Recently on Facebook, an old friend who is now a professor promoted a new series of essays to which she contributed. She noted that this is a history which “…place enslavement, colonialism, and indigenous removal at the center…” Some of the analyses clearly take postcolonialism for granted, where the contact with and shock of European imperialism are critical to understanding everything.
One some level empirically it is impossible to understand the recent history of black Americans or Native Americans without understanding the role that imperialism and colonialism played in shaping their self-understandings, and how they reacted to their oppression. But, on a purely normative level, I wonder if this diminishes the attempt to understand cultures and societies in a positive sense. As in, what defines a people beyond their reaction to other people? To be frank, often the fixation on slavery and genocide by white intellectuals allows these intellectuals to continue to focus on white people as the agents of history.
To some extent, this does reflect reality. But even in bondage and subjugation people continued to innovate, create, and flourish. The long recession of the native peoples and nations of the New World in the face of European hegemony was the work of centuries. How many people know that the last Maya kingdom was conquered by the Spaniards in 1697? Or that the Mapuche people of southern Chile were fully not conquered until the late 19th-century?
There are whole histories here that could be told which are not nearly as Eurocentric.
But the bigger issue is that outside of the context of the peoples of the New World, who felt the blunt force of European imperialism for centuries and manifested the colonialist experience par excellence, a postcolonial narrative that foregrounds the agency and action of Europeans may not be fully informative. The period between 1400 and 1800 is one where Europe became progressively more dynamic and powerful vis-a-vis other regions of the oikoumene, but until the very end of this period European powers were often marginal players except in their own imaginations.
After 1800 European hegemony truly took hold, as the Eurasian “gunpowder empires” collapsed, and the interior of Africa was finally opened up to colonization due to quinone. The question then becomes: does this century or so allow us to understand by and large the course of future history?
Consider both India and China. India was under direct or indirect British rule in totality by the middle of the 19th-century, though note that even in 1800 much of the subcontinent was under native rule. India and Pakistan were independent by 1947. China began to be impinged by European powers by the 1840s, and then underwent a series of shocks and decentralizations so that it was quasi-colonial by the early 20th-century. Like India, China’s indigenous elite shucked off foreign rule in the 1940s with the victory of the Communists.
But both India and China were strongly shaped by non-indigenous ideologies and currents after independence. China was Communist, while India’s elite was shaped by Fabian socialism. But today both China and India are arguably shifting toward more self-consciously indigenous modalities.
One way to understand the contemporary turn of both India and China is to interpret them in the lens of recent Western political history. For example, Hindu nationalism as an analog to nationalist movements in 20th-century Europe. These analogies are not without merit, but the problem is that often they are taken to extreme correspondences which are highly implausible. To me, it is important to consider the possibility, even likelihood, that deep indigenous sentiment and sensibilities are resurfacing in these societies as European ascendency recedes.
If this is the case, then it is important to understand the histories of these people beyond their interaction and engagement with the West. Beyond postcolonialism. Hindu nationalism is far more than fascism in brownface, and Salafism is more than a purely rational reaction to the Western challenge.* We must move beyond our European schemas to understand the post-European age.
* Actually, I do think Salafism is impossible to understand without its reaction and engagement with the West, but the impulse is far more ancient and goes back to Ibn Taymiyyah.
The biggest impact Europeans had on people which were not actually replaced is that they brought them enlightenment, science and modern, efficient methods of war, trade and production.
In this respect they played for some people a bigger role than for others. It depended on where they stood developmentally before the integration in the emerging occidental world system and how capable they were, for a whole variety of reasons, to adapt themselves to this higher level cultural competition.
It is quite obvious that e.g. China and Japan always had a different stand in this worldwide system and competition than many other world regions. What we saw is that people use these European achievements in their own ways for their own goals, always.
The simplest example is if you give a people guns and valuable goods and they use the new prestige and fire power to defeat and annihilate an enemy they had for generations, which lacked access to these goods and methods. At some point they would have done it anyway probably, the result was not the different, it was just one people had an advantage the others hadn’t.
What did the Europeans change fundamentally? Its like it was with the introducation of bows and arrows, farming and metal before. People use it for their own good and change while using the new, more effective means because your lifestyle cannot be the same afterwards.
It always strikes me as strange that the European grip on Africa being now so demonised, while the Islamic-Arabic being, from my point of view, quite often extenuated. Everything Europeans being accused to have done, West Eurasian Muslims and Islam in general did and did so with much more impact and lasting to this day in a much more fundamental war.
If the Europeans wouldn’t have come to Africa, Islam and Arabic lineages would have spread much further, “ruining” indigenous cultures and doing that not just in a peaceful way at all. Slave trade would still flourish in Africa, with trade paths to the Islamic world and slave hunters would go for the last tribals and foes in innumberalbe wars.
The Khoisan people would be largely annihilated and wars would be waged from one end of the continent to the other as it was done before Europeans came in.
Yet some people prefer to blame Europeans for everything going wrong in Africa or other places and holding them responsible, while in some regions the last functioning trains from the colonial era are the only means of mass transportation available.
I guess the European influence was huge throughout the world, but oftentimes IN OTHER WAYS postcolonialists imagine it. Like they have a wrong image of modernity and modern ills in a lot of respects too – whether its about Europeans or non-Europeans alike.
Unfortunately you can’t show them images of a world without these European systemic influences, but in most cases a quick look at the pre-European full impact times suffices to make a lot of “guilt claims” look completely ridiculous.
Europeans were historical agents and actors like any others. With one exception: They had more often, especially in the later times, some sort of Christian “helpers complex” and tried to better everything they encountered the way they imagined it improved. Other cultures and people would have cared, more often than not, much less for such considerations in the same position of absolute dominance, resulting in much worse outcomes for the local populations in the 19th century. Even in Northern America direct genocide was never the main factor for the replacement of the indigenous people. Postcolonialists make Europeans perpetrators and don’t put their actions in a wider context of human interactions in prehistoric and historical times.
They also overestimate the differences between pre- and post-European contact situations. The real big differences are peculiar and the more rational and scientific approach is the biggest asset occidental culture delivered.
The fun thing is that those people which adopted this point of view the least are the worst off economically today, but Europeans being made the most responsible for their drear situation. Which is absurd, because Europeans offered recipes more than anything else. Some learned to cook like that very fast and are good at it. But even the worst cooks are better off then they were before. Or would their modern demographic expansion have been possible in the first place? Demographic growth is the main limiting factor for the material wealth brought by the Western recipe. People can use the occidental achievements to have advantages for demographic growth or individual wealth. Most of the time both at extreme is simply impossible and a compromise would be the most reasonable approach. But biologically, this being constantly suppressed, the true profiteers in an egalitarian world system are those dealing wealth for offspring, regardless of their motives. Individual wealth is worthless if it results in a dead lineage, because life is about the future more than anything else. That’s the biggest deficit of the Western style socio-economic system, that it downplays or completely neglects that fact.
People with zero children and no living close relatives in a fertile age feel guilty and/or superiour because of material wealth and their “way of life”, while looking down or commiserate those with large families in relative poverty, when in fact, they are those to be pity for, because they have no future.
To my mind, post-colonialism just a different form of white supremacy – a maternal one. Maybe not “white supremacy” but a WEIRD one.
It’s like the transition of the role of the family dog from a beast of burden to a pampered pet. But it’s still a lower being at the mercy of its owners. Without agency, the [insert victim here] still revolve and depend on the mercy of the WEIRD…
If I remember correctly, the impact of diseases towards the entire population of native americans was so immense a century later after the introduction of them into the New World, the population decline surpassed the 95% proportion approximately.
Large populations were replaced in all history and prehistory, sometimes violently, or they were simply outnumbered and were assimilated leaving a minuscule impact on the new population. Did these people that mix over time “destroyed”? The narrative of europeans intervening in Africa to stop the replacement is completely baseless. The entire new world suffered massive replacement by europeans and in no way these people will apply the same standards of belonging to a certain land with native americans.
“the impulse is far more ancient and goes back to Ibn Taymiyyah.[1263-1328 CE]”
Others trace it back even farther to the very beginning of Islam:
The Khawarij … were members of a school of thought that appeared in the first century of Islam during the First Fitna [656–661 CE], the crisis of leadership after the death of Muhammad [632 CE].
* * *
In the modern era, some of Muslim theologians and observers have compared the beliefs and actions of the Islamic State (IS), al-Qaeda, and like-minded groups to the Khawarij. In particular, the groups share the Kharijites’ radical approach whereby self-described Muslims are declared unbelievers and therefore deemed them worthy of death and their disinterest in Quranic calls for moderation.
* * *
In the 18th century, Hanafi scholar Ibn Abidin declared the Wahhabi movement of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab as modern Khawarij although he does not consider them non-Muslims.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khawarij
HORTICULTURALISM: I think the best way to understand pre-Columbian population estimates is as orders of magnitude.
The Indian population of the US in the first census where Indians were counted (1890) was about 250,000. The order of magnitude (log 10) is 5 +/- 0.5 so any number between 30,000 and 300,000 is in that range. The indicated pre-columbian population would be 1 order, 10 times that number or between 300,000 and 3 million.
I think the 95% decline (20x) number is way high. In the 14th Century, Europe was pummeled by climate (cold and dry) and the Black Death, yet the high end estimates are 3x and mean is probably 2x. Even 10x is high, but lets go with that.
At any rate, no matter what numbers you use, the total pre-Columbian native population compared to the land area of the lower 48 (~3 million sq. mi.) was around 1 person pers sq. mi.
They were simply dust on the ground. By 1890, Europeans and Africans had settled the lower 48 at more than 20 people per sq. mi. Total population of ~63 million. The Native population was crushed by pure demography.
Another example of the twisted historiography is the history of slavery, which the NYTimes thinks is the key to the history of the US.
Simply put, very few Americans, even historians*, know that European Slave traders obtained the slaves they sold in the Americas by simple purchase from African rulers and slave traders. The story is not black good, white bad.
*I have a masters degree in American History obtained at reputable university and I did not know that until I read:
The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440 – 1870 by Hugh Thomas
https://www.amazon.com/SLAVE-TRADE-STORY-ATLANTIC-1440/dp/0684835657/
20 years after I graduated.
@Walter: Seriously, you didn’t know that? Do they try to cover it up in the USA? I mean after I looked at African slave trade, the first thing which came to mind is that they simply had new customers with Europeans on the field. Even TV documentaries regularly show the African slave trade as it was here. I remember seeing interviews with descendents of the very people which organised slave trade in Western Africa and who tried to keep up their tradition and palaces build “in the golden times”, which was obviously when slave trade with the Europeans flourished.
Slaves were outside of Europe and especially in the Islamic and African context just something normal, completely usual, like it was in pre-Christian European antiquity.
Its amazing which power and wealth some “black” African dynasties accumulated by hunting and trading slaves. They build palaces and urban centres with their trade profits, of which slave trade was one or the most important one (others were ivory, salt etc.), like in the kingdom of Mali and its successors.
Actually it was like the example I used, one tribe/socio-political unity/rule was lifted up, the others were pushed down. The better contact to Europeans was like a valuable asset in itself. Slave trade with Europeans enabled one group to dominate others by getting valuable goods and especially weapons. As a rule, this never changed the relations fundamentally, but rather intensified what was already there before Europeans entered the scene.
It could change the situation more drastically in a few cases though, like the Byzantine and Arabic slave trade contacts motivated the Vikings (Rus) and other Eastern European people to raid for even more slaves to sell.
@Obs: I majored in history at a very highly ranked university and earned a masters degree in the subject as well. Now,that was all 50 years ago. So teaching materials used in high schools and colleges might have changed. I think the reason for my surprise was that the historiography payed little attention to the importation of slaves when I was a student.
Why that was is something I do not know. But there are several facts that lean in that direction.
The first target of the British Abolitionist movement was not the institution of slavery itself, but the slave trade. However, Adam Hochschild, in “Bury the Chains” dates the beginning of the British abolitionist movement dates to spring 1787. In America, the Constitution was being drafted at the same time. Art 1 Sec 9 provided that Congress could ban importation in 1808, and tax importation immediately. The provision did not arouse much opposition. And the ban was duly adopted at the time provided. By luck and without arrangement, Britain banned the slave trade in 1807. The Royal Navy enforced the ban after the end of the Napoleonic wars.
I suspect that was because slave owners saw it would increase the value of their existing slaves, and that they expected a natural increase in the number of slaves to sell without competition from imports.
The real focus on the study of slavery in the US in my time was on the 19th century and the expansion of the plantation economy in the pre-civil war era. See e.g. “Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery” (1974) by the Robert Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman.
“I think the 95% decline (20x) number is way high. In the 14th Century, Europe was pummeled by climate (cold and dry) and the Black Death, yet the high end estimates are 3x and mean is probably 2x. Even 10x is high, but lets go with that.”
The ~95% decline figure is reported on several Amerindian societies from colonial spain, some of them showing more than 99% decline of population. Comparing the introduction of several diseases to an entire continent and the long term consequence of 95% population decline in 100 years to black death’s 40% death rate in a few years is disingenuous.
Amerindians not showing permanent settlements settled temporarily on different patches of land all over the Americas. There is no excuse of “dust on the ground” as those zones could be occupied one year or another.
“At any rate, no matter what numbers you use”
“They were simply dust on the ground.”
Whites invaded Amerindian lands and replaced the population upon expanding all over the Americas.