Kinda the other way around: Europeans might use the crops grown by Native Americans far more efficiently than they ever did in the original timeline because of the knowledge transferred by trading partners. There might even be some Europeans importing Native American agricultural technique, like irrigation, back home.
The Native Americans were Immunized to European Diseases Before Invasion
- Thread starter Muhkat Lomorki
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Hykal94
Orange Estus Kitteh
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- Firelink Shrine
Considering how many rulers were keen to trade with Europeans, I would say they would adapt just fine. It didn't take long for the Natives to master the horse and learn how to use guns.
AKuz
Been Better
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No, absolutely not. The only reason there was even room for the Europeans on the east coast is because the apocalypse had happened. And the only reason they were tolerated was as because the entire area was in flux and they were useful tools (in all senses of the word). And when the Europeans inevitably outstay their welcome there will actually be the numbers to push them off the continent instead of fighting to a standstill.
Unless by "Colonies still exist in some form" you mean limited trading posts and not settlements with active immigration and a bottomless thirst for Native blood and land.
Even central and south America the Spanish were still helped by disease. Like, all the instablity was in large part caused by the slow motion Apocalypse of disease and the loss of institutions and the, you know, destruciton of society allowed the Spanish to just sort of by default have the strength to take over. Tho I do imagine that they might be able to sit atop literally a a half million to one empire for a bit until they got forced out.
Catholicism also isn't taking hold in any way, because the Mexican natives had priests with advanced theological frameworks that when they actually debated the Jesuits were only defeat by a brute force "Well if your gods are so great then why Smallpox apocalypse huh?" Pacification isn't likely to settle in and Spanish rule will never hold.
People always seem to underestimate how absolutely devastating apocalyptic the Columbian exchange was disease wise. There is simply no room for large scale European settlement without Armageddon clearing the way first.
Hykal94
Orange Estus Kitteh
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- Firelink Shrine
Really? What were these theological frameworks?
AKuz
Been Better
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Well, for the Triple Alliance specifically, it was an artificially constructed (out of existing beliefs admittedly) Totalitarian state that required constant expansion and sacrifice otherwise the sun would stop rising and everyone would die. Something about having souls laid out for gods like tortillas in a street vendor's stall.
The interesting bits comes in the details and the grasp of logic and Rhetoric that really stymied the Jesuits who thought they'd roll in, argue with some peasants, and be able to declare victory in an afternoon. They didn't expect having to deal with another organized religious hierarchy that tried to deal with them Church to Church, Priest to Bishop, and be like "not cool bro. We're the same sort of organization. Please don't just erase all of our work. Like this is actually not cool, why the hell are you doing this"
The ended up like going back and forth on philosophy for a while (I am, obviously, not versed in the details) before the Jesuits ended up sort of giving up and using a brute force approach of, "Listen, we conquered you, you all caught smallpox and died, therefor your Gods fake and Jesus is best"
I mean they weren't nice people with a nice cuddly ideology, but they were as capable of arguing their case as the high ranking supporters of any other Totalitarian state based on ideology.
EDIT: Obviously a lot of what I'm remembering here is fairly hazy, and subject to memory failures, and if you want a fuller accounting I'd suggest looking it up somewhere. 1491 has a fairly decent account IIRC.
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Except this did not happen in Africa, with the circumstances far harder for the Europeans. If Great Kongo cannot push the Portuguese into the sea with Dutch money and cannons, how will whatever North American polity that grows tired of plantations and unequal trade?
Also, waving off fall Mexica states as only due to smallpox is disingenuous. It robs the natives themselves of the agency and the role they had in the fall Tenochtitlan's rule over the region.
The distances here are a bit different, which creates supply problems for the Europeans. Also, American polities at the time were quite strongly organised and warlike -- it's not a given that artillery alone will help them.
Also, you seem to assume that there would even be plantations and unequal trade. Those things were only ever possible because the Columbian Exchange cleared American lands and reduced the clear numerical superiority of Native Americans vis-a-vis the European settlers. Without it, it's not a given they'll ever make it this far.
Distances - it is closer from Spain to Virginia than from Portugal to Benguela :/.
As for North American polities- I thought that our understanding of pre-colombian societies had a lot of holes? Still, I beleieve you mistook a part of my arguement. It was not Portuguese who had Dutch support, the Dutch were allied with the Kongo.
And of course there are going to be plantations, they are just too profitable for them not to exists. The sugar islands outperformed economically non-plantation colonies for centuries. The European invostors do not need to conquer Americas, they just need enough land for a single plantation at a time. Or beaver fur trading post.
Reveen
Castro-Trudeauist
How many people do you have to shoot on your average commute to work? People outside NA just dont get it.
The route to African colonies are lined with coastline, making logistics and navigation much easier.
Compare that with the troubles of making it across the Atlantic and get back to me. The colonization of the Americas was a gradual process for a reason.
I'd be kinda wary of making such a blanket statement that we apparently "don't get it", considering the trauma of thirty-two million deaths in less than a decade just half a century ago. That's six point four percent of the pre-war population, to put it in starker relative terms. Hey, you might not get how that informs attitudes, culture, and ideology in European cultures, either.
If you claim that anybody than "Nobody but North Americans can 'get' it," or "Europeans don't 'get' mass gunfighting in the streets," don't be surprised if I treat it with a healthy dose of skepticism -- or if that gets turned around on you.
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- Luton Airport
And your daily body count is?
Except of course that they would have to sail against Benguela current and the coastline was held by countries, that would not always welcome visitors. Actually funny thing - Poruguese sailed around Africa by sailing to Brasil rather than follow the African coast, which would imply that it is the easier route.
xa na xa
A.E.I.O.U. - Antarticae est imperare orbi universo
- Location
- σ Octantis
This, very much this.
Whitle settlement will be limited to some marginal areas, like the Boers in Africa.
Carribbean will probably still be plantations, but mostly with local or imported more or less forced labour from the American mainland. By "more or less" I mean it won't be to total chattel slavery of the triangular trade. Spice cultivations in the Dutch East Indies might be a good parallel.
There will no total conversion to christianity like OTL, that was very much dependent on pandemic social collapse.
But exactly how successful missionaries are depend on a lot of butterfly effects; though one should expect at least a few major Amerindian polities to become Christian.
"West India Companies" would be the initial main colonialism vessel, in the fashion of their oriental counterparts.
Instead of a couple of countries like Spain imposing their hegemony, it would be a more equal power game, where smaller European states such as Venice or Denmark might be relatively significant colonial powers as well as New World states like the Incas that could remain major New World powers, equivalent to the states of the Indian subcontinent or China.
One intriguing and counter-intuitive aspect is that it would be more economically beneficial for Europe, having far more people to trade with, already organised in political entities.
Also New World crops might be adopted faster, when the societies cultivating them and their farming techniques have not been obliterated.
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It certainly would be better for Spain.
tankdrop24
Tread First into Hell
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Is that really so counter-intuitive though? Much of modern prosperity comes from trading between nations on relatively equal terms instead of purely exploitative relations, and similar examples of such trade have occured throughout human history, such as the Indian Ocean trade network.
Maybe it was the colonialists who were the counter-intuitive ones.
xa na xa
A.E.I.O.U. - Antarticae est imperare orbi universo
- Location
- σ Octantis
How do you figure?
Yeah I completely agree; should have said "contrary to what popular belief might assume" or something.
Too many people believe that the relation between colonialism and western prosperity is about nothing more than plundering the gold from the natives.
Because the empire wrecked spanish industries, entangled Spain in need for military adventures and obscured need for administrative reforms? I think there are even posts here on all they way Spanish Empire was screwed up over there.
the atom
Anarcho-Kemalist Thought Leader
- Location
- Comfortably numb
Nonsense. Disease didn't start significantly impacting Nahuatl society until around the siege of Tenochtitlan (and impacted the besiegers just as much), and the mass depopulation didn't really take hold until after they'd won.
The Tlapanec(?) had started converting well before the siege of tenochtitlan.
I've read about the Jesuit conversions and this is the first I've ever heard that disease factored into a significant part of their conversion rhetoric.
AKuz
Been Better
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Disease weakens everyone sure, but it also udermines everything in society because it's not really capable or operating at peak efficiency if, you know, the people a government needs to do stuff are dead or dying. And it's really hard to run a defence when for the first time in history everyone around you starts dropping dead and cutting your command infrastructure to shreds where the other side has people that know how to deal with that.
It's a fairly obvious thing that having your society and culture deligitimized by the goddamn Apocalypse will make you less likely to cling to a religion that clearly isn't working. The mandate of heaven would fall to the people whose society hadn't just ceased to exist in a storm of bullets and smallpox
Yes, west Africa, the place that at one point had the most gold on earth, was truly a collection of loin clothe wearing Neolithic tribesmen. They had no advanced society, oh no not at all. Not a single city ever attested to in history
I swear it's like people think all of Africa was the interior Congolese rain forest or something. The Malian and Songhai states were large, wealthy, and they certainly we're using metal tools plenty. They were much more advanced militarily than the Native Americans were. Europeans still took advantage of a period of instability to conquer then, burn a bunch of their cities, and reduce them to a far more agrarian state
America would look, charitably, like Asia does not and uncharitably like how Africa does now. The euros are still gonna go colonial, but there will be a native population about to care about their own rights denied to them by dint of race
Triggerhappy
Stick with Trigger and You'll Make it Through
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If the Native Americans were simply granted European resistance to European disease I might agree with you, since less severe pandemics would weaken the native empires, possibly enough that they would collapse (probably too strong a word, go defunct?) but would not winnow the population sufficiently for the Europeans to achieve permanent dominance.
European diseases failing to kill off enough of the natives might also create a powerful mythos to drive the foreigners back out. 'They brought this tainted miasma to us!' Which would be a powerful rallying cry to say fuck Europeans and their religion.
In OP's scenario the natives are totally immune to European diseases which means any bad luck due to disease is going to fall into the laps of the Europeans and not afflict the natives at all.
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I was super not saying this. Europe only colonized Africa after centuries of disruption caused in large part by the transatlantic slave trade, and even then it took the breechloader and the machine-gun (which is the gap I'm talking about, between an Africa already impoverished from years of instability and exploitation and 19th century European armies) for Europe to actually make real headway into the continent.
None of that would even be possible without whites exploiting the Americas on easy mode after the most apocalyptic epidemic in history. Europe was, until then, a backward and savage continent essentially incapable of feeding themselves, nevermind conquering anything. They only got anywhere by stealing ideas and technology from actual civilizations in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, and by being filthy enough to bring terrible diseases to the New World.
Sorry for the miscommunication.
Night
Widow Null
- Location
- Hoff
East Africa, perhaps, but the Portuguese in particular confronted the West Africans through the late 1500s on essentially equal terms and still managed to wreck their civilization(s), and South Africa was originally colonized by the Dutch in the mid-1600s and the Boers broke the Xhosa with what really amounted to civilian musketry through the 1700s.
The Portuguese were going crazy all over the Indian Ocean in the first half of 16th century. In east they conquered Malacca in 1511, in western reaches of Indian Ocean they affirmed their supremacy in battle of Diu in 1509. Pray tell me, how did they "cheat" in such a short time?
Unless native societies develops advanced sea faring societies, they are fucked. The Europeans failed to colonize areas in africa and Asia a lot. Like a lot a lot. But since Europe was essentially unassailable for most Asian and African societies, they could just keep coming back and waiting like vultures for when the natives are weak and divided and do in America what they did everywhere else
The galleon and caravel much more than the cannon is what won europe's colonial and then imperial empires