WI: Native Americans are immune to European diseases
- Thread starter King Washington
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Considering the logistics of it.
Colonialization would be slowed down hard, the european diseases wiped out like 90 percent of native american's.
Without that massive decrease in number's the european's are gonna meet much stiffer opposition.
And remember many native american tribes weren't particularly hesitant to take up european technology for themselves.
I can actually see things going a lot better for the natives americans in this timeline.
Would it totally stop colonization?
Probably not.
But i'm almost certain there won't be any "Manifest destiny" bullshit happening if america does somehow form despite the butterflies.
Colonialization would be slowed down hard, the european diseases wiped out like 90 percent of native american's.
Without that massive decrease in number's the european's are gonna meet much stiffer opposition.
And remember many native american tribes weren't particularly hesitant to take up european technology for themselves.
I can actually see things going a lot better for the natives americans in this timeline.
Would it totally stop colonization?
Probably not.
But i'm almost certain there won't be any "Manifest destiny" bullshit happening if america does somehow form despite the butterflies.
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This is incorrect. Hantaviruses are one family of epidemic diseases that is native to the Americas, and infectious diseases appear to have been quite common in the Americas judging from the frequency of osteological signs of infection. Jared Diamond's thesis is generally regarded as obsolete. At best, it might be said that the Americas had an admixture higher in chronic conditions than acute conditions. Health conditions before Columbus: paleopathology of native North Americans
That being said, the role of disease in the initial interactions is fairly difficult to disentangle. For example, Cortes (or, to put it another way, the captains of the Caxtilteca), at the cost of a massive proportion of his invading force (90% deaths among the initial arrivals) ended up realigning the internal power dynamics of Mesoamerica by placing a Tlaxcala-Texcoco-Tlacopan alliance in place of the previous Tenochtitlan-Texcoco-Tlacopan alliance that had dominated Mexico. Immunity to Old World diseases among the Mexicans would have made the siege of Tenochtitlan less deadly, but there is no obvious point at which you can look and say, "here is where smallpox won the day".
Now, there is such a point with the invasion of the Inka, in that it was a smallpox epidemic which likely touched off the civil war that Pizarro's group arrived into, and without such a factor, whoever was wearing the mantle of the Inka at that time would be in a position more like that of Motecuhzuma Xocoyotzin, able to herd the Castilians into a neat trap and keep them in Cuzco at his leisure. But this is in some ways a relatively minor point, if we understand that the Castilians frequently were used by the people of the Americas as a means to alter the political situation. It is entirely possible the Inkas are overthrown as a consequence of a less storybook effort.
What is more relevant is that the Americans are immune to Old World diseases. Historically, perhaps of the main effects of Old World diseases was that they disrupted existing communities and forced reconfigurations and accommodations that would not have been necessary otherwise. As such, Europeans will be in a substantially weaker position with regards to American societies, and they will have to deal with the possibility of American superiority, in that sickness and disease flow one way and it's from Americans to Europeans. This may well force an ideological shift among Europeans, and it will certainly affect how Christianity is interacted with by Americans.
Perhaps we might see the historical "empire of the weak" that emerged with respect to Africa and Asia in the 16th through 18th centuries, where Europeans maintained small outposts on the strength of their seapower alone. But we might not even see such a thing, in that a substantial ideological justification for such was Christian evangelism and this is going to take an enormous shock if Americans are immune to disease. And with independent American state societies, Europeans might well potentially have additional naval competitors besides the Ottomans.
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A.E.I.O.U. - Antarticae est imperare orbi universo
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This is very chronocentric thinking.
It's shocking to us, because we know there is no reason for immunity.
Europeans will just be more inclined to think that the Foutain Of Youth really exists or whatever.
This is one of the better predictions in this tread so far. Relations will be more like the East Indies, India and China.
American societies will fare better, but let's not think that immunity would somehow magically transform them into advanced civilizations.
Also, out of all the technologies that could be adopted, naval construction and navigation are about the very last, as being the most dependent on very specialised skills and craftmanship.
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1. Europeans would probably have a harder time sustaining the supremacist beliefs associated with colonization if they were manifestly and overtly inferior by way of vulnerability to disease. They would probably categorize this in supernatural ways, but they would still be building this on the material base of "inferiority".
2. Technological flows were historically very rapid. Chilies spreading across the Pacific in a decade, the Mexica and Inka learning how to fight cannon and cavalry within a few years of contact, the spread of gunsmithing knowledge into inland North America. The main limiting factor would be the relatively land-oriented outlook the existing states mostly had.
NothingNow
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Hantaviruses also aren't transmissible between humans except through saliva (which occurs so rarely that a large chunk of the recorded transmission incidents involved a dentist.) They're a family with epidemic potential, but they're also nothing like the diseases of the old world, as their primary means of transmission is direct contact with rodent droppings or aerosolization of rodent urine and feces. You can and do get an epidemic of Hantavirus, but it's not going to behave at all like Measles or Smallpox, and can't rack up the same body count even under ideal conditions.
You are correct that most disease in the Americas was chronic however. But that's still some parasites, some Treponema diseases and like HPV.
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First, I'd be a bit more sanguine than you about the capacity of the racist mind to turn everything into a justification for supremacy, even positive (or "positive") traits (or "traits): "The Jew is good at money. The Negro has a good sense of rhythm. The Red Man has a hearty constitution, thus showing that God meant for him to be the ideal slave."
Second, Europeans were totally unaware of the real, global effects of the diseases. They didn't know about and didn't expect the effects that we now know about. Most of it happened in what was the white spots of the map for them at the time.
Historiographically, the idea of the Columbian Exchange resulting in decimating pandemics is very recent. No older than post-WW2. To discover it, you need a) sufficient understanding of epidemiology, late 19th at the earliest, more like early 20 th century b) sufficient understanding of New World archaeology (and hence demographics), for which scientifically modern methods and techniques are necessary, post-war. This is for expert knowledge mind you, I don't think it came into the general public awareness until after the Civil Rights Movement, so like the 70s or 80s, when narratives about "the Red Man vanishing just as the natural order of things" became replaced by others with more consciousness of their plights and sufferings, of which the epidemics were a part. I wouldn't be surprised if the 500th anniversary of Columbus in 1992 played a major part in increasing and popularising awareness of the decimating effects of the Columbian exchange pandemics.
The immunity would be noticed as a peculiar trait of the locals among others, probably generating much scholary discussions and popular stereotypes, but with all sorts of descriptive and normative interpretations. Some would see it as a sign of innocence closer to Eden, some as proof of their devilish ways, some would attribute it to an effect of the geography of the new world, others to the unique native blood, the lack of certain miasmas in the Americas, the four humours being better balanced under the western constellations, etcetera, etcetera.
What is certain is that there would be many. What is uncertain is which ones would become accepted, and/or popular. Which ones would also change over time. Not only due to the general evolution of ideas, but also depending on the exact relationships between the old and new worlds.
I feel you're not quite realising how much naval technology was the very most advanced that was produced in Europe. Cathedrals come close maybe? A galleon is a marvel of engineering. The equivalent today of aircraft carriers. You needed master craftmen in all sorts of trade. All the different sorts timbers, oak of course for the hull, but also at least half a dozen to a dozen of different wood sorts, larch, fir, linden, pine, cedar, each type for specific uses, masts, different types of rigging, etc. Just like today not every country can have an automobile or aviation industry, only certain regions in Europe had the necessary shipwrights etc to build boats capable of transoceanic journeys. For the navigation, you needed what was bleeding edge science about astronomy, cartography, trigonometry, mathematics, often kept secret in the same way that today's states keep secrets about radar stealth or rocket surgery. This is rather different than just gunsmithing (although there would be mostly imports of better quality arms from Europe, see the Kingdom of Kongo for a model)
For a long time, it was the only superior really technology that made colonialism possible. The mastery of the sea allowed colonial powers to always have a venue of retreat, and to supply garrisons and forces across the sea. On land, their military might was hardly better than the most advanced locals, like in India or China.
This is why there is two very distinct phases in colonialism, the first one from the 16th to 18th century, where transoceanic capabilities was the primary thing that made it possible, and the second in the 19th where the industrial revolution gave massive force multipliers that made possible defeating forces larger than one or two order of magnitudes, the era of "Whatever happens, we have got/The Maxim gun, and they have not". So instead of the cunning manipulations and divide et impera of the EIC and VOC in India and the East Indies, or establishing coastal forts that had little projection power in the interior, they could now blast there way through and Scramble For Africa.
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You know, I did link a source...
1. So you're taking the tack that racism is inherent to Europeans? The point I am making is that in a situation where they are forced into material inferiority, the justifications for their actions that derived from perceived superiority would need to be modified in order to take this reality into account. And they would be forced into material inferiority, because in the absence of the plagues, they are going to be disease-ridden and prone to dying and thus far less able to enforce their will on people than they were historically, where they were only able to achieve success through integrating themselves into state societies where compelled labor was a part of life. Without the disruptions from the plagues, organized European efforts to conquer are going to look much more like the Aracaunian people chasing them out of Chile and Patagonia than the mythical Conquest.
2. No, Europeans were not ignorant of the effects of disease. The main impetus for examining the possibility of disease was, in fact, examining colonial-era parish records from New Spain, which showed a great many deaths from disease. And then examining contemporary accounts showed that the majority were well aware of the plagues in their immediate area, while of course not knowing of what was happening in places they had no access to. They frequently attributed said plagues to the wrath of God on the people of the Americas for being pagans, sexually perverse, etc., but in an environment where everyone is laid low from smallpox or malaria and the Americans are totally unaffected, are they going to declare that the lack of sickness is the hand of God punishing the pagans? Especially given the genuine theological confusion that existed at the moment of contact.
3. I feel like you're presuming that Europeans had manifestly superior technology rather than a developed infrastructure for oceangoing ships that nobody else had much interest in developing given the relative costs and benefits involved.
Automobiles and airplanes are a very good example- the idea that Nigerians, say, can't build cars is fundamentally asinine (as the Innoson factory in Nnewi makes obvious), the issue is that the costs and time horizon and risks of developing such an industry mean that the majority of countries are willing to maintain an automotive industry that assembles knock-down kits or produces some spare parts but not invest further, and the manufacturing plants of the US and Germany and France and Japan and Korea turn out enough and shipping is cheap enough to make that a practical option.
And airplanes are even better, because the cost of producing large jet airliners and cargo planes is so immense that it's been seriously suggested that the industry is naturally a nullopoly, that in the absence of heavy subsidization jetliners would be limited in size to about what Lear or Embraer or Bombardier produces, at best. So developing a (civilian) aerospace industry is very much of dubious benefit given the massive costs necessary to produce something prestigious, let alone something cost-effective. Which would seem to be very relevant to the massive expenditures and costs of developing transoceanic sailing ships.
NothingNow
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Which I've actually read previously. Did you get it off r/askhistorians? Because I'm the person who actually linked it in a comment. It also doesn't negate my point that there was no functional equivalent to the epidemic diseases of the old world, and neither does a survey of remains. There's a big difference between anemia and a staph infection killing someone (or Syphilis and Pinta for that matter) and an actual set of endemic and epidemic diseases that actually forces the development of quarantine protocols or that kills a few hundred thousand people annually.
You're the one who brought up a family of diseases which in practical terms aren't communicable as a comparison to Smallpox and Measles. As opposed to Pertussis which the journal article actually named. Even then, Pertussis is super benign, was still fairly rare in the Pre-columbian Americas and even basically only kills infants, so it didn't have anything like the cultural impact something like smallpox had.
Yeah, I think this might change a lot.
The Conquistadors might still have something like their initial successes against the Aztecs and Inca; conquering big empires is easy in a way, there's a state apparatus already built, you just have to remove the people who control it and insert yourself in their place. But with no epidemics I think their conquests would probably be smaller, more fragile, shorter-lived, more contingent on the cooperation of natives, and more dependent on sea power. And smallpox epidemics strategically weakened the Aztec and Inca empires, so it seems like a toss-up whether Cortez and Pizarro would succeed in this world. Basically I can see the Spanish and Portuguese being to the sixteenth and seventeenth century Americas what the Vikings were to Dark Age Europe (much like how the Spanish and Portuguese interacted with Africa and Asia in our world). I think the height of Spanish power in the Americas in this world might be the early to middle fifteenth century, and then it would decline as their useful technology and institutions were adopted by American peoples. That means Christianization in Latin America might look more like Christianization in Dark Age and Medieval Europe.
Even by high-count estimates the present-day CONUS region was fairly thinly populated in the late pre-Columbian period; ten or twelve million people in a territory as big and fertile as CONUS is not a dense population. So I think CONUS might still be an attractive prospect for European settlers, and European settler colonies might still be established and grow, especially in the northern areas like present-day Maine, Newfoundland, and Labrador where the more cold-adapted European agriculture would allow them to settle areas that IIRC at the time were only inhabited by hunter-gatherers. In the long term prospects for European settler colony growth depend on how enthusiastically American people adopt the crops, agricultural techniques, institutions, and cultural features that enabled Europeans to develop much denser populations (10-12 million in pre-Columbian CONUS vs. 50-100 million in Medieval and early modern Europe, with the two land-masses being similar size and fertility).
The African slave trade is likely to be much smaller, as there will be a much bigger supply of potential slaves in the Americas. If something like our world's American South culture comes into existence it may be more militaristic and even nastier than in our world.
If the Spanish never seize the Inca silver mines or lose them after a few decades that will probably make a big difference to world history, as IIRC Spanish control of American silver was very important in shaping the emergence of a true world economy in the early modern period and giving Spain a prominent role in it. Similarly, there's no guarantee that anything like the United States of America would emerge in this world, and it's particularly unlikely if CONUS native peoples experience strong population growth in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and develop population densities in the same ballpark as Europe, and twentieth century history would probably be extremely different in a world where a U.S.A. analog didn't existence. And of course this scenario gives you five hundred years of strong butterfly effects.
For the last couple of millennia world population has been heavily concentrated in Europe and Asia, with the rest of the world being relatively thinly populated. CONUS has a very similar fertile climate to Europe, so it's well-positioned to become the third great population center. I suspect this didn't happen in our world because agriculture in the Americas started with tropical/subtropical crops in South and Central America, arrived in CONUS relatively late, and was not as well-adapted to the temperate CONUS climate as European wheat-centered agriculture. The StratFor people made a video that basically says CONUS is a great place to create a global superpower because of geography. Give the Americas a few thousand extra years, or a successful Vinland colony that introduces European crops, or a scenario like this, and I think interesting things might happen.
I think just about any attribute can be spun into a negative in the process of out-group demonization. The out-group is stronger than you? They're animalistic subhuman brutes, morally and intellectually inferior but dangerous because of their natural brute strength. The out-group is smarter than you? They're smarter than you in a bad way, all cold calculating soulless sociopathic intellect with no heart. The out-group is more beautiful than you? Their beauty just shows how decadent they are. The out-group is in some important sense more successful than you? It's the ill-gotten gains of their evil predatory ways, they've sold their souls for shallow material gain - or their apparent success just makes them decadent and therefore contemptible. The out-group is more moral than you by your own standards? They're insufferable smug no-fun-allowed goody-two-shoes who need to loosen up, or they're hypocrites and their apparent goodness just shows how evil they must be at heart. Once a relationship of conflict or domination exists, people will think up reasons to hate their enemies or see their victims as inferiors. I mean, look at the way some people think about fantasy elves: people manage to find a way to see "beautiful immortal superhuman" as a contemptible set of traits, and they don't even have any particular structural/materialist reason to feel that way.
The Conquistadors might still have something like their initial successes against the Aztecs and Inca; conquering big empires is easy in a way, there's a state apparatus already built, you just have to remove the people who control it and insert yourself in their place. But with no epidemics I think their conquests would probably be smaller, more fragile, shorter-lived, more contingent on the cooperation of natives, and more dependent on sea power. And smallpox epidemics strategically weakened the Aztec and Inca empires, so it seems like a toss-up whether Cortez and Pizarro would succeed in this world. Basically I can see the Spanish and Portuguese being to the sixteenth and seventeenth century Americas what the Vikings were to Dark Age Europe (much like how the Spanish and Portuguese interacted with Africa and Asia in our world). I think the height of Spanish power in the Americas in this world might be the early to middle fifteenth century, and then it would decline as their useful technology and institutions were adopted by American peoples. That means Christianization in Latin America might look more like Christianization in Dark Age and Medieval Europe.
Even by high-count estimates the present-day CONUS region was fairly thinly populated in the late pre-Columbian period; ten or twelve million people in a territory as big and fertile as CONUS is not a dense population. So I think CONUS might still be an attractive prospect for European settlers, and European settler colonies might still be established and grow, especially in the northern areas like present-day Maine, Newfoundland, and Labrador where the more cold-adapted European agriculture would allow them to settle areas that IIRC at the time were only inhabited by hunter-gatherers. In the long term prospects for European settler colony growth depend on how enthusiastically American people adopt the crops, agricultural techniques, institutions, and cultural features that enabled Europeans to develop much denser populations (10-12 million in pre-Columbian CONUS vs. 50-100 million in Medieval and early modern Europe, with the two land-masses being similar size and fertility).
The African slave trade is likely to be much smaller, as there will be a much bigger supply of potential slaves in the Americas. If something like our world's American South culture comes into existence it may be more militaristic and even nastier than in our world.
If the Spanish never seize the Inca silver mines or lose them after a few decades that will probably make a big difference to world history, as IIRC Spanish control of American silver was very important in shaping the emergence of a true world economy in the early modern period and giving Spain a prominent role in it. Similarly, there's no guarantee that anything like the United States of America would emerge in this world, and it's particularly unlikely if CONUS native peoples experience strong population growth in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and develop population densities in the same ballpark as Europe, and twentieth century history would probably be extremely different in a world where a U.S.A. analog didn't existence. And of course this scenario gives you five hundred years of strong butterfly effects.
For the last couple of millennia world population has been heavily concentrated in Europe and Asia, with the rest of the world being relatively thinly populated. CONUS has a very similar fertile climate to Europe, so it's well-positioned to become the third great population center. I suspect this didn't happen in our world because agriculture in the Americas started with tropical/subtropical crops in South and Central America, arrived in CONUS relatively late, and was not as well-adapted to the temperate CONUS climate as European wheat-centered agriculture. The StratFor people made a video that basically says CONUS is a great place to create a global superpower because of geography. Give the Americas a few thousand extra years, or a successful Vinland colony that introduces European crops, or a scenario like this, and I think interesting things might happen.
As I understand it, "Europeans are manifestly and overtly inferior to the natives by way of vulnerability to disease" was exactly the situation in Africa; part of the reason Africa was the big source of slaves for Caribbean and American sugar and cotton plantations was that Africans had better immunity to the tropical diseases the existed in the Caribbean and the American South, and the reason inland Africa wasn't conquered until the late nineteenth century was that the tropical diseases made it an extremely hostile environment for Europeans. It isn't hard to develop a racist ideology against a physically superior out-group: just claim that they're physically superior but intellectually and/or morally inferior. Indeed, I get the impression this is exactly the sort of attitude a lot of white racists actually have toward black people; belief that black people are naturally better athletes and so on coexists with beliefs that black people are intellectually and morally inferior. The two beliefs actually fit well together if you look at what white racists think about black people: the common white racist belief is that black people are Orc-like brutish subhuman ape-thugs who want to steal your wallet, rape your wife, beat you up for sadistic thrills, and spend all day snorting crack they bought with the welfare check that your hard-earned tax dollars went into; in the context of that mythology any supposed physical superiority just makes them seem more threatening and feeds into the idea that they're primitive animal-like beings whose main advantage is their natural brute strength.
I think just about any attribute can be spun into a negative in the process of out-group demonization. The out-group is stronger than you? They're animalistic subhuman brutes, morally and intellectually inferior but dangerous because of their natural brute strength. The out-group is smarter than you? They're smarter than you in a bad way, all cold calculating soulless sociopathic intellect with no heart. The out-group is more beautiful than you? Their beauty just shows how decadent they are. The out-group is in some important sense more successful than you? It's the ill-gotten gains of their evil predatory ways, they've sold their souls for shallow material gain - or their apparent success just makes them decadent and therefore contemptible. The out-group is more moral than you by your own standards? They're insufferable smug no-fun-allowed goody-two-shoes who need to loosen up, or they're hypocrites and their apparent goodness just shows how evil they must be at heart. Once a relationship of conflict or domination exists, people will think up reasons to hate their enemies or see their victims as inferiors. I mean, look at the way some people think about fantasy elves: people manage to find a way to see "beautiful immortal superhuman" as a contemptible set of traits, and they don't even have any particular structural/materialist reason to feel that way.
The biggest potential obstacle I see to defensive modernization of American cultures is that CONUS nations might have had a low population density because they used low-intensity agriculture that didn't need much effort, and if so they might find the idea of adopting higher-intensity agriculture unattractive. If so, they might gradually become minorities in their own homelands as European farmers who are used to more labor-intensive farming methods that can support much higher populations colonize the place.
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Chloe Sullivan
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Your own source says that there is little agreement on actual population numbers pre-coloniazation.
I personally think your 10-12 million number is way too low.
Critics have pointed out that a lot of techniques used to estimate population suffer from cultural bias or just plain wild guessing.
I mean just skimming that article it mentions that anthropologists went with "number of warriors reported in secondhand account multiplied by five" which sounds kinda sketch - 20% military is way high levels of mobilization.
I mean, I read a book about how primary sources from the early Spanish expeditions reported fairly high population density in the Amazon basin, which scholars Pooh-poohed for a long time because "you can't support that many people in a forest"
Only it turns out you can, because unlike Europeans and their fixation on clear-field agriculture, Native Americans often developed forest-based agriculture. Rather than being "Wild untamed" jungle, the Amazon may actually be the world's biggest orchard.
I personally think your 10-12 million number is way too low.
Critics have pointed out that a lot of techniques used to estimate population suffer from cultural bias or just plain wild guessing.
I mean just skimming that article it mentions that anthropologists went with "number of warriors reported in secondhand account multiplied by five" which sounds kinda sketch - 20% military is way high levels of mobilization.
I mean, I read a book about how primary sources from the early Spanish expeditions reported fairly high population density in the Amazon basin, which scholars Pooh-poohed for a long time because "you can't support that many people in a forest"
Only it turns out you can, because unlike Europeans and their fixation on clear-field agriculture, Native Americans often developed forest-based agriculture. Rather than being "Wild untamed" jungle, the Amazon may actually be the world's biggest orchard.