So I've been wondering this for a while, obviously Columbus had a huge impact on Native Americans by virtue of establishing permanent contact between Europe and the Americas. However, I am wondering specifically about how important his behavior was in establishing how Europeans treated Native Americans. Would another, more open minded explorer have set a better precedent? Would it have mattered?
How impactful was Christopher Columbus on the treatment of Native Americans?
- Thread starter Chillvillain
- Start date
Maybe a better precedent could be had, but I don't see it as likely or mattering much before the current times, given the prevailing attitudes of the day.
Last edited:
That's my thinking too. Columbus wasn't as uniquely evil as many believe, and there's precedent for his actions in the Spanish conquest and occupation of the Canaries. Even if he'd been scrupulously humane to the Natives, there would eventually have been someone who would abuse them.
Not impactful at all. The power disparity and incentives at play were beyond any man’s power.
considering the main settler colonies of Brazil and British North America had exactly fuck all to do with Colombus and spain relied on the natives as workers in some capacity and thus were less prone to out and out genocide (not that they never did) i have to agree very little
I don't know what this fallacy is called but the whole "if they didn't do it then someone else would" argument is often used to defend some terrible atrocities. I don't agree with it.
Vangogh
Banned
righteousness have to be protected though. You need people willing to fight for it, not just remove specific bad people
you will find that a lot of people on here are perfectly willing to call out Columbus on his abominable treatment of the natives, but in the case of the OP question here, answering 'If he didn't do it, someone else would' is an accurate answer.
Lusitania
Donor
There was no difference. Remember peasants had no rights and serfs and indentured servitude all prevalent in Europe. Southern Europe also dealing with slavery as ongoing attitude. Therefore there is no difference between various countries. Which is some cases such as Aztec was better than them.
This is just plain wrong. Peasants had rights in Europe. Not as many as you might have liked, but they were protected under the law and could not be sold as chattel.
It's worth pointing out that a lot of the negative stories about Columbus come ultimately from his personal enemies via the report of Francisco de Bobadilla, who was sent to check up on Spanish affairs in the New World in 1499. It's not entirely clear how many of the atrocities he was supposedly involved in were actually due to him, how many were people acting against his wishes, and how many were made up or falsely attributed to him.
If the claims against Columbus are exaggerated, that would support the view that Columbus' personal attitudes and actions probably weren't very impactful in the long-run. When you have a load of unscrupulous people who want to get rich quick, are willing and able to work the natives to death, and are on the other side of the ocean from the central government, it's going to be difficult to stop them mistreating the natives. It would take a governor of exceptional humanitarianism and strength of character to rein such people in, and by definition most people, even in high office, aren't going to be exceptional.
If the claims against Columbus are exaggerated, that would support the view that Columbus' personal attitudes and actions probably weren't very impactful in the long-run. When you have a load of unscrupulous people who want to get rich quick, are willing and able to work the natives to death, and are on the other side of the ocean from the central government, it's going to be difficult to stop them mistreating the natives. It would take a governor of exceptional humanitarianism and strength of character to rein such people in, and by definition most people, even in high office, aren't going to be exceptional.
raharris1973
Gone Fishin'
I get whereyour coming from- it is not, and cannot, be a defense or an excuse.
Before any ethical system, people and institutions are accountable for what they do, at least their reputations (for the dead) are accountable, based on the standards of their times or later.
At the same time, as a statement of probability the odds that someone within his century would have gotten around to employing similar criminal methods in the Americas, it is completely valid to say to macro picture of European treatment of, and impact on, Amerindian natives would have been the same as OTL.
Indeed, you would need a broad sea change in cultural practices and enforcement of the highest aspirational standards of the day to change results on the macro-scale. Morally it would have been worth it. It just wasn't likely.
Europeans already had a big difference between ethical standards expressed (at least aspirationally) and routine practices. Hypocrisy is quite old.
European wars, conquests, enslavement, expulsion, and deliberate property and resource destruction certain made a life and death difference numbering in the millions. Not the majority of millions lost probably. For that we can blame morally unaccountable microbes, and for a thinner slice of the pie of millions, morally unaccountable introduced invasive plant and animal species (various pigs and rats) disrupting ecology were the cause.
---To prevent or mitigate a major fraction of the epidemiological, ecological and megadeath disasters that befell the American natives from abrupt contact with Eurasians, one would need constant tending from ASB guardian angels. That's why Native American victory scenarios are so few, limited in scope, and strictly relative. But worth doing more of.
Lusitania
Donor
What was indentured servants? Please look that up. If if a person could not pay taxes they could be sold. This happened all the time with thousands of people being sold and sent to Caribbean to work on plantations.
Peasants and indentured servants were not the same thing. I suggest you check your facts before making such grandiose (and false) statements. Also, your definition of indentured servant is incorrect.
This statement are wrong. Essentially it boils down to, "Labor is always exploited and people are always mistreated, therefore there are no meaningful differences between kinds of mistreatment/exploitation." If this was a justice system, then this logic would dictate that hitting a woman is the same as killing her. The logic goes that indentured servitude is no different from racial chattel slavery. Peasant enclosure no different from the wholesale genocide of ethnicities. The Cathar Crusade is identical to the Holocaust because they both featured 'cleansing of an other.' At the face of this, all of these are absurd. They all sucked in one way or another, but that doesn't make them the same. The way that native labor was used in the Spanish colonies of the New World is pretty different than being an indentured servant in British North America. Your life meant a hell of a lot less. Your ability to even rely on the letter of the law was far more limited. Basic respect for your leisure, your family, your religion, and your language was not the same. Just compare the premature death rate of indigenous laborers in the Peruvian silver mines versus the premature death rate of European indentured servants. "There was no difference" is a sick joke.
Last edited:
raharris1973
Gone Fishin'
I agree with this. Although I would also say that the "premium" for whiteness compared to having another color in the first century or two post contact (1492-1700) wasn't as much as it became later (1700-1935) because the general suckitude of life for all, and general murderousness and unchecked abuse of power everywhere was worse in lower periods. When you get to Jacksonian democracy, then the racial caste differential is starker and starker. And continued disgustingly late, with California government state legal warrant for genocide - bounties rather than punishments for killing natives, mining prospectors still killing off California Indians in the 20s, and rural Australian middle-class folk still doing hunts for Aborgines with impunity through the 20s.
Indentured servants also didn’t exactly last long. 50% or more died before their terms were up. The decline in such death rates as time went on is one of the reasons slavery was adopted more widely. And I’d also note that singling out the silver mines isn’t great, as mining death rates were ALWAYS dreadfully high. A better comparison would be to native workers in agricultural labor, more similar to what the Indentured workers were doing.
(This number is also extremely high.)