Reduce New World Colonisation

How could we reduce or drastically change new world colonies to small entities like city state colonies and settlements (like the Greeks had in Ancient Egypt or the Pheonicians, or Venice & Genoa in Crimea) rather than outright
conquests and evictions of Native peoples of OTL?

Also say Columbus didn't survive the journey to the Americas and so the Pinzon brothers are in charge. How does this alter the 1st voyage to the Americas? Would they turn back or keep going delaying Iberian contact with the Americas?
 
Columbus not surviving is actually a pretty good POD for setting up a chain reaction to reduce colonization.

Let's say that the Pinzon brothers, being less personally invested in creating a grandiose legacy for Columbus than Columbus was, focus on pushing eastward rather than conquering the Taino. After all, if there is a possibility to island hop to Asia, that's where the real money is. They do create a colony on Cuba or Hispaniola, and probably will set up a Taino Cacique as a puppet king, but other than that leave the islanders alone (for now). Pushing eastward they are unable to find a route to Asia, though they do find some large civilizations on the coast of Mesoamerica with wealth.

From there, the Spanish maintain the policy of finding the route to Asia, sponsoring trips which are meant to find passage to China rather than conquer. Of course, some captains go rogue, and do attempt a large scale conquest-Cortez and Pizarro might do this. But ITTL, the dice roll a little differently. The Aztecs get a little luckier and kill Cortes on la Noche Triste, causing his men to lose morale and flee the empire. In Panama maroons fleeing from the Caribbean colonies assassinate Pizarro when he makes a go at conquering Panama.

Then, in 1521, Magellan finds the route to Asia-hallelujah! The Spanish, at this point, don't have a large empire. On some of the Greater Antilles they do have sugar plantations, worked by Indian slaves that their Taino allies assure them are cannibals and, therefore, legally enslavable, but they haven't gained a large foothold on the mainland. In fact, buying maize from the Mayans and Aztecs is now a large part of how they keep the slaves on the sugar plantations fed, so they actually want to avoid disrupting the mainlanders as much as possible.

Just like the Portuguese in Africa, the Spanish focus on building a series of forts around the continent to secure their path. The Atlantic coast of South America is politically fragmented, and therefore does not offer an opportunity to capture an empire by taking down the capital or monarch as Cortes and Pizarro did in OTL. On the Pacific coast, they establish themselves either in cities that were in revolt against the Inca or were abandoned entirely like Rimac (OTL Lima), and thus do not directly challenge the Inca Empire. With more focus on finding Asia, the return route in the northern Pacific is discovered earlier, and the Spanish focus on sailing to China, selling gold, silver and other goods bought from the natives.

While epidemics still damage the natives, lobbying from the likes of las Casas sees the use of African slaves instead of Native Americans as per OTL, reducing Spanish slave raids against the Indians. Combined with their being no conquest and no reduction of the Natives to an encomienda system, they are able to recover or at least keep their population steady instead of plunging down. When new European powers push into the Americas, the Spanish have created a precedent of making factories and forts on the coast and nibbling at the islands around the Americas, but not conquering inland. Anyone who tries will find a Native population which is much higher than what they would have encountered IOTL, and in large parts of Central and South America said natives would by now be armed with iron weapons and horses bought from the Spanish.
 
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