It should have said, what followed was an inevitable clash between a culture with science, architectural, medical, and cultural achievements with technology to build ships to travel the world and refine metals with the sciences of metallurgy, and chemistry, and knowledge to move earth, and build transportations systems and plan cities and water storage, just as they were at the beginning of a scientific, technological and political explosion when they meet a group of people who afters thousands of years their greatest scientific innovation was fire. I can guarantee if aliens with technology incomprehensibly well beyond ours were to land and start moving in, they would see us as inferior and after we fought back enough a nuissance, and eventually something that must be purged
But we’re so cute. Don’t you think they’d want to keep us as pets? At least the pretty blonde anchorwomen and eastern european supermodels.
InAmerican Beliefs, John McElroy notes that there were four main colonial powers in America, and each of them found different things and wanted to do different things:
- Spain :
- found bronze-age civilization, and conquered them in a conventional manner as they would have liked to have done in Europe, especially England. Since they found a going concern their only interest was in dominating and exploiting it, rather than creating it. So the only people they sent to their colonies were soldiers and gentlemen to be in charge. No Spanish peons need apply.
- France :
- found in Canada not a going bronze-age civilization but a stone age one. But like Spain, France's primary motivation was control - of navigation of the St. Lawrence River - and trade with the natives. So there was need of traders, but mostly of gentlemen and soldiers to control. Very few peons, even French ones and certainly none other, were needed.
- Portugal :
- found stone age peoples in Brazil. In order to exploit Brazil they sent over workers - in the form of African slaves. Plus of course, gentlemen to control the operation.
- England(it wasn't Great Britain until later) :
- found in the portion of North America which it was able to claim nothing but stone-age people and forests. The land was rich and had tremendous agricultural potential but wasn't farmland until it had been laboriously cleared of trees and vines. The English colonists found that gentlemen were pretty useless; what the situation cried out for was farmers. So England sent over poor people - some, including some of my ancestors, came from Lutheran Germany - and so the American polity was dominated by practical people (even if they often had religious motivations for wanting to come, still they learned that the situation required diligent work).