England and America in 1600-1700s

[Jim_Baur]

How did England gain control of the Indians’ lands?

How did the French and Spanish gain control of there areas in America?

I do not need a lot of details. Was the land purchased? Was it taken by war?

THANKS!

 

[christofirst]

Manifest destiny. The native people might have a different explanation.

 

[ltwin]

How did England gain control of the Indians’ lands?

How did the French and Spanish gain control of there areas in America?

I do not need a lot of details. Was the land purchased? Was it taken by war?

THANKS!

Well, the simple answer is that it was unjustly taken. The nation of Mexico was essentially the Aztec Empire. Under an amazing set of circumstances, Spanish Conquistadors found that they were initially welcomed as gods due the fact that the Native Americans had never seen men riding on horses and thought it was one single being. Anyway, it started out good, but the Spanish were pretty cruel and took everything.

Europeans had firearms. Native Americans didn’t. In North America, the English were at first dependent on Native Americans. The First Thanksgiving myth is partially true. The Native Americans saved the Pilgrims butts.

An issue was the Native American concept of property. Often, Europeans would trade odd trinkets and cheap stuff with the Native Americans in exchange for land. The Native Americans, however, never thought they were permanently selling the land. They only thought they were giving Europeans the right to use the land.

Europeans also brought with them some nasty diseases, which the Native Americans didn’t have natural immunity to. These diseases spread through the Native population and weakened them at a critical time.

Eventually, European settlement reached critical mass, and the Native populations were too weak and too dependent on European trade. They essentially became too weak and dependent to resist being pushed further and further West.

 

[manualman]

Didn’t you go to grade school? Everybody knows the protestant English came in peace in search of religious freedom and for beneficial trade opportunities while the catholic Spaniards were rapacious Conquistadors bent on looting and enslaving all they could lay their hands on! This is only slightly exaggerated from the standard narrative in English speaking countries and reflects what some historians call the Black Legend. (English good, Spanish bad).

There’s one important flaw in that narrative. If it were TRUE, I’d expect to see North America having become a blended culture between the Eurosettlers and the indigenous peoples to the point where nearly everybody you see on the street today would have recognizable native features and genes. In South America, that narrative would have you expect to see near genocidal treatment of natives to the point of near extermination and perhaps the herding of said original people into tiny enclaves deprived of resources and opportunity while the xenophobic invaders repopulated the land staying ethnically homogenous over the generations.

Problem is, the truth on the ground is exactly the OPPOSITE of the above, isn’t it? Maybe we were lied to. Sure, it’s a matter of historical record that the Spanish invaded militarily and conquered the Aztec empire and looted it of much gold. But the story can’t end there. The usual narrative we English speakers hear has been stripped of the achievements of the missionaries and Jesuits in overcoming that conquerer mentality in a manner that, if not perfectly, certainly preserved the survival of the people and the culture much more effectively than the English model used in North America.

In both places, natives were taken advantage of and exploited. The technology advantage of the Europeans and the comparatively weak immune systems of the native people made the natives culturally vulnerable and fallen human nature proceeded to do it’s usual thing. But in South America there were more effective mitigating effects than in North America and I don’t think it’s coincidence that the South was catholic and the North was protestant.

 

[DAML72]

Didn’t you go to grade school? Everybody knows the protestant English came in peace in search of religious freedom and for beneficial trade opportunities while the catholic Spaniards were rapacious Conquistadors bent on looting and enslaving all they could lay their hands on! This is only slightly exaggerated from the standard narrative in English speaking countries and reflects what some historians call the Black Legend. (English good, Spanish bad).

There’s one important flaw in that narrative. If it were TRUE, I’d expect to see North America having become a blended culture between the Eurosettlers and the indigenous peoples to the point where nearly everybody you see on the street today would have recognizable native features and genes. In South America, that narrative would have you expect to see near genocidal treatment of natives to the point of near extermination and perhaps the herding of said original people into tiny enclaves deprived of resources and opportunity while the xenophobic invaders repopulated the land staying ethnically homogenous over the generations.

Problem is, the truth on the ground is exactly the OPPOSITE of the above, isn’t it? Maybe we were lied to. Sure, it’s a matter of historical record that the Spanish invaded militarily and conquered the Aztec empire and looted it of much gold. But the story can’t end there. The usual narrative we English speakers hear has been stripped of the achievements of the missionaries and Jesuits in overcoming that conquerer mentality in a manner that, if not perfectly, certainly preserved the survival of the people and the culture much more effectively than the English model used in North America.

In both places, natives were taken advantage of and exploited. The technology advantage of the Europeans and the comparatively weak immune systems of the native people made the natives culturally vulnerable and fallen human nature proceeded to do it’s usual thing. But in South America there were more effective mitigating effects than in North America and I don’t think it’s coincidence that the South was catholic and the North was protestant.

Hmm - I’ve lived in Argentina, and I take issue with what seems to be your assertion that native populations were more readily assimilated into the culture of Latin America. There remains tremendous poverty among native populations in Latin America and racism, at least in Argentina, is more accepted than it is in the North America. They just don’t realize that it is racism.

 

[Jim_Baur]

I would think that it happens regularly in history–but I do not know.

How often does the conquering people get conquered at a later date?

In the lower 48, there were hundreds of differ peoples. Did the conquers later see their grandchildren lose their “stolen” lands?

 

[Jim_Baur]

It seems to me that the English might have taken a great deal of land (stolen, tricked or by war). Then the new American government took it from England. That government’s children and grandchildren took more land as the country moved west.

Is that an accurate statement.

So did the thief, England, get their land stolen by USA?

 

[tomarin]

Didn’t you go to grade school? Everybody knows the protestant English came in peace in search of religious freedom and for beneficial trade opportunities while the catholic Spaniards were rapacious Conquistadors bent on looting and enslaving all they could lay their hands on! This is only slightly exaggerated from the standard narrative in English speaking countries and reflects what some historians call the Black Legend. (English good, Spanish bad).

There’s one important flaw in that narrative. If it were TRUE, I’d expect to see North America having become a blended culture between the Eurosettlers and the indigenous peoples to the point where nearly everybody you see on the street today would have recognizable native features and genes. In South America, that narrative would have you expect to see near genocidal treatment of natives to the point of near extermination and perhaps the herding of said original people into tiny enclaves deprived of resources and opportunity while the xenophobic invaders repopulated the land staying ethnically homogenous over the generations.

Problem is, the truth on the ground is exactly the OPPOSITE of the above, isn’t it? Maybe we were lied to. Sure, it’s a matter of historical record that the Spanish invaded militarily and conquered the Aztec empire and looted it of much gold. But the story can’t end there. The usual narrative we English speakers hear has been stripped of the achievements of the missionaries and Jesuits in overcoming that conquerer mentality in a manner that, if not perfectly, certainly preserved the survival of the people and the culture much more effectively than the English model used in North America.

In both places, natives were taken advantage of and exploited. The technology advantage of the Europeans and the comparatively weak immune systems of the native people made the natives culturally vulnerable and fallen human nature proceeded to do it’s usual thing. But in South America there were more effective mitigating effects than in North America and I don’t think it’s coincidence that the South was catholic and the North was protestant.

This is because north of what is now Mexico City there was in Pre-Columbian times only scattered hunter gatherer populations of Indo-Americans whereas in Mexico and Peru there were complex states with large populations that had to be accommodated in one way or another by the colonial state once it had vanquished the Indo-American states. I also suspect that it was harder for Spain to mobilize settlers to go into the New World than it was for the English, not sure why. But demographically speaking, except for Cahokia and some of the other “mound civilizations” of the middle South which had vanished mysteriously before the Spanish explorers even arrived on the scene, there were no large complex societies in North America north of Mexico, making the possibility of an English-speaking mestizo society pretty much non-existent.

 

[manualman]

There remains tremendous poverty among native populations in Latin America …

Exactly my point. While surely mistreated, your native populations still exist. Ours are almost all dead, except for tiny remnants on (until casinos came along) economically unviable lands.

Neither is exactly a shining example of Christian culture at its best, but I personally would rather be exploited economically than murdered. You?

 

[manualman]

This is because north of what is now Mexico City there was in Pre-Columbian times only scattered hunter gatherer populations of Indo-Americans whereas in Mexico and Peru there were complex states with large populations …

Actually, current scholarship on the matter disagrees. North American populations are now thought to have been MUCH higher than originally supposed based on initial colonist accounts because North American natives appear to have been hit sooner by European diseases than their South American counterparts (possibly due to differences in winter severity and the resulting stresses and hygiene issues). They were not hunter-gatherers, but practiced sophisticated agriculture on a seasonally nomadic basis. Thus they did not leave behind the massive stone edifices of South American cultures.

Many original NA colonists found vast plots of land mysteriously cleared and previously utilized for agriculture, but recently abandoned. The explorers brought the diseases sooner than the colonists and the colonists took over the land abandoned by the dead.

Disease eventually swept South America too, so the differences today have to have their origination in cultural differences between the Northern and Southern invaders.

 

[Ridgerunner]

Well, the simple answer is that it was unjustly taken. The nation of Mexico was essentially the Aztec Empire. Under an amazing set of circumstances, Spanish Conquistadors found that they were initially welcomed as gods due the fact that the Native Americans had never seen men riding on horses and thought it was one single being. Anyway, it started out good, but the Spanish were pretty cruel and took everything.

Not really. Far and away the biggest part of the “Spanish army” that conquered the Aztecs was the army of their Indian ally, the Tlaxcalans. The Tlaxcalans (and some other tribes) were oppressed by the Aztecs and despised them. Without those allies, Cortez would not have been anywhere near able to do it, firearms and horses or not.

And the Tlaxcalan leaders became Spanish nobles, and wealthy. The truth is that the oppressed threw off their oppressors with Spanish help and didn’t mind Spanish rule (of which they were a part) as compared to Aztec rule.

One of the reasons why so many of the Indians in Mexico survived was that they were numerous to begin with and because the Spanish didn’t war on their own allies. Disease did a lot of damage; the result being that despite the few Spanish immigrants, the Mexican population is only 20% “white” to this day.

 

[manualman]

highered.mcgraw-hill.com/sites/0072879130/student_view0/chapter1/where_historians_disagree.html

Here’s some intro reading on the subject (bare intro only). But the best current information is that the Euro diseases seriously decimated native populations in both North and South America. The near invisibility of natives in North America and almost total ubiquity of native genes in South America cannot be dismissed as differences in disease mortality or initial population size. It’s almost obviously cultural difference in the invaders.

 

[Ridgerunner]

Actually, current scholarship on the matter disagrees. North American populations are now thought to have been MUCH higher than originally supposed based on initial colonist accounts because North American natives appear to have been hit sooner by European diseases than their South American counterparts (possibly due to differences in winter severity and the resulting stresses and hygiene issues). They were not hunter-gatherers, but practiced sophisticated agriculture on a seasonally nomadic basis. Thus they did not leave behind the massive stone edifices of South American cultures.

Many original NA colonists found vast plots of land mysteriously cleared and previously utilized for agriculture, but recently abandoned. The explorers brought the diseases sooner than the colonists and the colonists took over the land abandoned by the dead.

Disease eventually swept South America too, so the differences today have to have their origination in cultural differences between the Northern and Southern invaders.

Some anthropologists believe the Amazon basin had a very high population and was well-farmed and orcharded, but that the very earliest Spanish explorers inadvertently brought disease which wiped out the populations. The Amazon basin returned to jungle and has largely remained so ever since.

 

[tomarin]

Actually, current scholarship on the matter disagrees. North American populations are now thought to have been MUCH higher than originally supposed based on initial colonist accounts because North American natives appear to have been hit sooner by European diseases than their South American counterparts (possibly due to differences in winter severity and the resulting stresses and hygiene issues). They were not hunter-gatherers, but practiced sophisticated agriculture on a seasonally nomadic basis. Thus they did not leave behind the massive stone edifices of South American cultures.

Many original NA colonists found vast plots of land mysteriously cleared and previously utilized for agriculture, but recently abandoned. The explorers brought the diseases sooner than the colonists and the colonists took over the land abandoned by the dead.

Disease eventually swept South America too, so the differences today have to have their origination in cultural differences between the Northern and Southern invaders.

Which scholars? I know a book was written a few years ago with the thesis about the population being wiped out in advance by European diseases (“1491”?) but I don’t know how it was received by academic archaeologists.

Even if the populations were more robust, there still weren’t any complex societies north of Mexico City that I know of except for Cahokia, prior to the arrival of Europeans.

 

[Ridgerunner]

Exactly my point. While surely mistreated, your native populations still exist. Ours are almost all dead, except for tiny remnants on (until casinos came along) economically unviable lands.

Neither is exactly a shining example of Christian culture at its best, but I personally would rather be exploited economically than murdered. You?

Possibly settlement of the U.S. could best be compared to that of Argentina, which is also mostly in the temperate zone and has a lot of grassland.

It’s true that there were large Indian populations in the Eastern U.S. prior to white settlement. Also in the Ohio and Mississippi river valleys…or at least until Eurasian diseases killed a lot of them.

But the American plains were almost devoid of population, and always had been. Few great river valleys, semi-arid for the most part as compared to the eastern U.S. Not very conducive to primitive agriculture. The Indian population boom in vast plains areas of the U.S. began with the introduction of the horse, which finally allowed Indians to access the millions of tons of “food on the hoof” represented by Buffalo, on any kind of scale.

Argentina’s grasslands were not heavily populated by Indians. Without some kind of accessible ruminant animals or farming methods suited to prairies, populations can’t thrive in grasslands. Nor was the south of the country, which is cold and inhospitable much of the year, conducive to primitive forms of food production. Spanish settlers brought cattle, and European industries and mining allowed for population growth. But the growth was largely through immigration. For that reason, Argentina’s population is mostly of European extraction.

 

[Ridgerunner]

Which scholars? I know a book was written a few years ago with the thesis about the population being wiped out in advance by European diseases (“1491”?) but I don’t know how it was received by academic archaeologists.

Even if the populations were more robust, there still weren’t any complex societies north of Mexico City that I know of except for Cahokia, prior to the arrival of Europeans.

It depends on what one means by “complex”. Some of the Ohio River settlements were socially complex and did have significant, organized agriculture. But there wasn’t much else upon which to base a judgment of “complexity”. The same was true of Cahokia. Yes, they built those mounds and had irrigation channels and social organization. But they were not “complex” in terms of technology anywhere near what the Aztecs, Maya and Incas appear to have been.

Some of that had to do with animals. Indians’ food animals were almost entirely wild game. The Indians encouraged their proliferation by such means as thinning out forests and burning grasslands. But hunting was still the method of harvest. Interestingly, Kentucky (like my region, the Ozarks) was a “hunting preserve”, kept depopulated of Indians by other Indians. The “owners” of Kentucky were Ohio River tribes, and the “owners” of much of the Ozark game preserve were a tribe living in the Missouri Valley.

I recall reading old accounts that even the more agricultural Indians were astonished that white men brought their food animals with them, and that they used “all the land” in farming instead of smallish plots here and there.

So, to some degree, the low populations of Indians in what is now the U.S. was kept low by Indians themselves.

 

[manualman]

Ridge, perhaps what you say applies well to Nebraska or Kansas or even parts of Missouri (I’m not so familiar with those ecosystems). But my part of Illinois (much wetter than the above areas) was vast prairie land before it got plowed under with only scattered woodlands. But a funny thing happens. Leave pretty much ANY northern IL farm field unattended for 7-8 years and it turns into a brush jungle, and eventually turns into a woodland (cottonwoods, maples, black cherry, red oaks). There is nothing about the climate hereabouts unfriendly to woods. It was prairie hereabouts because of man!

There is a tendency to see man as NOT a part of nature, but that’s usually untrue. At least in my area, the vast prairies only stayed that way because Indians burned them off frequently, often as a technique to force buffalo to killing grounds before they had the horse.

 

[Ridgerunner]

Ridge, perhaps what you say applies well to Nebraska or Kansas or even parts of Missouri (I’m not so familiar with those ecosystems). But my part of Illinois (much wetter than the above areas) was vast prairie land before it got plowed under with only scattered woodlands. But a funny thing happens. Leave pretty much ANY northern IL farm field unattended for 7-8 years and it turns into a brush jungle, and eventually turns into a woodland (cottonwoods, maples, black cherry, red oaks). There is nothing about the climate hereabouts unfriendly to woods. It was prairie hereabouts because of man!

There is a tendency to see man as NOT a part of nature, but that’s usually untrue. At least in my area, the vast prairies only stayed that way because Indians burned them off frequently, often as a technique to force buffalo to killing grounds before they had the horse.

I’m not sure why the various prairies were prairies. Undoubtedly some would have turned to woodland but for the Indians’ practice of burning them off annually. Some places just aren’t all that conducive to the development of woodland.

Of interest, I’m not sure we know the whole story yet. It might be too early. A great deal of the region in which I live is woodland, a good part of which was once grassland. But some of the species of trees are not well suited to the area and some start dying off after a time. But it can take a very long time to really know. In my area, probably the best suited, long-term, are white oak, shortleaf pine in the hilly land, and walnut and other fruit-producers in the valleys and hollows. But there are a lot of red oaks, ash and other species that do not well survive extended droughts when they get older, and are more vulnerable to ice storm damage and follow-on disease and pests. We’re just now realizing that old red oaks don’t survive the area’s cycles all that well, whereas white oaks and shortleaf pines do.

And, of course, plowing allows for introduction of woody plants. Initially, this area was largely cultivated, but is almost entirely woods and grassland now. Those old prairie sods were very thick and nearly impenetrable by any woody species trying to get established. Interestingly, perhaps, some of the best and latest grassland practices also are conducive to development of thick “sod protection” by grass species that build thick sods.

Truth is, I don’t think anybody really knows for sure why a lot of the land is the way it is or was the way it was. We might not really know for a long time yet. And we might never know for sure. I have long thought that no person presently living, or perhaps no person living within the last thousand or so years, really knows or knew what a “state of nature” was anywhere other than in the subarctic and arctic regions.

Let me add that a lot of the species that take over abandoned farmland are “opportunistic” but don’t stand the test of time. They establish easily and grow fast, but given time often don’t make it. With red oaks and some others in my part of the country, it has taken about 70-80 years for people to realize they don’t hold up. In a mixed forest with white oaks, the white oaks are more resistant to everything, and when the red oaks and ash die, one of two things seems to happen. Either the white oaks fill in with a canopy that prevents almost anything else from growing, or some kind of thick sod-building grass takes over.

I was astounded, once, on land my family owns, to find a patch of “tallgrass prairie” growing in a place where a couple of oaks had died and fallen. Some haw sprouts had tried to get started, but died. Nothing has encroached on it since. Tallgrass prairie species tend to prevent establishment of woody plants.

 

[tomarin]

It depends on what one means by “complex”. Some of the Ohio River settlements were socially complex and did have significant, organized agriculture. But there wasn’t much else upon which to base a judgment of “complexity”. The same was true of Cahokia. Yes, they built those mounds and had irrigation channels and social organization. But they were not “complex” in terms of technology anywhere near what the Aztecs, Maya and Incas appear to have been.

Some of that had to do with animals. Indians’ food animals were almost entirely wild game. The Indians encouraged their proliferation by such means as thinning out forests and burning grasslands. But hunting was still the method of harvest. Interestingly, Kentucky (like my region, the Ozarks) was a “hunting preserve”, kept depopulated of Indians by other Indians. The “owners” of Kentucky were Ohio River tribes, and the “owners” of much of the Ozark game preserve were a tribe living in the Missouri Valley.

I recall reading old accounts that even the more agricultural Indians were astonished that white men brought their food animals with them, and that they used “all the land” in farming instead of smallish plots here and there.

So, to some degree, the low populations of Indians in what is now the U.S. was kept low by Indians themselves.

I meant complex in terms of social organization and scale. The Cahokians had a social hierarchy composed of classes of people, with division of labor - they had a class of priests and were ruled by a theocracy. They worshiped their king, who they identified with the Sun God who was also at the center of their cosmology. These kinds of societies are associated with larger populations because they don’t have to all be farmers or hunters or shepherds, which “frees up” more of the population to develop the trappings of civilization (a writing system, government, taxation and accounting, a complex religious structure).

I’m not aware of any society like that of Cahokia, north of Cahokia (or east or west of it). Therefore I assume most of the other Indians were hunter gatherers or pastoralists. Not that there’s anything wrong with that - but for various reasons they don’t accrue the large populations that would require a foreign invader to accommodate local people (which is what happened in Mexico and South America).

I also suspect the Spanish weren’t as successful as the English at persuading its European population to colonize the New World - but that’s just a guess.

 

[Ridgerunner]

I meant complex in terms of social organization and scale. The Cahokians had a social hierarchy composed of classes of people, with division of labor - they had a class of priests and were ruled by a theocracy. They worshiped their king, who they identified with the Sun God who was also at the center of their cosmology. These kinds of societies are associated with larger populations because they don’t have to all be farmers or hunters or shepherds, which “frees up” more of the population to develop the trappings of civilization (a writing system, government, taxation and accounting, a complex religious structure).

I’m not aware of any society like that of Cahokia, north of Cahokia (or east or west of it). Therefore I assume most of the other Indians were hunter gatherers or pastoralists. Not that there’s anything wrong with that - but for various reasons they don’t accrue the large populations that would require a foreign invader to accommodate local people (which is what happened in Mexico and South America).

I also suspect the Spanish weren’t as successful as the English at persuading its European population to colonize the New World - but that’s just a guess.

Probably a person with a lot better background in anthropology could address this better than I could.

It is my impression that there were large “cities” (towns?) up and down the Mississippi River, and not just at Cahokia. I don’t think any similar structures to the Cahokia Mounds have been identified on the lower Mississippi. But then, the Mississippi changes course from time to time and is entirely capable of eating away a mound standing in its way. But the Spanish explorers who saw those “cities” were not followed up by others for nearly 200 years. By then, those “cities” and the Cahokia civilizations were gone. Disease is the presumed culprit, though there are other theories about the disintegration of the Cahokia civilization; drought, social disintegration, invasion by other tribes; the usual guesswork suspects.

My understanding is there were extensive agricultural Indian societies in the Ohio Valley that were encountered by the French and English. But again, not equaling Cahokia in the creation of structures.

But even then, the Ohio Valley tribes relied for meat on hunting. They are the ones who depopulated much of Kentucky and kept it depopulated. Of possible interest, I recall reading that when Daniel Boone and some of the earliest settlers in Kentucky went there, they were fiercely resisted by Indians…not Indians living there, but Indians from the Ohio Valley who were accustomed to killing anyone they found in their private hunting ground.

As I mentioned before, when whites first became aware of the Ozarks, they had been earlier largely depopulated of Indian residents by the Osage who had come from farther north not long before and settled in the Missouri Valley. The Ozarks was the “Osage game preserve” for a time, until other tribes started moving west in numbers the Osage couldn’t keep out. The Osage were somewhat unusual, then, in moving west largely on their own, more because of Indian immigrants than because of white settlers. Some of those Indian immigrants were every bit as fierce as they were, but they also took a heavy toll on the game, which some believe was the real reason for their move.

So, while it’s correct in a sense to characterize tribes like the Osage as “hunter/gatherers”, they were also farmers and ranchers in a broad sense, in that they did raise crops in smallish patches and kept large tracts open for the wild large animals they relied on for meat supplies.

.