The mixed legacy of 1492 (European viruses wipe out population)

Boston.com ^ | 10/11/10 | James Carroll

[Libloather]

The mixed legacy of 1492
By James Carroll
October 11, 2010

IT IS commonly observed that 1492, in addition to being the year of Christopher Columbus, was also the year of the Jews — their expulsion from Spain by the same Ferdinand and Isabella who sponsored the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria. But the overlap of events (actually, Columbus set sail in the very week of the banishment) has historic significance, for it was in Iberia that ancient Christian anti-Judaism had recently morphed into genetic anti-Semitism — the idea that Jews are contemptible not because of their religion, but because of their “blood impurity.’’ This notion of a group’s innate biological inferiority tragically gripped the European imagination just as the encounter with the New World occurred. It was a decisive factor in the creation of modern racism that determined so much of what came in the wake of Christopher Columbus. Contempt for Jews was practice for contempt for aboriginal peoples.

The racist myth of European superiority still shapes the story of the colonial conquest — starting with how the Caribs, Mayans, and Aztecs are remembered as never having had a chance against Spanish steel and gun powder. But it wasn’t technological genius that led to the dominance of the newcomers, nor was it their courageous soldiering, intellectual heritage, or moral superiority — much less the favor of God.

By far, the most decisive factor in the quick establishment of European control was the accident of disease. The immune systems of Western Hemisphere indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by pathogens that accompanied the Europeans, with the result that populations of so-called Amerindians were almost instantly decimated. The population of Mexico, to take one example, fell from 25 million in 1517, when Europeans first came there, to 1.5 million a century later.

[kenavi]

Why is it always the invaders who seem to have the stronger immune systems?

Not true, see "War of the Worlds" and "Independence Day."

[668 - Neighbor of the Beast]

Not doubting you, but could you save me a lot of google time and point to a source?

[aruanan]

The mixed legacy of 1492 (European viruses wipe out population)

But how many have they killed with tobacco?

[davisfh]

"Too bad those viruses don’t work on Muslims"

Yes, and you'd think that with their custom of "wiping" with the left hand and eating with the right, they'd have very little immunity. Or might it be that they get confused about right and left from time to time.

[cripplecreek]

The voyage of Saint Brendan sometime around 525 BC is looked at as a legend with a possible basis in fact. Some believe the “isle of the blessed” may be the Americas.

[Tublecane]

“the vast majority of transatlantic migrants (more than 80 percent up to 1820) came from Africa — labor to replace the disease-defeated Amerindians”

It’s moreso the fact that a lot of the native americans were less like the settled Aztecs and more like hunter-gatherers. Governments conquer and regularize kleptocracy over agrarian and later city-dwelling peoples, not mobile peoples. You can’t make slaves out of people that can run for the hills.

[Boogieman]

Sure, we gave them smallpox, but they gave us syphillis, so I’d say we’re about even.

Now the gay African monkeyphile that gave us AIDS still has some explaining to do...

[Redbob]

"How did they arrive at an estimate of 25 million and how accurate is the methodology."

Same process and same methodology by which they predicted "global warming"...

[Yardstick]

How did they arrive at an estimate of 25 million and how accurate is the methodology.

Probably the same method they used to find that 100,000 (or whatever it was) Iraqis were killed in the war.

If there's anything you can count on in leftist agitprop, it's good, credible numbers.

[BenLurkin]

ABC News http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Sex/story?id=4136401&page=1

PBS http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/previous_seasons/case_syphilis/index.html

Archaeology.org(?) http://www.archaeology.org/9701/newsbriefs/syphilis.html

[BenLurkin]

ABC News http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Sex/story?id=4136401&page=1

PBS http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/previous_seasons/case_syphilis/index.html

Archaeology.org(?) http://www.archaeology.org/9701/newsbriefs/syphilis.html

[davisfh]

"The mixed legacy of 1492 (European viruses wipe out population)"

I've become convinced over the years that this is just a bunch of hogwash. I don't understand why anyone would want to propagate such an idea. Perhaps it's some sort of self-loathing on the part of some European descendants who want to lay a guilt trip on everyone else.

[Billthedrill]

This is hardly a revelation, although the linkage between the Plague, the Reconquista, cultural racial superiority, and a lynching noose is tenuous at best - grotesque might be more accurate - it is not a feature of any sensible historical narrative wrapped around facts but of a relentless anti-colonial ideology looking for a victim and finding the usual suspect in Europe. The actual mortality was often greater - estimated up to 90% for measles - among Native American populations than the 30% or thereabout mortality for the Plague in Europe. No one has forgotten or ignored that; ideologues such as Carroll would like to accuse of us of it, however. His slant is fairly obvious, and is not immune (pardon the pun) to the failings of the history he attempts to criticize.

In exchange, in addition to viruses, the native peoples of America received, to take another bitter example, horses, which served mainly as military machines in contests they lost.

Well, no. They also served as one of the central features of Plains Indian cultures, notably the ability of horsemen to hunt bison. One senses a rather condescending view of those cultures on the part of Mr. Carroll while he is upbraiding us for the identical sin.

It is, as well, another tired entry in the repackaging of history in a wrapper of guilt. Carroll tips his hand in the last sentence. It isn't actually about history at all, it's about semiotics.

Christopher Columbus represents the knot into which all these threads are tied. A past in which the threads were woven ultimately into lynching rope cannot be undone, but how it is remembered can and must be changed.

Changed, presumably, by right-thinkers on the topic, although it is highly doubtful if Carroll numbers among them. One hopes that one day historical revisionism through ideology will be viewed in the same shameful lens in which Carroll tries to cast the history he's attempting to revise.

[GeronL]

wow. This is all pretty interesting in an esoteric way.

PS- What does esoteric mean?

:p

[GeronL]

WAG is probably true

[Mind-numbed Robot]

You can bet if they had anything to transmit I would have caught it. Several weeks in a small ship on a storm tossed sea with a bunch of sweaty limeys and I would have probably cozied up with a coconut.

[Senator John Blutarski]

James Carroll, A smug fellow with a political agenda to cast a pall over all of European civilization and its history - one of the reasons I haven’t read the Boston Globe in twenty five years or tuned into PBS before Masterpiece Theater.

What an ass.

[Carry_Okie]

Humans came over here fully prepared to hunt everything to death.

In the late Pleistocene, this continent wasn't exactly an Edenic landscape, particularly the upper Midwest. Humans exerted a profound influence, particularly after introducing the Asian bison.

The animals had not enough time to evolve defenses.

You underestimate the humans. Canis dyerus was no puppy. Neither were mammoths or the bison that was here. It is a simple fact that the humans that came here were simply voracious and extremely capable hunters not interested in developing domestic livestock, much less a settled lifestyle.

There were stock here that were suitable for development. Shrub oxen, a small camel, and a small horse, but they were good to eat and were soon gone. Certainly some of the sloths were good potential meat animals.

The animals had not enough time to evolve defenses.

LOL, grizzlies did OK. We disagree. IMO what happened was because of the cultural attributes of those who first arrived. In my opinion, entire continents take the shape pursuant to the values of the people in charge. We are that influential.

I am simply unwilling to look at humans in a strictly biological fashion. There is no other species on earth that even remotely approaches such a profound effect on every level of the food pyramid as humans, for good or ill. Evolutionary models are simply not that accurate beyond closed systems, and for the most part, do not include people as an integral component. It is either an egregious mistake or wishful thinking on the part of a misanthropic few.

[NavyCanDo]

No one could have anticipated what would happen when a modern culture came face to face with indigenous people who were still living in the stone age. That's right 5000 years after people in the old world began using the wheel and learned to use metals, the people in the America's had not even invented the wheel yet, and were still using stone tools.

[Carry_Okie]

Let’s get this straight and clear: the “native Americans” were cultural losers who got thrown out of Asia because they were some combination of losers, , antisocial, inadequate, socially caustic or retarded. Indians were (are) freaks.

Can't say; I didn't know any of them. Before my time.