I was reading Lies My Teacher Told Me awhile back and this quote struck me:
So that actually piqued some intrigue. The book is rather anti-Eurocentric, and also about a decade old, so I wouldn't be surprised if this consensus changed by now; the ideas of former paragraphs mentioned the idea that Africa and Asia were "dominated but not settled," and implied that without the plagues that killed many Natives, that America would be something more like Africa or Asia. This really makes me curious.The technology and culture of Indians on America's east coast were genuine rivals to those of the English, and the eventual outcome of the rivalry was not at first clear. . . , One can only speculate what the outcome of the rivalry would have been if the impact of European diseases on the American population had not been so devastating. If colonists had not been able to occupy lands already cleared by Indian farmers who had vanished, colonization would have proceeded much more slowly. If Indian culture had not been devastated by the physical and psychological assaults it had suffered, colonization might not have proceeded at all.