Which European nation had the best colonisation model in America.

Which country was better at colonising.

  • British

    Votes: 94 57.0%
  • French

    Votes: 42 25.5%
  • Portuguese

    Votes: 10 6.1%
  • Spanish

    Votes: 19 11.5%

  • Total voters
    165
Which country had the best model, in terms of resource extraction, settlement creation and and post colonial legacy.

EDIT: definition of best model completely up to your opinion on the subject.
 
Last edited:
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.
 
Spontaneously I'd go with the French, if the criterium is relatively little damage to native cultures.

"Kennedy Gang" AH is a good subversion on this : while IOTL Canada and Great Plains have a working relationship between natives and Europeans, it really changes in South and Carribeans with a segregation on steroids and southern tribes assimilated as blacks.

Overall, IOTL, the better treatment of natives was determined by three things : the maintain of a late demesne institution when it come to economic/political division, much reduced settlement rate, and ideological tenents (slavery being essentially absent in New France, royal policy of conciliation with natives, etc.).
But New France's situation was really different from the slavery ridden Carribeans on this regard, and even if this one wasn't different from other coloniser situation, it HAVE be accounted for in the same time than less brutal colonisation of North America : New France and Haiti are two face of a same coin.
 
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.
Actually the intermarried with the native.
 
Well the natives where doomed to die from disease the day Europeans came.

Yeah, they were going to die out completly, so who cares if they were heavily persecuted?
I mean, they were all doomed to die : they didn't need their land or their culture anymore right?

Really, I don't know why they complain : they didn't even all died out.
 
Well the natives where doomed to die from disease the day Europeans came.

That's a myth. European disruptions actively helped disease spread - for example the American South had no major epidemics throughout most of the 17th century, despite having had contact with the Spanish for over a century. 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.
The Europeans (including the French) also actively destroyed many peoples by force.
 
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.
 
I would ask the question: "Assuming that the definition of best colonial policy = Best treatment of natives, how is this accomplished other than by barring/nearly barring European colonization?"

It seems to me, that considering the turmoil going on for centuries in Europe, plus the awful deprivations of the poor, combined with the need to escape religious persecution, restricting settlement in North America is something of a pipe dream, considering:

a) The low population of Natives in NA compared to Europe, giving the impression of "vast expanses of deserts", only to be revealed in time as fertile land fit to support teeming numbers in a mostly temperate zone.

b) The nature and causes of the wealth of nations (thank you Adam Smith). This idea that immigration to the New World could somehow be restricted, and thereby strangling future trading opportunities, seems to be pointing towards a world in which Great Britain as we know it doesn't exist.

c) Immigration restrictions against settling the NA interior was one of the major causes of the American Revolutionary War.
 
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.

Mesoamerican and Andean slavery cannot be compared seriously to Indian slaves in the American South, since the Spaniards there weren't, for the most part, getting slaves via slavers who were engaging in disruptive raiding. Mesoamerica and the Andes were also seemingly less touched because they had much higher densities to begin with.
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).
 
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).

Hmmm. 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?

(Also assuming that's a typo and should be "Had Europeans NOT shown up and screwed up the system....)
 
Which country had the best model, in terms of resource extraction, settlement creation and and post colonial legacy.

For resource extraction and post colonial legacy, I'd go with the Spanish: With just a handful of macho adventurers and adventurous missionaries, they subdued half of southern America, bled it dry, fleeced the population of everything they had, and somehow managed to make them feel proud and special because of it.

For everything else, I'd go with the British, especially when you regard not just the American continent, like almost all the posts here do, but also Africa, India, Australia and all the islands in-between.
 
Hmmm. 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?
Demississippianization is a complex story. But

  1. Mississippian societies were already beginning to shift in major ways: the major clue to this is Cherokee oral history about the overthrowing of the hereditary priest clan the Ani-kutani, which occurred in Pre-Columbian or pre-major-European-contact times (I believe de Soto mentiones the Cherokee, although I could be wrong). The Ani-kutani are pretty clearly the overlords of the Mississippian society of the Cherokee, and the revolution against them is part of the Demississippianization process.
  2. Different regions were affected differently by Demississippianization, even after contact: for example, the Yazoo Basin suffered demographic collapse, whereas the Natchez Bluffs were mostly untouched (note that de Soto passed through both). A shrinking Natchez complex chiefdom in the Bluffs survived until the French forcibly demolished it around 1730, even though by that point it was suffering from continuous epidemics and warfare. It being unlikely that every Mississippian society except the Natchez would be so feeble as to perish after only a few outbreaks of disease, so there were clearly other issues (climatic shifts, pre-existing societal pressures as we see with the Ani-kutani). We know for sure that there were droughts and other pressures on the Mississippians during the period. There has been an unfortunate tendency to attribute all abandoned 16th-century sites to disease; if Cahokia had collapsed in 1550 we might be saying it collapsed due to disease too!
  3. Not all the Mississippians died: This is an obvious point but perhaps still worth raising. The Natchez chiefdom survived until 1731, and the Coosa chiefdom just shrunk and morphed into the Muscogee Creek Confederacy (which still exists). Coosa itself is one of the four mother towns of the Creeks (although the Cherokees and then the Americans took it over).
  4. There isn't ethnographic verification for a region-wide pandemic (of smallpox or something else) for the fifteenth century: That isn't to say it never happened, but it does mean that it may not have happened. The first historically documented (and horrible) region-wide pandemic in the Southeast, from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, was from 1696~1700, long after the disruption of society.

Really, read Epidemics and Enslavement: Biological Catastrophe in the Native Southeast, 1492-1715 by Paul Kelton, he states it better than I could. To quote from the introduction where he states his thesis (italics mine):
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.
So yeah, I don't have any love for English/British colonial policies in the Americas.
 
The British actually tried to spread pandemic among natives by selling them blankets from those who had small pox.

There is just one verified instance of that (Captain Ecuyer in 1763) and it was of dubious success since the chiefs who were supposed to contract the smallpox (Mamaltee and Turtle's Heart) were healthy enough two months later.
 

GdwnsnHo

Banned
It really does depend on your criteria

Based on landmass colonised? - The Spanish

Based on native institutions exploited? - The British (Outside of America - Which I guess in this case, means the Spanish win here)

Based on economic success - The British / Portuguese

Based on avoiding intentional harm done to the natives - The French (I think)

Based on population - The British (Again, Outside the US - meaning Spain wins again).

Compared to initial resources - the Portuguese, by a mile.

Based on modern morality? The Swiss :p
 
I'd have to go with the Spanish and Portugese based on the fact that they incorporated their native populations better. Mexican Catholicism includes many native beliefs. And Brazil's racial democracy, though in no way perfect, would be something for America to achieve. The aggressive white supremacy of Anglo-American colonialism leaves a sour taste.
 
Top