An interesting take on the colonization of America
-
Some of these things apply only to the US and Canada but interesting thinking nonetheless.
t’s time to put a few comforting misnomers to rest about the settlers who came to America and their relationship to those who were already here. The modern habit of flattening history into a morality play may feel virtuous, but it comes at the cost of accuracy. Being first does not confer civilizational primacy, and coexistence myths do not substitute for hard distinctions between societies that build and societies that do not. History is not sentimental. It is developmental. And development always leaves a record.
What existed in North America prior to European settlement was not a civilization in the sense the word has always been understood. There was no written language, no codified law, no durable institutions, no cities, no philosophy, no science, no architecture that scaled, no technological trajectory that suggested imminent development. What existed was a patchwork of tribes, many of them locked in constant warfare, with lifeways that had largely plateaued for centuries.
That is the line history itself draws.
The technological gap between Europeans and the populations they encountered was not modest. It was absolute. Europeans arrived with metallurgy, navigation, mathematics, agriculture at scale, written law, political theory, and an institutional mindset oriented toward permanence. To suggest that the two societies were “not greatly separated” technologically is simply false. One was moving forward on a compounding civilizational arc. The other was not.
And this is the larger issue that continues to distort the conversation: the builders are rarely credited as builders. Settlers are spoken of as if they merely “took” something from an already-functioning civilization, rather than creating one where none existed. There would have been no conquest to speak of if there had been a civilization capable of resisting, adapting, or preserving itself. History does not record theft from nothing. It records replacement through development.
Even today, the consequences of refusing to speak plainly remain visible. Permanent separation through reservations has proven destructive, not protective. Assimilation is how modern societies function. No group thrives by being frozen in time, subsidized into dependency, or incentivized to remain culturally isolated. And when modern “contributions” are reduced to casino economics, that is not empowerment. It is a quiet indictment of a system that rewards stagnation over integration.
Progress is not a conspiracy. It is nature’s method. Everything that survives develops. Everything that refuses to develop is eventually overtaken.
Both groups can be discussed without malice. European settlers and the indigenous tribes they encountered did not operate at the same civilizational level, a distinction the record makes unavoidable.
-
If one reads 1491 and 1493...
There was no written language (not true everywhere), no codified law (wrong),no durable institutions (untrue in several places), no cities (Tenochtitlan had a population 4x larger than London in 1491), no philosophy (really?), no science (the Aztecs did things e.g. Agriculture we still haven't figured out), no architecture that scaled (e.g. Tenochtitlan??), no technological trajectory that suggested imminent development.
Seems like he's arguing for manifest destiny and a certain mustached man who argued for the supremacy of a certain tribe.
-
It’s basically true in the English colonies. Not so much in the Spanish. It basically came down to whether the local tribesmen were more hunter-gatherer or agricultural.
By the way, by and large the hunter-gatherer tribes were wiped out and the agricultural societies were functionally enslaved or at least systematically exploited. I used to think that was primarily an English vs Spanish thing but it again had to do with the development state of the local tribesmen. Hunter gathers in the pampas were wiped out just like the North American ones.
