Spontaneously I'd go with the French, if the criterium is relatively little damage to native cultures.
Actually the intermarried with the native.We would have to define what "best" means in terms of legacy. Spontaneously I'd go with the French, if the criterium is relatively little damage to native cultures. Though I'm not sure how much of this is due to being out-competed by other powers. Somehow, I can't really imagine a French "Ėtats-Unis". Rather a few Quebecs and lots of territories where they are ultimately overthrown and chased away, pieds-noirs style.
The one who did not try to exterminate the natives?
The one who did not try to exterminate the natives?
Well the natives where doomed to die from disease the day Europeans came.
Well the natives where doomed to die from disease the day Europeans came.
I don't think we need to go that far : the first outburst was really devastating for native peoples, including ones not yet contacted by colonial powers (as in North America).It took European demands for slaves, leading to raiding and a fundamental disruption of the old Southern world, that really made it susceptible to wide pandemics.
I don't think we need to go that far : the first outburst was really devastating for native peoples, including ones not yet contacted by colonial powers (as in North America).
It's worth nothing, furthermore, that the most enslaved populations weren't the most devastated demographically : many Mesoamericans states keep an important native and metissed population, when North Amerindians (that were more rarely, if ever in some regions arguable more peripherical, enslaved) were proportionally more touched.
While European colonisation certainly prevented native demographics to recover, and made their populations more vulnerable, the first epidemic shock was quite unpreparable and would have happened even without colonial process.
The case of the (post-de Soto) South shows that, had Europeans shown up and screwed up the system, that first outbreak might not have been much of an outbreak at all because political structures (deserted buffer zones between polities) stopped a region-wide pandemic as opposed to a limited coastal occurrence. (and contrary to what some books say, Demississippianization already begun in Pre-Columbian times and was not caused solely by disease, although it might have hastened it).
Which country had the best model, in terms of resource extraction, settlement creation and and post colonial legacy.
Demississippianization is a complex story. ButHmmm. Can you expand on this (or give some links?) I just know the conventional-wisdom story i.e. de Soto came through in 1542 and spread infections, so that when Marquette and Jolliet came through 130 years later disease had destroyed the Mississippi civilisations. More to it?
So yeah, I don't have any love for English/British colonial policies in the Americas.In the American Southeast, English-inspired commerce in Native slaves was the element of colonialism most responsible for making indigenous peoples across the region vulnerable to newly-introduced diseases. Around the middle of the seventeenth century, labor-hungry Virginians escalated their acquisition of captives from their allied Native partners in exchange for manufactured goods. South Carolinians expanded both the volume and the geographic extent of such trade and brought indigenous communities as far west as the Mississippi River into the Atlantic market economy. When smallpox entered the English slave-trade network in 1696, an unprecedented biological catastrophe occurred that I call the Great Southeastern Smallpox Epidemic. This horrific event was not simply the result of a deadly virus being introduced to a previously unexposed population but stemmed from the Native slave trade facilitating the spread of such a lethal germ to communities that had been rather isolated from the outside world. [...] Before 1715, however, English commercialization of aboriginal practices of warfare and capture had created the deadliest period that southeastern Natives ever had with epidemics.
[...]
While this book draws attention to the biological impact of English colonialism, it also addresses the epidemiological significance of Spanish colonialism on the Southeast. [...] Documented outbreaks did occur among mission communities, making it seem possible that undocumented epidemics occurred beyond the purview of Europeans. [...]
With closer attention to disease ecology, however, this study suggests that the impact of newly introduced germs during the protohistoric period is often misunderstood and exaggerated. [...] My analysis suggests that the protohistoric period was a time in which Columbian Exchange diseases had only a limited impact on the Greater Southeast. Specifically, malaria had a significant chance of becoming widespread and may have resulted in some demographic disruption, but that disease alone would not have produced the 90 percent population collapse that has been suggested. The deadliest scourges - smallpox, bubonic plague, measles, influenza - had only a sight potential of traveling beyond Catholic missions and into the Greater Southeast. Only after the English built an extensive trade network over the last half of the seventeenth century did conditions emerge that facilitated the thorough spread of the Columbian Exchange's most lethal germs.
The British actually tried to spread pandemic among natives by selling them blankets from those who had small pox.
The one who did not try to exterminate the natives?