americans may not have come over the Bering land bridge around 12,000 B.C. but by boat along the Pacific coast 10 or even 20 thousand years earlier; the Americas were a far more urban, more populated, and more technologically advanced region than generally assumed; and the Indians, rather than living in static harmony with nature, radically engineered the landscape across the continents, to the point that even “timeless” natural features like the Amazon rainforest can be seen as products of human intervention.

[Dondoolee]

Thanks for the lit, I’ll check it out.

Back to the OP then. Would you agree that:

a) there is no evidence to suggest Europe would be some backwoods 3rd world continent if it had not colonized specificaly America when it did

b) It is at least reasonable to think the people of a continent that is more isolated with less resourses, less population, and less land would most likley be in a sore spot when it was found (and that includes the disease aspect of things)

c) There would have been a decent chance the Americans would have been colonized and decimated anyway, if not by a late arrival of W. Europe than some other Eurasian power?

d) The teacher (by tonly what the OP is saying) seems to have an agenda to push, and may not be reacting in an intellectualy honest way

[Marko]

@Dondoolee

I actually meant for that statement to go both ways. Many “right wing” types get all bent out of shape when their notion of the Americans get questioned. I certainly am no fan of the Western bias of history that exists (and it does). I mean just look at how they treat the “Byzantine” Empire, for example, it’s a complete joke.

What do you mean, mate? What do they teach you about Byzantium and how it is incorrect?

[Marko]

@Dondoolee

b) It is at least reasonable to think the people of a continent that is more isolated with less resourses, less population, and less land would most likley be in a sore spot when it was found (and that includes the disease aspect of things)

Pretty much. Just look at biology. The animals in isolated Australia simply can not compete with their counterparts from Eurasia. You introduce a fox there and they drive 50 different species extinct.

Then you have the example of what self-imposed isolation did to China - once the most advanced civilization in the world.

And I would also introduce an additional factor that may have played a role - the migrations themselves. Amerindians reached South America like 13,000 years ago. While Europe was settled 40,000 years ago. That is a head start of 25,000 years.

[Dondoolee]

@Marko

@Dondoolee

I actually meant for that statement to go both ways. Many “right wing” types get all bent out of shape when their notion of the Americans get questioned. I certainly am no fan of the Western bias of history that exists (and it does). I mean just look at how they treat the “Byzantine” Empire, for example, it’s a complete joke.

What do you mean, mate? What do they teach you about Byzantium and how it is incorrect?

I won’t get too much into this, as it is WAY off topic. But it is almost exclusivly treated by it’s relationship to the West, treated with very broad strokes (ex: there is more primary source info on the Bzantine Empire than the entire west between the 300’s - 1300’s yet it pales in comparison with actual scholarly output), and there is no reason to even call it the Byzantine Empire to begin with. That and there seems to be a high correlation of authors using the “great man theory” when writing their 300 page books on a 1000 year history.

[shazam]

@Dondoolee

Thanks for the lit, I’ll check it out.

Back to the OP then. Would you agree that:

a) there is no evidence to suggest Europe would be some backwoods 3rd world continent if it had not colonized specificaly America when it did

b) It is at least reasonable to think the people of a continent that is more isolated with less resourses, less population, and less land would most likley be in a sore spot when it was found (and that includes the disease aspect of things)

c) There would have been a decent chance the Americans would have been colonized and decimated anyway, if not by a late arrival of W. Europe than some other Eurasian power?

d) The teacher (by tonly what the OP is saying) seems to have an agenda to push, and may not be reacting in an intellectualy honest way

I agree with all of those. Thanks for the advice.

[AndrewR]

First, I’m not sure where the OP gets the idea that europe would have developed ‘nukes, tanks and airplanes’ and subsequently use them to crush the Amerindians at a later date, considering that most of these inventions required the USA to exist in the first place (directly and indirectly as the case might be). If the european colonisation of the Americas didn’t occur, it’s incredibly hard to say how the world would have developed, since the answer rests entirely on the speculator’s own personal fantasies and prejudices.

I’m quite wary of people who imply that the Amerindians lived in some sort of Eden like/communist/pacifist paradise until the ‘serpentine’ whiteman crashed the party. How were the Amerindians not subject to follies and fantasies of human nature, exactly? And what about the African cheiftans who kickstarted the Atlantic slavetrade…

(Afterall, if you want to play that game, you may as well have a burning hatred of the Romans, the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Carthaginians, the Saxons, the Normans (and so forth), right back to the early humans who possibly forcibly displaced the neanderthals…)

Human history is littered with rival tribes supplanting their neighbours for various reasons. That doesn’t make it morally or ethically right, of course, but we can only effect events in our own time; why this pre-occupation with ‘passing down the guilt’ to each new generation who had nothing to do with, and no control over, the actions of their forebears? We ought to righty condemn stupid, cruel and evil behaviour of people in the past and hold ourselves to a different standard because of it, not to assume the burden of collective self-loathing!

All that said… imagining alternate scenarios can be entertaining. A book based around the ‘world without europe’ theme (read: without the Western bloc) came out a few years ago. Called ‘The Years of Rice and Salt’ and written by Kim Stanley Robinson, a self-identified democratic socialist or somesuch, it envisaged what might’ve happened had the Black Death wiped out 99.9% of europe in the 1300s and begins with Ghenghis Khan’s hordes arriving amongst the eerily deserted villages, towns and cities of Poland. Suffice to say, Christianity becomes a ‘minor cult’ amongst the few white people that remain as slaves to the Moors of Spain…

The book’s politics are inevitably silly, but it’s an interesting read nonetheless.