What percentage of Native American deaths were the result of European mistreatment?

This is interesting. The first appearance of the word "smallpox" on the Google word frequency tool is in 1563 -- right when the above paper suggests that it emerged among humans:

Google word frequency -- smallpox.jpg
 
Very small.

The Europeans also mistreated, and oppressed the Indians in India, the Africans, the Filipinos, the Indonesians, and many others in the Old World. It could be either milder, the same, or harsher than how the Europeans treated the Indians of the Americas.

Yet only in the New World did such a population crash occurred in such a manner that it permanently altered the genetic make-up of those places. You don't see Africa that was not African, the Philippines that was white, India with a substantial British descended populations, etc.

The only reason that the New World suffered such catastrophic population lost compared to the Old World colonized by the Europeans was because of Virgin Soil Epidemics.
 
This question could be best answered by someone from /r/AskHistorians, if anyone wants to go there.
I'm resurrecting this thread because I just read that smallpox may have first emerged in human populations in the mid-16th century, see this report. From the discussion section of the report:

The most distinctive physical manifestation of smallpox—the pustular rash—has supposedly “definitive” reports in 4th century China, with suggestions that it was present in ancient Egypt and India over 3,500 years ago, although in reality it is difficult to distinguish smallpox from chickenpox or measles using historical records alone. Such a discordance between inferred molecular-clock dates and retrospective analyses suggests that if they were indeed due to smallpox, these early cases were caused by virus lineages that were no longer circulating at the point of eradication in the 1970s. Conversely, others have suggested that there is little compelling evidence for epidemic and/or virulent (i.e., high-mortality) smallpox in Europe prior to the 16th century, close to our inferred date for the ancestry of VARV. For example, the bills of mortality, the best-known mortality records for Europe at that time, provide the first clear evidence for severe smallpox in London in 1632, shortly before several major European and western Asian epidemics took hold and most likely infected the Lithuanian child studied here.

This obviously causes a problem, considering that the 1520 epidemic is generally considered to be smallpox, based on admittedly rather imprecise descriptions of the symptoms. Measles does look rather similar to smallpox in their early stages, and can have a similar 30% virgin-field mortality rate, so perhaps the great 1520 mortality was due to measles instead of smallpox.
I'd wait on peer review for this one. It seems a little hasty to interpret the results of a MRCA of modern smallpox as that being its first ever instance. It sounds like it could be a bottleneck.

Furthermore, as disease-ridden Europe was I don't trust their pathological knowledge. They may not have differentiated smallpox strains from that of measles or similar diseases. I'm gonna need to see more conclusions by other researchers in order to overturn all our previous patho-historical knowledge.
Personally, I don't believe it was indigenous. I've read some accounts written by physicians at the time, and what struck me was not only how they reported that Europeans of all types were almost untouched, but that Africans were much lighter hit than natives. Although still heavier than Europeans. I don't think the Africans had any advantages on the natives in terms of living conditions. To me, that sounds like something from Europe, possibly with a new reservoir or mutation.
Tons of Europeans were affected by cocoliztli. The thing is in the 1500s there were a lot more natives in Mesoamerica than there were Spaniards, who mostly lived in well-off urban areas insulated from the rural farmlands which would be home to the disease-spreading rodents. Eventually it did reach the Spaniards and start killing them.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistori...were_cocoliztli_and_matlazahuatl_and_how_did/

It's almost definitely an indigenous disease, as there is no evidence of any similar disease in Europe or Africa at the time. Furthermore, all reports of the disease came from Mesoamerica's interior; if it came from the Old World it would appear not only there, but along the path of the Spaniards such as Mexico's Gulf Coast or the islands. From the descriptions of the disease it appears to be some kind of hantavirus or arenavirus, of which there are many in the Americas and are commonly carried by the native rodents, especially cotton rats. While we can't agree or identify the specific pathogen that caused cocoliztli, the consensus among historians is it's indeed endemic to Mesoamerica, and the epidemics recorded were caused by a drought that forced the rodents into pockets of water shared by humans.

https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/8/4/01-0175_article
 
This question could be best answered by someone from /r/AskHistorians, if anyone wants to go there.

I'd wait on peer review for this one. It seems a little hasty to interpret the results of a MRCA of modern smallpox as that being its first ever instance. It sounds like it could be a bottleneck.

Furthermore, as disease-ridden Europe was I don't trust their pathological knowledge. They may not have differentiated smallpox strains from that of measles or similar diseases. I'm gonna need to see more conclusions by other researchers in order to overturn all our previous patho-historical knowledge.

Tons of Europeans were affected by cocoliztli. The thing is in the 1500s there were a lot more natives in Mesoamerica than there were Spaniards, who mostly lived in well-off urban areas insulated from the rural farmlands which would be home to the disease-spreading rodents. Eventually it did reach the Spaniards and start killing them.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistori...were_cocoliztli_and_matlazahuatl_and_how_did/

It's almost definitely an indigenous disease, as there is no evidence of any similar disease in Europe or Africa at the time. Furthermore, all reports of the disease came from Mesoamerica's interior; if it came from the Old World it would appear not only there, but along the path of the Spaniards such as Mexico's Gulf Coast or the islands. From the descriptions of the disease it appears to be some kind of hantavirus or arenavirus, of which there are many in the Americas and are commonly carried by the native rodents, especially cotton rats. While we can't agree or identify the specific pathogen that caused cocoliztli, the consensus among historians is it's indeed endemic to Mesoamerica, and the epidemics recorded were caused by a drought that forced the rodents into pockets of water shared by humans.

https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/8/4/01-0175_article

I have a question. If that is the case, shouldn't that mean that the whites should have been more devastated by the native disease, because they would not have any immunity at all, compared to natives, who would have at least some immunity? I'm reminded that in Africa, the Europeans were held back from colonizing the interior because of the disease environment of the African Interior. Sure those diseases devastated Africans too, but it devastated the Europeans so much more that it was impossible to colonize it until the 19th century when quinine was developed, and Europeans were not nicer to Africans on the coasts than they were to Native Americans. And it did not lead to population crashes among the native Africans than the colonizing Europeans.

If it was indigenous, and it was endemic, then it should be like the recurring waves of Black Death and Smallpox in Europe and China during the early modern period. It should affect only the children, since all the adults contacted it when they were children, and either died or survived and became immune as a result, thus relegating it to childhood diseases over time. And it should affect arriving foreigners (Europeans) much more severely than natives.

Instead, it devastated adults and children alike, crashed the population so hard like a virgin epidemic would, and seemingly did not affect the population of Europeans.

Basically, to me, the population decrease in the Americans seemed more consistent with a disease that the Natives had never been exposed too before, and that the Europeans had immunity to it.
 
I have a question. If that is the case, shouldn't that mean that the whites should have been more devastated by the native disease, because they would not have any immunity at all, compared to natives, who would have at least some immunity? I'm reminded that in Africa, the Europeans were held back from colonizing the interior because of the disease environment of the African Interior. Sure those diseases devastated Africans too, but it devastated the Europeans so much more that it was impossible to colonize it until the 19th century when quinine was developed, and Europeans were not nicer to Africans on the coasts than they were to Native Americans. And it did not lead to population crashes among the native Africans than the colonizing Europeans.

If it was indigenous, and it was endemic, then it should be like the recurring waves of Black Death and Smallpox in Europe and China during the early modern period. It should affect only the children, since all the adults contacted it when they were children, and either died or survived and became immune as a result, thus relegating it to childhood diseases over time. And it should affect arriving foreigners (Europeans) much more severely than natives.

Instead, it devastated adults and children alike, crashed the population so hard like a virgin epidemic would, and seemingly did not affect the population of Europeans.

Basically, to me, the population decrease in the Americans seemed more consistent with a disease that the Natives had never been exposed too before, and that the Europeans had immunity to it.
User @yboxman, who is a cell biologist, made a nice post about diseases and immune systems in his Viking TL some time back. He could explain it better than I can.

First off, I mentioned before that the Spaniards were protected from the brunt of the epidemic by their living conditions and locations, in addition to better medical care and tools. Furthermore, the epidemic coincided with one of the most severe droughts in Mesoamerica at the time, which is what made the rodents gather together like I mentioned. It stands to reason this wouldn't be a common occurrence, and so there wouldn't be a lot of opportunity to select for resistance. The Americas appeared to be in the early days of epidemic disease development during the time of Spanish arrival, and cocoliztli was not a common enough sight to make its mark into the immune systems of Mesoamericans. It arose under special conditions and did not yet have the opportunity to become an endemic, commonly recurring disease.

As far as the biology of it goes, basically Yboxman's post says that people that have had a history of infectious diseases have the ability to better fight new ones, even if they've never been exposed. So the Spaniards already had an immune advantage regardless of what Mesoamerica had to offer. They still got sick, though, once the disease finally reached their way.
 
Tons of Europeans were affected by cocoliztli. The thing is in the 1500s there were a lot more natives in Mesoamerica than there were Spaniards, who mostly lived in well-off urban areas insulated from the rural farmlands which would be home to the disease-spreading rodents. Eventually it did reach the Spaniards and start killing them.

Well, I don't think that is factually accurate.

This is an account from a Spanish physician who worked with the natives during the outbreak in 1576: "All witnesses mentioned that a striking aspect of this epidemic
was its marked selectivity for the Indian population. Everywhere the disease was reported the Spanish remained almost untouched."
The man who wrote that account was Dr. Francisco Hernandez, former physician of King Phillip II of Spain and physician in chief of New Spain. Together with two other physicians he worked with the victims, and performed autopsies. All of them remarked on the diseases preference for Indians. This was also reported on the later outbreaks. Outbreaks in 1545, 1576, 1736 and 1813 all reported that Indians were preferentially affected, despite Europeans living in close proximity to Indians for the latter outbreaks.

This was also echoed in the fact that Jesuit monasteries where Europeans worked with the diseased, with complete lack of hygienic measures as was common then, observed very few cases (none of the physicians and very few of the priests). It was not a matter of reaching the Spanish. Spanish who spent every day literally up to their elbows in gore from the victims were unaffected.

t's almost definitely an indigenous disease, as there is no evidence of any similar disease in Europe or Africa at the time.

Actually, Yellow Fever is quite similar. It does, however, infect Europeans quite happily. Also, it does not fit the geographic distribution of Cocoliztli, which was markedly less aggressive on costal areas.

Furthermore, all reports of the disease came from Mesoamerica's interior; if it came from the Old World it would appear not only there, but along the path of the Spaniards such as Mexico's Gulf Coast or the islands.

Well, I understand that Cocoliztli in the 1545 and 1576 epidemics was considerably less aggressive on the coasts. I am however unsure if the outbreaks of 1736 and 1813 showed any such geographic preference.

As far as the biology of it goes, basically Yboxman's post says that people that have had a history of infectious diseases have the ability to better fight new ones, even if they've never been exposed. So the Spaniards already had an immune advantage regardless of what Mesoamerica had to offer. They still got sick, though, once the disease finally reached their way.

The difference in mortality and infection rates between the Native Americans and the Europeans, however, was enormous. It is not impossible that a difference in immune systems could explain it. It is possible. However, previous exposure would explain it and be less unlikly.

From the descriptions of the disease it appears to be some kind of hantavirus or arenavirus, of which there are many in the Americas and are commonly carried by the native rodents, especially cotton rats. While we can't agree or identify the specific pathogen that caused cocoliztli, the consensus among historians is it's indeed endemic to Mesoamerica, and the epidemics recorded were caused by a drought that forced the rodents into pockets of water shared by humans.

Like I said, it is not a conclusion I agree with. One hypothesis has been that Cocoliztli did not transmit between humans at all, but only from an animal reservoir to humans. And that exposure to this reservoir was a function of Indian living conditions. However, this does not explain that some outbreaks were rural, and some urban. Nor that the preference for Indians persisted over centuries of changing living conditions.

It has also been suggested that the disease opportunistically infected only people who were in poor condition due to malnutrition and overwork. This does not account for the fact that African lethality was somewhere between Indian and European, without Africans having any advantage on the Indians in terms of living conditions or nutrition.

I find the notion that it was an old world disease that found a new reservoir in an inland species more more convincing.
 
Last edited:

cgomes

Banned
As someone said before here, the deaths from disease cannot be separated from European mistreatment. The disruption of native american society was one of the things that caused the plagues in the first place.

You need native labour, you capture the natives, they live close to you, they catch your diseases.
 
As someone said before here, the deaths from disease cannot be separated from European mistreatment. The disruption of native american society was one of the things that caused the plagues in the first place.

You need native labour, you capture the natives, they live close to you, they catch your diseases.

A lot of Native societies were wiped out before even setting sight of Europeans since disease ran ahead of the white men. Look at the Mound Builders. It existed during De Soto's expedition, then vanished just a few decades later. Most likely by disease. And the place were the Pilgrims were also recently empty because they were wiped out by disease.

Europeans also mistreated and abused Africans in Africa, Indonesians, Indians from India, Filipinos, etc. And they did not the same way as the Native Americans did, in the same numbers and proportions. Did 95% of the Indians in India die of disease when the British conquered them? How about the native Filipinos? They were maltreated too, yet did not die in the same proportion as the Native Americans.

The only plausible explanation for the horrific death rate of the native americans is disease.
 
As someone said before here, the deaths from disease cannot be separated from European mistreatment. The disruption of native american society was one of the things that caused the plagues in the first place.

You need native labour, you capture the natives, they live close to you, they catch your diseases.

There were many tribes throughout the Canadian interior that were savaged by disease and had virtually no contact with Europeans until much later, conquest and mistreatment had nothing to do with it, that happened afterwards.
 
As someone said before here, the deaths from disease cannot be separated from European mistreatment. The disruption of native american society was one of the things that caused the plagues in the first place.

You need native labour, you capture the natives, they live close to you, they catch your diseases.

Here is a good point, in most cases. The overall collapse of Mississippian civilisation is independent from their treatment by Europeans. There were few Europeans in North America before de Soto's expedition where he and his men gave witness to the fall of North America's most vibrant indigenous civilisation. It has more to do with trade networks in the Caribbean, where the diseases existed thanks to the Spanish colonisation, which spread the epidemics to North America. Considering the minimal interaction Europe had with North America before the 17th century, outside of abortive attempts at missions, we can't really blame Europeans there, and certainly not the mistreatment of natives, for the spread of epidemics there.

What European interference did was make things far, far worse, where it was most prominent, like in Latin America. If the Andeans or Mesoamericans hadn't been as brutalised by Europeans in the form of slavery and what was basically slavery, I don't think they would've died in such numbers. Smallpox (let's just call it smallpox, regardless of what this thread of current research is saying) and other disease (it wasn't simply smallpox of course, but a host of Old World diseases) would wreck the American Indians regardless of what was done to them. But the difference between, say, 60% of people dying and 80% dying is huge. When the Spanish fed the locals into the mines like Potosí and subjected them to brutal conditions of labor, they helped make the inevitable epidemics far, far worse than it had to be. It still would be destabilising to local societies. But it was made far worse than it had to be.

I think the evidence shows that Spanish/Portuguese interference in the New World was by far the most destructive, whereas England/France (and the United States) simply finished them off. Locals had little resistance to European diseases, as late as the 19th century. It's noteworthy that when the Sioux were vaccinated against smallpox by a US government mission to vaccinate American Indians, that they were able to gain a huge advantage against other groups who were unvaccinated (because Congressional funding ran out) like the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Pawnee in large part because of this.

Overall, I'm still convinced that the majority of native deaths were because of European diseases rather than any specific acts of Europeans. But Europeans (especially Spain) helped contribute to the diseases being so brutal thanks to their own brutal treatment of the natives. But in the end, it's a fallacy to blame Europeans for the majority of American Indian death, at least in terms of direct mistreatment. The majority was due to disease, the rest is probably evenly split between Euroamerican-related violence (Indian Wars) and American Indian groups fighting amongst each due to the technologies and opportunities brought to them by Europeans. All of this contributed to make the 19th century Great Plains one of the most violent places on Earth thanks to the amount of conflict between various American Indian groups and Euroamericans.
 
Here is a good point, in most cases. The overall collapse of Mississippian civilisation is independent from their treatment by Europeans. There were few Europeans in North America before de Soto's expedition where he and his men gave witness to the fall of North America's most vibrant indigenous civilisation. It has more to do with trade networks in the Caribbean, where the diseases existed thanks to the Spanish colonisation, which spread the epidemics to North America. Considering the minimal interaction Europe had with North America before the 17th century, outside of abortive attempts at missions, we can't really blame Europeans there, and certainly not the mistreatment of natives, for the spread of epidemics there.

What European interference did was make things far, far worse, where it was most prominent, like in Latin America. If the Andeans or Mesoamericans hadn't been as brutalised by Europeans in the form of slavery and what was basically slavery, I don't think they would've died in such numbers. Smallpox (let's just call it smallpox, regardless of what this thread of current research is saying) and other disease (it wasn't simply smallpox of course, but a host of Old World diseases) would wreck the American Indians regardless of what was done to them. But the difference between, say, 60% of people dying and 80% dying is huge. When the Spanish fed the locals into the mines like Potosí and subjected them to brutal conditions of labor, they helped make the inevitable epidemics far, far worse than it had to be. It still would be destabilising to local societies. But it was made far worse than it had to be.

I think the evidence shows that Spanish/Portuguese interference in the New World was by far the most destructive, whereas England/France (and the United States) simply finished them off. Locals had little resistance to European diseases, as late as the 19th century. It's noteworthy that when the Sioux were vaccinated against smallpox by a US government mission to vaccinate American Indians, that they were able to gain a huge advantage against other groups who were unvaccinated (because Congressional funding ran out) like the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Pawnee in large part because of this.

Overall, I'm still convinced that the majority of native deaths were because of European diseases rather than any specific acts of Europeans. But Europeans (especially Spain) helped contribute to the diseases being so brutal thanks to their own brutal treatment of the natives. But in the end, it's a fallacy to blame Europeans for the majority of American Indian death, at least in terms of direct mistreatment. The majority was due to disease, the rest is probably evenly split between Euroamerican-related violence (Indian Wars) and American Indian groups fighting amongst each due to the technologies and opportunities brought to them by Europeans. All of this contributed to make the 19th century Great Plains one of the most violent places on Earth thanks to the amount of conflict between various American Indian groups and Euroamericans.

I would separate Spain from Portugal.

Spain was more disruptive and destructive for the mere reason that it grabbed the most populated, richest and most structured areas of the Americas : the aztec and inca empires.

Portugal and Britain grabbed far less densely populated areas, so the disruption they caused seems less cataclysmic in a relative perspective.

France was an other story : It took a much more collaborative path dealing with the amerindians. And although It was partly due to the weak number of french settlers, It was probably not the only reason. I guess the mobile nature of fur trade also makes it more necessary to get on decently with natives than a kind of colonization based on grabbing lands and mineral resources.

I guess any other power grabbing the aztec and inca empire would have behaved quite the same way as the spanish did and have produced quite the same catastrophic results.
 
I would separate Spain from Portugal.

Spain was more disruptive and destructive for the mere reason that it grabbed the most populated, richest and most structured areas of the Americas : the aztec and inca empires.

Portugal and Britain grabbed far less densely populated areas, so the disruption they caused seems less cataclysmic in a relative perspective.

France was an other story : It took a much more collaborative path dealing with the amerindians. And although It was partly due to the weak number of french settlers, It was probably not the only reason. I guess the mobile nature of fur trade also makes it more necessary to get on decently with natives than a kind of colonization based on grabbing lands and mineral resources.

I guess any other power grabbing the aztec and inca empire would have behaved quite the same way as the spanish did and have produced quite the same catastrophic results.

Agreed. Portugal we see with the bandeirantes causing quite brutal results on the indigenous people--they would've acted like Spain did if they had Mexico or Peru instead of a less densely populated land like Brazil. Britain grabbed an even less densely populated land, and did their own set of brutalities with it. France, well, I notice a cliche of France being good to the natives compared to others, and that's only the case because of the market France was in. If France put more people on the ground, they would've resorted to the same measures as other colonial powers.
 
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