WI:More advanced Native American populations on contact but disease is still there?

[Mitchell Hundred]

The European colonization of the Americas is often seen as the ultimate example of a more advanced civilization over-running a less developed one.

However I believe the vast majority of deaths to the natives was through relatively involuntarily transmission of diseases to which they had no immunity against.

If the Europeans came up on an Iron Age level perhaps civilization throughout the Americas or even beyond, would that have made all that much of a difference in the grand scheme if diseases was still present?

 

[Intransigent Southerner]

The European colonization of the Americas is often seen as the ultimate example of a more advanced civilization over-running a less developed one.

Australia, maybe (again with all the caveats about "development" and similar terminology). In America, by the time the English/British lost the 13 Colonies the vast majority of what would today be the continental USA was ruled or occupied by natives who numbered in the many hundreds of thousands.

If the Europeans came up on an Iron Age level perhaps civilization throughout the Americas or even beyond, would that have made all that much of a difference in the grand scheme if diseases was still present?

Depends on what you mean by an Iron Age level, because such a thing doesn't really exist. There is no Iron Age level that exists throughout the world, there are different ages in different places where different cultures use iron.

 

[PBJ]

Depends on what you mean by an Iron Age level, because such a thing doesn't really exist. There is no Iron Age level that exists throughout the world, there are different ages in different places where different cultures use iron.

I'm assuming he means "Iron Age" as in the colloquial sense, so Classical Age to late Antiquity.

Even if the Native Americans possessed more advanced tools, it would not have drastically mattered. Diseases would still take a majority of the population, and early Medieval era technology generally doesn't do well against gunpowder and the like. So expect for things to turn out generally similar to OTL.

However, the surviving natives, having a much better grasp of metallurgy, would most likely adopt gunpowder weapons even faster than they did in OTL, plus would most likely be able to manufacture their own in large quantities rather than trade for them, provided that they are instructed on how to do so (higher quality steel, more sophisticated forges, etc).

 

[Burton K Wheeler]

The literate and centrally controlled Aztec empire, with millions of people and metal working, collapsed in less than a year when invaded by a few hundred renegades with swords.

Conversely, the industrial United States Army with telegraphs and Gatling guns struggled to contain a couple thousand nomadic buffalo hunters.

The more sophisticated the Native polity and the higher the population, the more quickly it falls to European invaders.

 

[twovultures]

I
Even if the Native Americans possessed more advanced tools, it would not have drastically mattered. Diseases would still take a majority of the population, and early

True, but an unconquered population may very well bounce back faster and suffer fewer casualties from disease than a population being forced into serfdom. There's a reason that there are a lot more Navajo than Chumash nowadays.

Medieval era technology generally doesn't do well against gunpowder and the like. So expect for things to turn out generally similar to OTL.

I kind of disagree here. Against the initial attacks by conquistadors, being able to use metal arrows or atlatl darts against horse barding, metal swords and halberds against chainmail etc. will allow the natives to fight against the conquistadors in a more even manner. So the 2/5* initial successful invasions of the mainland by the Spanish could (though not inevitably will) end up being 0/5. Even given disease, this will probably cause a Spanish pivot to trade and proselytizing instead of outright conquest, giving some nations a little time to recover and start to bring in and copy European technology.


*or x/y whatever

 

[Intransigent Southerner]

Even if the Native Americans possessed more advanced tools, it would not have drastically mattered. Diseases would still take a majority of the population, and early Medieval era technology generally doesn't do well against gunpowder and the like. So expect for things to turn out generally similar to OTL.

Actually gunpowder was not very important in the two big Conquests and Senegambians without firearms annihilated the Portuguese repeatedly in the 15th century. This technology gap is not as big as you're thinking.

Per The Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest, disease, allies, and steel swords (swords specifically, because most other weapons did not matter as much) were all requisites for conquest.

 

[Deleted member 93645]

A surviving Vinland would have spread iron technology and animal husbandry throughout the New World, but without spreading disease (no way smallpox is surviving the trip to Iceland, then to Greenland, then to Vinland).

 

[twovultures]

(no way smallpox is surviving the trip to Iceland, then to Greenland, then to Vinland).

Smallpox can survive a long time outside the human body. In a successful Vinland scenario, clothing or blankets from victims of the 13th century outbreaks in Iceland could be traded to Native Americans, inadvertently introducing the disease.

Now whether North America had any population that was large and concentrated enough for smallpox to become endemic is another story. But perhaps it could burn its way to the Mississippi river, and bounce up and down the river, leading to an immune adult population by 1492.

 

[PBJ]

Actually gunpowder was not very important in the two big Conquests and Senegambians without firearms annihilated the Portuguese repeatedly in the 15th century. This technology gap is not as big as you're thinking.

Per The Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest, disease, allies, and steel swords (swords specifically, because most other weapons did not matter as much) were all requisites for conquest.

Ah, my mistake. I still think it won't be much different than our timeline, since the European policy of divide and conquer will still occur, not to mention the rampant diseases.

 

[RGB]

I kind of disagree here. Against the initial attacks by conquistadors, being able to use metal arrows or atlatl darts against horse barding, metal swords and halberds against chainmail etc. will allow the natives to fight against the conquistadors in a more even manner.

I really don't know about this. Powder arms didn't decisively help Congo. Steel didn't help the Omanis. Pizzarro's expedition was hardcore mercenary types, while Cortez mostly had sailors and volunteers backing a very small core of professional soldiers. Nonetheless both were able to win decisive victories where large numbers of men were involved. Alvarado could have perhaps failed when he struck out on his own until his opposition decided to stand and fight, and then he won.

A lot of it had to do with the tactical adaptations that went along with the military technology, and that learning process seems to always lag the simple acquisition of technology. Will your army collapse when your leadership is killed? Will your army always withdraw in the face of direct attack because most warriors are skirmishers and have been trained as skirmishers all their life? Will your army be able to sustain itself in the field for a long time politically and logistically if stalemated?

I have considered this since the last time this topic was brought up in another form on another thread, and here's what I'm leaning towards now:

BKW makes an excellent point in that the places that offered the most resistance were where people were sparse, economic incentives for conquest were low, and regular expeditions had to engage against guerrillas that targeted civilians and infrastructure instead of trying to defeat the enemy's core army.

Russia wasted (comparatively) lots of resources keeping Chukotka down. The Spanish found it hard going against the Mapuche and the Comanche. The conquest of the Canaries was pretty painful. Portugal couldn't force its way deep into Zimbabwe.

Remove an exploitable population that can provide food for the conquerors and conquest becomes much harder or at the very least less interesting.

The other alternative is to outnumber the invaders by a really huge factor (see Qing vs. Russia/Dutch, some of the coastal African kingdoms vs. Portuguese and French factories, Arakan vs. European mercenary outposts), then direct military action becomes possible. But that's when the disease comes into play.

In Asia, Europeans carried the same disease package as their opponents. In Africa the balance was firmly against them. In America, they have the advantage. So the whole "acquire modern weapons, outnumber significantly" strategy would have to be considered AFTER the disease takes its toll. Can there even be enough population for that in America? It's a genuine question: I don't know.

 

[twovultures]

I really don't know about this. Powder arms didn't decisively help Congo. Steel didn't help the Omanis. Pizzarro's expedition was hardcore mercenary types, while Cortez mostly had sailors and volunteers backing a very small core of professional soldiers. Nonetheless both were able to win decisive victories where large numbers of men were involved. Alvarado could have perhaps failed when he struck out on his own until his opposition decided to stand and fight, and then he won.

Well, there's the rub. Guns, germs and steel did not actually help the Europeans colonize most of the world outside of the Americas and Australia-their military and political structures did. However, these structures were not so well developed in the 1492-1545 timeframe, and if the Native Americans had something to give them more of an edge on the battlefield, they could have stopped a pattern from developing.

For that matter, a little more luck with OTL's type of Native American military and technology could have seen the Spanish conquest, and subsequent European colonization, go a lot differently-but I'll leave that argument to people less pessimistic about the Native chances than I.

In Asia, Europeans carried the same disease package as their opponents. In Africa the balance was firmly against them. In America, they have the advantage. So the whole "acquire modern weapons, outnumber significantly" strategy would have to be considered AFTER the disease takes its toll. Can there even be enough population for that in America? It's a genuine question: I don't know.

Depends on who you ask. Like I said, lack of colonization means that Native American population recovers quicker and suffers less, disease or no. Not being forced into the encomienda system will do wonders for indigenous demographics in the new world. It's also worth pointing out that, even post-smallpox, the Spanish were greatly outnumbered by the total Native population in places like Mexico and the Andes. Their control relied on exploiting pre-existing ethnic animosities between indigenous political groups, with groups like the Canari and the Tlaxcallans supporting them against the elite Quechua and the Aztecs respectively. Without strong initial victories against the established elites, they will not be able to recruit local allies to help their conquests.

 

[Intransigent Southerner]

I really don't know about this. Powder arms didn't decisively help Congo. Steel didn't help the Omanis.

Kongo (not Congo) remained independent into the 19th century, Oman rekt the (albeit weakened) Portuguese. So I don't see your point.

The other alternative is to outnumber the invaders by a really huge factor (see Qing vs. Russia/Dutch, some of the coastal African kingdoms vs. Portuguese and French factories, Arakan vs. European mercenary outposts), then direct military action becomes possible.

Do you really believe military disparity between "the West and the rest" in the 17th century was so huge that "a really huge factor" was needed (also the Qing did not fight the Dutch...)? Perhaps in terms of siege warfare because of trace italienne (even that's somewhat disputable), but in an artillery battle on an open field (in the steppe, perhaps) in 1700 the fact that Qing banner armies or so had more cannons per 1000 men and had greater mobility with their cannons than general European armies would have made up for the poorer quality of their cannons. We don't know, of course, because such a fight never really happened.

 

[Riain]

The Pre Columbian Americas were pretty light on for walled cities/towns and other fortifications and the heavy, crew served weapons required to takle such fortifications. If Cortez had come up against cities surrounded by stone walls and defended by balliasta, mangonels and trebuchets throwing heavy, fast missiles into his sword and buclker formations or boats there would have been no military conquest.

 

[NolanFoster]

The Aztecs had chance after chance to kill Cortez and his men, so I don't buy the argument that sophisticated polities will fall even more easily.

 

[Arkenfolm]

The Aztecs had chance after chance to kill Cortez and his men, so I don't buy the argument that sophisticated polities will fall even more easily.

But if and when they do fall, it's much easier to hold them down. Spain beat the Mapuche and Comanche multiple times, but it's pretty telling that each time they bounced back to continue posing a major threat to colonial holdings in those areas and survived well into the 19th century until completely ground down by settlers and 19th century modern armies as a result.

 

[Herman Gigglethorpe]

Is it just me, or did everyone forget about the Tlaxcalans, Córtez's indigenous allies (EDIT: Except for twovultures)? Pizarro was fortunate to arrive during a war of succession among the Incas after Huayna Capac died in a disease outbreak, and he apparently had Huanca allies. Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel" may have helped, but it took more than that to conquer the Americas, and even then, they weren't entirely subdued.

Notable books on the Mexican conquest include The Broken Spears, Bernal Díaz's "Conquest of New Spain", and the works of Bernardino de Sahagún. Maybe I should read them someday.


Good point about the Mapuches. As far as I remember, neither the Incas nor the Spaniards subdued them entirely in Chile, and they were still a notable force when they fought against Argentina in the Conquest of the Desert.

It wasn't until the Conquest of the Desert in the late 19th century that the Tehuelches of Patagonia were defeated either, come to think of it.

In Paraguay, Guaraní is more commonly spoken than Spanish. It's vibrant enough that Duolingo is adding a "learn Guaraní from Spanish" course soon.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/12/w...-language-with-unique-staying-power.html?_r=0

The link is a 2012 New York Times article on Guaraní.

Some people in Mexico even today are monolingual in indigenous languages such as Mixtec and Nahuatl.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/11/n...us-mexican-languages-encounter-isolation.html


Quechua and Aymara are commonly spoken in Bolivia.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/29/AR2007012901665.html

American Indians may face discrimination in Latin America, but some of their cultures have survived today, and even those that didn't were destroyed in the 19th century, well after the old conquistadores.

 

[NHBL]

Civilization = disease

Would a more urbanized society in North America perhaps develop some more diseases that are fatal to Europeans?

 

[Arkenfolm]

Would a more urbanized society in North America perhaps develop some more diseases that are fatal to Europeans?

I doubt it. You'd need to have the Native Americans domesticate more animals and then you probably would have some disease that would make the jump to humans and kill lots of people. Maybe from surviving North American horses/camelids, but that's a very, very far back POD.

 

[Marc Pasquin]

The literate and centrally controlled Aztec empire, with millions of people and metal working, collapsed in less than a year when invaded by a few hundred renegades with swords.

Conversely, the industrial United States Army with telegraphs and Gatling guns struggled to contain a couple thousand nomadic buffalo hunters.

The more sophisticated the Native polity and the higher the population, the more quickly it falls to European invaders.

I think it was mostly a difference in the way they fought and were ruled, not the tech level. The aztec prefered to capture enemies for sacrifice and were ruling a vast but very loose empire of ethnically diverse people who didn't particularly liked them and so turn on them thinking the spaniards might be their salvation.

Plain Natives moved in small self-sufficient groups who fought guerrilla style.

 

[ennobee]

The European colonization of the Americas is often seen as the ultimate example of a more advanced civilization over-running a less developed one.

However I believe the vast majority of deaths to the natives was through relatively involuntarily transmission of diseases to which they had no immunity against.

If the Europeans came up on an Iron Age level perhaps civilization throughout the Americas or even beyond, would that have made all that much of a difference in the grand scheme if diseases was still present?

So to refrain the question: What if the Inca empire were a copy of 1500's Japan, qua technology as well as qua organization/culture? What if it
were only technologically equivalent but preserved its OTL loose confederacy of tribute states under the rulership of the emperor priest. (provided this is even possible as the advances in technology bring with them their own changes in society...)

Or on a related question, what would happen if the first OTL traders involuntarily brought a superbug to Japan that would ravage the population just as severely as smallpox ravaged the indigenous Americans?