My recent post on the case fatality ratio of the new Wuhan Coronavirus sparked a long discussion about the role of European epidemics in the colonization of the new world. There is a theory that after Europeans came to the new world (the Americas, Australia, etc) they brought with them diseases that went through the local populations like wildfire, killing huge proportions of the local populations because they were not previously exposed to these diseases, and so lethality was much higher and even simple diseases that Europeans were used to (like influenza) were highly destructive in these naive populations.
This theory sparked my statistician’s skepticism, and also my cynicism about colonial narratives. Europeans arrived in the Americas in 1492, an era not known for its highly advanced demography, and when they arrived counting the locals wasn’t their primary priority. Epidemiology wasn’t particularly advanced at that time either, and medicine incredibly poor quality, not to mention the difficulty of preserving accounts from that time. Furthermore, I don’t see any evidence that the mortality rates due to diseases like smallpox and plague have changed over time in western populations, and because our recent encounters (in the past 500 years) with immunologically naive populations have been very hostile it’s hard to believe that people bothered to adequately (let alone accurately) record what happened in that time, and it’s hard to imagine that there have been any actual, valid studies of immunologically naive populations in modern times.
Furthermore, there has been a major revisionist movement in the west in the past 20 years, which has tried to deny the reality of genocide in the Americas and Australia, and to cast the white invaders as innocent of any crimes, or at worst having made a few well-meaning mistakes. In Australia this has been spear-headed by Keith Windschuttle, whose Fabrication of Australian History series explicitly attempts to deny violence towards Aborigines and recast the destruction of Australian Aborigines as a consequence of disease and demographic decline. This has been pushed by national newspapers (The Australian, of course, fulfilling their role as propagandists for Satan) and our former prime minister, and its “success” has no doubt sparked similar narratives in other countries. There is even a counter-narrative in the Spanish world of the “Black Legend“, which dismisses claims of violence by Spanish conquistadores as propaganda by England and France. It’s very convenient for these people if they can claim that immunologically naive populations are especially vulnerable, and population decline due to violence is actually the consequence of disease. They can even claim that mass movements of indigenous populations occurred due to disease, not genocide. Handy!
This led me to ask two related questions:
- Are immunologically naive populations actually subject to higher mortality rates when disease hits them?
- Did disease kill the majority of the population in the Americas, and was that disease introduced by Europeans?
The first question can be answered by looking at the history of black death in Europe, and by genetic studies. The second depends on demographic and epidemiological data, and as I will show, there is none, and all the accounts are extremely dodgy.
The history of diseases in naive populations
A population that is naive to a disease is referred to as a “virgin soil” population, although it appears that this name is never used to describe European populations affected by the plague (which was imported from Asia) – “virgin soil”, along with terra nullius, is a concept reserved for the new world. In fact Europe was virgin soil for the plague in the 14th century, and experienced repeated and horrific epidemics of this disease from the 14th century to the 16th century, with smaller plagues later on. In total the black death is estimated to have killed 30-60% of the population of Europe, and to have precipitated huge social changes across the continent. That was 700 years ago, and yet today the case fatality rate due to plague remains 60%, so 700 years of exposure to this disease hasn’t changed European susceptibility at all.
We can also see this in influenza. The H1N1 epidemic of 2009 killed only 0.01% of people who caught it, even though it was a new strain of influenza to which people could be expected not to be immune. The Spanish flu probably killed 10-20% of people it infected, but it did not do an especially greater job in isolated communities who had never experienced influenza before. For example in Samoa it probably killed about 20% of the population, having infected 90%, which suggests it did not behave particularly egregiously in an unexposed population. Smallpox, which has existed for 10,000 years in humans, had a similar mortality rate over most of its history, with variations in this mortality rate primarily driven by the number of people infected and the quality of the healthcare system. There is some evidence that the mortality rate is lower in Africans, who had been exposed to it for longer, but if so this has taken 10,000 years to manifest, which suggests that in general infectious diseases do not behave differently in “virgin soil” populations, though they can be much worse in populations with inadequate health care or infection control methods.
It’s worth noting that many estimates of the impact of these diseases rely on extremely dubious estimates of population. Putting aside demographic methods of the 14th century, Samoa in 1918 was a colony managed by New Zealand, with a colonial management so incompetent that they allowed people to disembark from a plague ship flying a yellow quarantine flag, and then mismanaged the resulting epidemic so badly that everyone on the island got infected. Did New Zealand’s colonial administration have any incentive to accurately count the population before the epidemic? Did they accurately register newborns and elderly people, or did they only record the working age population? How good were their records? If the Samoa population is underestimated by a small amount then the mortality rate plummets, and conclusions about the effectiveness of the disease in this naive population are significantly changed. And was the population even naive? Were the NZ colonial administrators previously recording every influenza epidemic on the island?
These problems are an order of magnitude worse when we try to understand what happened in native populations.
How many Spaniards went to Mexico?
Accounts of the effect of epidemics depend ultimately on our knowledge of the population affected, and population estimation is a very modern science. How was this done in 15th century America, by people who were busy slaughtering the people we now wish they were counting? What was the variation in population estimates and who was recording population, how and why? Fortunately we have a partial answer to questions about how population was recorded, because a historian called David P. Henige wrote a book called Numbers from Nowhere: The American Indian Contact Population Debate, much of which can be read on google books, that makes a lot of strong criticisms of recording of population at that time. Sadly his specific chapters on over-estimation of epidemics are not available online, but he does provide an analysis of accounts by Spanish reporters of the numbers of Spanish soldiers present at certain actions on the continent. As an example, he reports on the number of deaths recorded during the noche tristes, an uprising in the city of Tenochtitlan in which the Aztecs rose against their Spanish occupiers and slaughtered them, driving them out of the city. Spanish accounts of that event – by people who were there – record the number of deaths as between 150 and 1170, with Cortes (the general in charge) recording the lowest number. Henige also notes accounts of expeditionary forces that vary by up to 10% between reporters who were on the scene, and may not even mention Indian attachments that probably far outnumber the Spanish forces. He reports on a famous Spanish reporter on the continent (las Casas) who misreports the size of the continent itself by a huge amount, and notes that a room that was supposed to be filled with treasure as tribute was given radically different sizes by different Spanish observers, as was the amount of treasure deposited therein. He also notes huge discrepancies (up to a factor of 10) in population estimates by colonial administrations in north America. He writes
If three record books showed Ted Williams lifetime batting average as .276, .344 and .523 respectively, or if three atlases recorded the height of Mt. Everest as 23,263 feet, 29,002 feet, and 44,083 feet, or if three historical dictionaries showed King William XIV as ruling 58 years, 72 years and 109 years, their users would have every right to be thoroughly bemused and would be justified in rejecting them all, even though in each case research could show that in each case one of the figures was correct. Yet these differences are of exactly the same magnitude as those among the sources for the size of Atahulpa’s treasure room that Hemming [an author reporting this story] finds acceptable
These are all relatively trivial examples but they make the point: almost nothing reported from the colonies in the 15th century was accurate. In the absence of accurate reporting, what conclusions can we draw about the role of infectious diseases? And what scientific conclusions can we draw about their relative mortality in virgin soil populations?
Scientific estimates of epidemic mortality in Latin America
A first thing worth noting about scientific reports of epidemic mortality in the Americas is that they often use very old sources. For example, this report of the environmental impact of epidemics in the Americas cites McNeill’s Plagues and Peoples (1977), Dobyns’s estimates of population from 1966 and 1983, Cook’s work from 1983, and so on. It also relies on some dubious sources, using references extensively from Jared Diamond’s 1997 breakout work Guns, Germs and Steel. Some of these works receive criticism in Henige’s work for their credulity, and Diamond’s work has been universally canned since it was published, though it has been very influential outside of academia. Many of these works were written long before good computational demography was well established, and though it’s hard to access them, I suspect their quality is very poor. Indeed, McNeill’s seminal work is criticized for using the Aryan population model to explain the spread of disease in India. These works are from a time before good scholarship on some of these issues was well established.
Dobyns’s work in turn shows an interesting additional problem, which is that no one knows what caused these epidemics. In his 1993 paper Disease Transfer at Contact, (pdf) Dobyns reports on many different opinions of the diseases that caused the demographic collapse in south America: it may be smallpox, or plague, or Anthrax, or typhus, or influenza, or measles. Dobyns’s accounts also often note that people survived by fleeing, but do not ever consider the possibility that they were fleeing from something other than disease. Contrast that with accounts from north America 400 years later (such as the story of the Pince Nez reported in Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee), which make clear that native Americans were fleeing violence and seeking sanctuary in Canada. There is a lot of certainty missing from these accounts, and we need to be careful before we attribute population decline to disease if we don’t know what the disease was, and are relying on accounts from people who refused to consider the possible alternative explanations for the social collapse they are witnessing.
This is particularly complicated by recent studies which suggest that the epidemic that wiped out much of the Mexican population was actually an endemic disease, that jumped from local rats to the indigenous population, spread from the mountains to the coasts (not from European coastal settlements), and had symptoms completely unrelated to European diseases. In this account, a long period of drought followed by rain triggered a swarm of a type of local rat into overcrowded settlements of native peoples, where a type of hantavirus jumped from those rats to humans and then decimated the population. The disease started inland where the drought had been worse and spread outward, and it primarily affected indigenous people because they were the ones forced to live in unsanitary conditions as a consequence of slave-like working conditions forced on them by the invaders. Note here that the western invaders, presumably completely naive to this disease, were not affected at all, because the main determinants of vulnerability to disease are not genetic.
Further problems with the epidemic explanation for native American population loss arise from the nature of the transatlantic crossing and the diseases it carried. The transatlantic crossing is long, and if anyone were carrying smallpox or influenza when a ship left port the epidemic would be burnt out by the time the ship reached the Americas. In fact it took 26 years for smallpox to reach the continent. That’s a whole generation of people slaughtering the natives before the first serious disease even arrived. During that time coastal populations would have fled inland, social collapse would have begun, crops were abandoned, and some native communities took sides with the invaders and began to work against other native communities. In 9 years of world war 2 the Germans managed to kill 50 million Europeans, several millions of these due to starvation in the East, and created a huge movement of refugee populations that completely changed European demographics and social structures. What did the Spaniards do in 26 years in central America?
It is noticeable that many of the accounts from that time seem not to account for flight and violence. Accounts at that time were highly political, and often reported only information that served whatever agenda the writer was pursuing. Las Casas, for example, whose accounts are often treated as definitive population estimates, appears not to have noticed massive epidemics happening right in front of him. Others did not notice any possible reasons why natives were abandoning their fields and farms, and didn’t seem to be able to consider the possibility that something scarier than disease was stalking the land. The accounts are an obvious mess, with no reliable witnesses and no numbers worth considering for serious study.
Conclusion
Without good quality demographic data, or at least even order of magnitude accuracy in population estimates, it is not possible to study the dynamics of population collapse. Without decent information on what diseases afflicted local populations, it is impossible to conclude that “virgin soil” populations were more vulnerable to specific diseases. There is considerable evidence that disease mortality is not different when populations are naive to the disease, drawn from European experience with plague and global experience with influenza, and there is no solid evidence of any kind to support the opposite view in indigenous populations. Historical accounts are fundamentally flawed because of their subjectivity, lack of accuracy even when their interests are not threatened, and the unscientific nature of 15th century thought. A whole generation of conquistadores acted with extreme violence before dangerous diseases arrived on the continent, so many accounts of population collapse must reflect only war, but even after the diseases arrived it is likely that they were no more dangerous in native populations than they were in Europe, which by the 16th century was experiencing endemic smallpox that regularly killed large numbers of people (in Europe in the 18th century it killed 400,000 people a year). There is no reason to think that the Americas were special, or that their local population was especially vulnerable to this or any disease.
It is important to recognize that these issues – accurate diagnosis of disease, accurate estimates of numbers who died, and accurate population numbers – are not just academic exercises. You can’t put them aside and say “well yes, we aren’t sure what disease did it, how many people died, and what the population was, but by all accounts it was bad in the colonies.” That’s not how epidemiology works. You would never, ever accept that kind of hand-waving bullshit when applied to your own community. Nobody would accept it if the Chinese government said “yeah, this coronavirus seems bad, but you know there aren’t that many people affected, the population of Wuhan is anywhere from 1 million to 20 million, and we don’t even really know it’s not seasonal influenza or smallpox.” You would rightly reject that shit out of hand. It’s no different when you’re talking about any other population. We have no reason to suspect any special impact of epidemics in the Americas or Australia, and no reason to conclude that they were especially influential in the history of those regions compared to the violence inflicted on the locals – which we know happened, and we have many accounts of. To look at the accounts we have of disease in the new world, and conclude anything about them beyond “it happened” is to put undue confidence in very, very vague and very poor reporting. There is no empirical evidence to support many of the claims that have been made in the past 40 years – and especially, by genocide deniers, in the past 20 years – about the role of disease in the destruction of indigenous populations of the new world.
This matters for two reasons. First of all, it matters because it has interesting implications for how we think about the threat of disease, and how new diseases will affect naive populations when they jump from animals to humans (which is how almost all new diseases start). These diseases can be extremely dangerous, killing 30-60% of the affected people in some cases, but the reality is that for them to become pandemics they need to mutate to facilitate human-to-human transmission, and that mutation significantly reduces their mortality rates. It is rare for a disease that transmits easily to also be dangerous, and there is very little in the history of the human race to suggest otherwise. The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 is perhaps the sole exception, and if so it should show just how rare such events are. We should, rightly, be concerned about coronaviruses, but we should also not expect that just because we’re naive to them they’re going to be extra dangerous. Diseases do what they do, and that is all.
But more importantly, we need to reject this idea that the catastrophe that unfolded in the new world between 1492 and 1973 wasn’t the fault of its perpetrators, white Europeans, and we need to reject even partial explanations based on epidemics. It was not disease that killed the people of America and Australia. There is no evidence to suggest it was, and a lot of reasons to question the limited evidence that some people present. The epidemic explanation is a nice exculpatory narrative, which tells us that even if white Europeans had approached the people of the new world with open minds and hearts in a spirit of trade and collaboration they would still have been decimated by our diseases. In this story we may have done some bad things but it doesn’t matter, because contact was inevitably going to destroy these fragile and isolated peoples. And this story is wrong. It isn’t just uncertain, it is wrong: there is nothing in the historical record to support it. If white Europeans had approached the new world in this spirit, there would have been a generation of trade and growth on both sides before the diseases struck, and then we could have helped them to escape and overcome the diseases we were familiar with, that were no more dangerous to them than they were to us. Their communities would have been better prepared to resist the social consequences of those diseases because they would not have been at war, and would not have been experiencing social collapse, overcrowding, starvation and poverty because of western genocidal policies. They would not have been forced into overcrowded and desperate accommodation on drought-stricken plains as slaves to Spanish industry, and the homegrown epidemic of 1545-48 would not have affected them anywhere near as badly. It’s important to understand that the tragedy that befell native Americans was caused by us, not by our diseases, and our diseases were a minor, final bit of flair on a project of destruction deliberately wrought by western invaders.
This other story – of diseases we couldn’t help but strike them down with, even if we had been pure of heart – is a genocide denier’s story. It’s self-exculpatory nonsense, built on bad statistics and dubious accounts of native life presented by biased observers. It is intended to distract and to deny, to show that even if we did a few bad things the real destruction was inevitable, because these frail and noble savages were doomed from the moment they met us. It is a racist narrative, racist because of its false assumptions about native Americans and racist because of what it assumes about the balance of mortality in the continent, racist for trying to pretend that we didn’t do everything we did. It is superficially appealing, both because it adds interesting complexity to an otherwise simple story, and because it helps to explain the enormity of what Europeans did in the Americas. But it is wrong, and it is racist, and it needs to be rejected. There is no evidence that epidemics played a major role in the destruction of native American communities, no evidence that native Americans were especially vulnerable to our diseases, and nothing in the historical record that exonerates European society from what it did. White Europeans enacted genocide on native Americans, and just a few of them happened to die of some of our diseases during the process. European society needs to accept this simple, horrible fact, and stop looking for excuses for this horrible part of our history.
Compromise and Conceit 
January 29, 2020 at 8:43 am
faustus – you might consider the different trajectories of meso-America, Peru and the parts of Asia Europeans attacked. All had dense populations, urbanisation and complex institutions. The Portuguese and Spanish were not less violent in India or the Philippines than in Mexico. Yet Spanish is the language of Mexico, not Nahuatl, and the Quechua and Aymara are still trying to fight their way from under domination. You might consider the difference between the arrival of a new disease every few centuries and the arrival within a few decades of many different diseases (and then the affect of repeated waves knocking back populations as they recover from the initial impact).
The Black Death certainly involved human to human transmission – and the follow up waves were less severe than the initial eruption.
This does not excuse European violence – it explains its effectiveness in the Americas as opposed to its limited impact in Asia or Africa.
January 29, 2020 at 11:12 am
Peter T, I can tell that you aren’t clicking on any links in these posts, so I know that you aren’t actually reading the evidence I’m presenting. I’m not sure that you can claim that the Spanish were less violent in the Philippines than Mexico, but the different trajectories you want to compare are somewhat complicated by the fact that the Philippines had already experienced centuries of colonial violence and conflict, had many competing kingdoms that could sue for attention from the invaders, and already had a large Muslim population and trade arrangements with countries that the Spaniards saw as rivals rather than subjects (like China). Colonial policy in the countries was also likely different, since no one in Europe saw Muslim lands as terra nullius. You cannot analyze an invasion and war against a Muslim Asian state like the Philippines or India in the same way as an indigenous community – to do so requires ignoring almost everything we know about the attitude of Christians towards indigenous people. The patterns of conquest and extermination and war are therefore completely different, and the comparison is not useful.
Follow up waves of the black death were less severely transmissive but – as I have said repeatedly now – the CFR of black death has not changed in the last 700 years. Humans have adapted socially to it, but not genetically. This is not consistent with your theory. Neither is the fact that the largest epidemic in Mexico arose from an endemic (local) haemorraghic fever which did not affect the (immunologically naive) Spanish invaders.
Now it’s possible that the arrival of new diseases had a shock effect that changed the dynamics of colonial violence – but that theory does not require and does not lead to any theory of immunological naivete. And because those diseases appeared 30 years after first contact and the violent expulsion of indigenous people from the coasts, it should necessarily be viewed of secondary importance to the primary problem, which was 30 years of war, by people with guns and horses against people who had neither.
You should also consider why it is that the narrative of immunological naivete and “virgin soil” diseases is applied only to indigenous populations and not to the population of western Europe when the plague arrived. This difference in narrative is the reason, I suspect, that you refuse to even consider the issue of plague’s unchanging CFR in European populations.
January 29, 2020 at 8:58 pm
I’m not an epidemiologist, and do not dispute the unchanging CFR. I am trained in history, and that’s where I would have an issue with your assertions. The Spanish started out in the Americas as violent imperialists – small in number, allying with locals (the Aztecs were not exactly popular), using their technological advantages and cohesion to conquer the native states. Like conquerors elsewhere, they hoped to displace the former rulers. The first conquistadors took wives from the Aztec and Inca elites, learned the languages and tried to take over their conquests as going concerns. There was violence as they expanded their control, but its not like highland Mexico or the Inca domains were strangers to war. The collapse of the native populations took them down a different path (the link to the speculation about an endemic fever shows the collapse very graphically).
So, at the start, they were very like, say, the repeated conquests of India from Central Asia – a band comes in, grabs control, imposes some new forms and religions, merges in over time (north India is littered with Ghazni, Turki, Afghan, Mughal and other remnants). This was also the Spanish pattern in the Philippines or, for that matter, the British one in India. Conquest gives you control, but it does not usually displace the locals (if sufficiently numerous) absent some other major factor.
The history of the Spanish in Mexico and Peru is not the same as that of Europeans in North America (where many Europeans came to farm, not conquer) or Australia, or elsewhere. Each path is the result of the interaction of a lot of contingent factors.
January 30, 2020 at 12:32 pm
To me it seems reasonable to suppose that there are people in fields such as history or anthropology to have a special interest in, for example, the topic of diseases, or the topic of the Columbian Exchange, and it further seems reasonable for such specialists to pose and investigate questions such as:
What human diseases were transmitted from the Old World to the New World as part of the Columbian Exchange?
What was the demographic impact of the transmission of those diseases?
What were the effects in terms broader than demographic impact?
As far as anything I know goes, it’s possible that questions such as those I mentioned are unanswerable. When I read (as I have read) apparently sober and well-informed accounts of what happened, I am inclined to suppose that the authors knew (at least to some extent) what they were talking about–not that their accounts were precisely 100% accurate, but at least that they weren’t wholly mistaken, that there was something in it. However, when I read somebody else (such as our kind host here) making an apparently sober and well-reasoned argument that there’s not the necessary evidential base to draw such conclusions, I am inclined to revise my position and think that maybe those authors were wholly mistaken, or nearly so.
However, if the evidential base is insufficient to answer questions like the ones I mentioned, then negative conclusions are no more justified than affirmative ones. It seems to me that you’re saying both ‘We can’t tell what impact Old World diseases had in the New World’ and ‘Old World diseases had no significant impact in the New World’, and I can’t figure how those statements can be reconciled.
January 30, 2020 at 7:59 pm
I need to read most of this article when time permits, but I’ll post a quick thought posed by your previous post. This should be read as an extension of your 2 initial questions:
3. If we remove the belief of heightened native mortality due to disease, do we need to adjust our estimates of native population prior to Western arrival?
This question is based on:
– If our current pre-Western population figures are based on projected mortality rates from Western arrival, then either:
a) these population estimates need to adjusted downward to reflect a lack of evidence for their existance; or
b) We should expect to find sporadic evidence of much higher murder rates (e.g. the occasional diary saying “I killed 6 natives today” instead of “I fought and heroically killed one native” to reflect the higher moratality due to violence [1]
– If our current pre-Western population figures are based on evidence not associated with assumed death rates or (dodgy) centuries old demographics then either:
a) the excessive deaths were caused by disease; or
b) the sporadic records are out there but not identified or collated ebnough to be useful; or
c) cultural shame prevented record creation (e.g. the murderers were racist enough to kill natives, but not racist enough to be honest about it); or
d) the records existed but have been excised from the historical record by destruction or concealment.
NOTE: I haven’t done any reasearch on this yet, but I wanteed to identify a line of discussion for later excavation.
[1] We can assume that such evidence would be sporadic due to the invaders not particularly applying moral weight to the murder of innocent natives, though the same assumption means they wouldn’t particularly hide it. It’s basically a “Nazi’s record Jewish deaths accurately-ish, because their assholes who don’t recognise their own records show their own asshole-ishness”. [2]
[2] PS Imagine being the sort of madman that keeps accurate records of killing people because you like accurate records more than you dislike being a murderous stain on the species?! That’s what racism does to you. These people don’t particularly like accurate records, they just hate people of group X enough to devalue them…
January 30, 2020 at 10:04 pm
Peter T, now you seem to be suggesting a new argument, that spanish invaders weren’t so genocidal and so it must have been disease (though perhaps at European levels). This is a different debate, which I prefer to leave at this time. It does dovetail with Paul’s question, which is interesting.
Paul, I was mostly addressing accounts and numbers from the 15th and 16th century in this post. I think after the Crimean war (1853) especially, with Nightingale’s development of modern epidemiology, counting and recording got much better. Also in some areas (the North of America, Tasmania) there was a bounty on indigenous people in some times and places, which presumably would have encouraged accurate counting of the dead. But, accurate counting of the dead is only half the story and yes, I think it’s safe to say we don’t know how many people were in the populations at risk[1]. But I also think there would have been an incentive to exaggerate the number of combat-age males they had killed (to look brave and useful) and reduce the number of women, elderly and children they killed (so they could look brave and also not quite so disgusting). Although, the accounts from Sand Creek suggest that maybe they weren’t so ashamed of what they were doing … and accounts like that also suggest that there are more than “sporadic” accounts of mass killings.
Knowing what the effect of genocide was on the demographics of native Americans is going to be almost impossible. But the accounts of the killings enable us to identify what was done, by whom, and why and to what end. But this kind of numerically imprecise account is not so useful when understanding disease. We need numbers if we’re to understand disease.
J-D you messed up that comment a little so I edited it a bit, as you can see. Regarding negative vs. positive conclusions, the standard practice in statistics is to assume the status quo until evidence comes through to disconfirm it. I’m taking that approach here: assuming that mortality due to disease would have been the same in native American populations as in European populations, and waiting for evidence of the contrary.
I’ll also point out that these accounts seem to be way less prevalent with the Maori, who seem to be not included in the idea that they were vulnerable to disease. Yet at least smallpox, plague and typhus should have been novel to them. I suspect that there is a link between racist notions of weakness, vulnerability and senescence of races (which were applied to e.g. Aboriginal people) and the idea they were especially vulnerable to disease. In the classic racist story of colonization, Maori “fought back” and were much more robust and dangerous than the other peoples of the southern hemisphere. I think it’s no coincidence that having escaped the noble savage image, they also escape some of the assumptions of disease vulnerability. [Though I may just be unfamiliar with a wealth of opinion on the matter]
—
fn1: Could it be that part of the severity of what happened arose from the fact that white invaders treated mass killings with the horror they would reserve for such events occurring in a European population, and weren’t aware that they were dealing with much smaller populations? So they thought e.g. five deaths was “just” five deaths and didn’t realize that in a European context that would be like killing 500 people?
January 31, 2020 at 9:33 am
Thanks. I prefer platforms where I can edit my own comments, but you play the cards you’re dealt.
But surely on that assumption, it would have to follow that there was a significant impact of disease? What else would one expect in a situation where a disease associated with a significant death rate is introduced to a population not previously exposed to it? If influenza, just for the sake of example (or substitute the disease of your choice), kills a significant number of people, then its introduction to a population not previously exposed to it would result in an increase from zero death rate from influenza to a significant death rate from influenza.
.We don’t, however, need numbers to understand the indefensibility of colonialist violence. Governments encouraged and sponsored organised attempts to take possession of land in occupied parts of the world: that means, predictably, violence and death. The death toll was lower than alleged, even if true, has no exculpatory significance: the moral issue doesn’t hinge on the statistics, and it’s a mistake to get drawn into a discussion that treats it as if it does. The behaviour of some people in treating the statistical question as having moral weight is itself indefensible. (There may be other factors that complexify the moral issues, but the numbers are not one of them.)
January 31, 2020 at 9:34 am
Done it again. Can you fix that one?
January 31, 2020 at 10:07 am
Fixed! Yes, it follows under the null hypothesis that there was a significant impact of disease. That’s not at issue here. What’s at issue is the idea that the impact was greater because of a lack of immunity, and that it had a greater impact than colonial violence. These are much harder positions to defend without reference to numbers – as you say, the existence and wrongness of colonial violence does not need numbers to be judged. As an example of using “statistics” to dismiss colonial violence and encourage the idea that it was disease that did the damage (which requires the additional idea that disease was uniquely bad for indigenous people) see Windschuttle’s work.
Here is an example of what may be a more reliable account of the effect of smallpox in Aboriginal populations. It was brought by the First Fleet as a vaccine, rather ironically. That account notes that western invaders were immune because of exposure in their infancy (not because of some genetic immunity) but also claims that 70% of Aboriginal victims were killed because they “had no past exposure”. However, again, we don’t know how those numbers were calculated.
It’s worth noting that smallpox didn’t reach Tasmania until 1882 and was confined to one epidemic on the coast. It requires special accounting to try and tie disease to the extermination of the Aboriginal people in Tasmania. We need to be super careful about treating accounts from that time with no viable statistics as valid accounts of disease, especially when we have so much knowledge about government policies of exclusion and extermination directed towards the native population.
January 31, 2020 at 8:07 pm
Population estimates for the Americas don’t rely on records (there were basically none, except maybe in the Inca Empire), but on field archaeology, and satellite surveys coupled with anthropology and reasoning from parallel civilisations. These give estimates of area settled (agriculture, towns and villages) and density. As more work is done, the estimate rises (eg, satellite surveys show more settlement in the Amazon basin than previously thought). This makes a crash through sustained violence less likely – humans are violent and most populations have ways of coping.
The Americas saw a whole set of diseases (measles, chickenpox, influenzas, smallpox, plus some 16th century ones that have since morphed or disappeared eg the ‘sweating sickness’) arrive pretty much at once – with successor diseases arriving every few decades for a century or more. This kind of hammering is hard to adapt to or recover from (I read that infant mortality was so high in some north-east Amerindian groups that many women refused to bear, which added to their demographic problem).
Maori had a century of contact (sealers and whalers) before serious settlement. So maybe a more gradual exposure?
January 31, 2020 at 8:23 pm
Peter T, why do you keep saying these things? I have presented you with a whole book that makes clear population estimates were not from records or field archaeology, but from random opinions of 17th century idiots. The work you first cited, McNeill, depends on those dodgy accounts, and subsequent work has the same trouble.
I also showed you that no smallpox arrived in the Americas for 25 years – and entire generation of murder – and their most dangerous disease was a local haemorraghic fever that your own theory has no account for. Please, try to engage with what is being written here!
February 1, 2020 at 9:35 am
Faustus – you are citing one work (Henige) in a long-running academic debate, without looking at the other side (eg Denevan’s The Native Population of the Americas in 1492, cited in Mann’s Ancient Americans) . Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence is a good rule. Something caused Amerindian demographic collapse and prevented recovery and it was not warfare or harsh colonial rule – the latter came after the depopulation. The sources – many native – describe great plagues (eg the one that killed the reigning Inca, his son, wife, brother, uncle and much of the court before Pizarro’s band of looters arrived).
For a flavour of the evidence, see eg https://www.researchgate.net/publication/47348270_The_Native_Population_of_Amazonia_in_1492_Reconsidered
Note the intersection of multiple sources. For a piece of evidence that cannot be dismissed as ‘the random opinions of 17th century idiots’ see https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379118307261#bib182
Key sentence: “Furthermore, we show that the global carbon budget of the 1500s cannot be balanced until large-scale vegetation regeneration in the Americas is included.”
‘Large-scale vegetation regeneration’ has to take in the very large parts of the Americas that were barely touched by western contact in the 1500s – most notably eastern woodland north America.
Also – some early sources are far from random idiots. Pedro Cieza de Leon’s three volume survey of the Inca domains was done 1532-50, Bernardino de Sahagun arrived in Mexico in 1529, learned Nahuatl and spent 50 years documenting Aztec culture and history, much from conversations with Aztec notables.
February 1, 2020 at 10:55 am
Peter T, I know that the article in Science can’t be dismissed as “the random opinions of 17th century idiots” because I cited it in my post and wrote:
It’s like I did some research for this post!
I don’t have a lot of time to deal with this today because I have to prepare for an afternoon of colonialist violence in the Melik system, but let’s take a moment to consider how that article approaches the island of Hispaniola. It cites population estimates between 4 million (Las Casas) and 60,000 (Verlinden) and then as much as 8 million. If I told you the population of Wuhan was between 60,000 and 8 million and “some of them died of a novel virus” would you consider my estimates credible? Then the article combines these estimates to get a population estimate for all of the Americas of 60.5 million (table 1). But that estimate is wrong by up to 7 million (11%!) just on the basis of the estimate of the island of Hispaniola. You don’t improve estimates by including data that is just wrong; sometimes you need to throw out some estimates as not credible.
Furthermore, the article then estimates the post-contact population at 60,000, and says this is “a reduction of 85% within 16 years if Bartholomew Las Casas’ initial 4 million estimate was to be correct”. But they previously said that Las Casas wasn’t correct, and probably a better estimate is 300-500,000; and Las Casas has been criticized (by Henige) for reporting that all of the deaths in latin America were due to war, and ignoring disease. This is a messy conflation of sources and causes. We then move on to Table 4, where they report a 30-50% mortality rate due to smallpox in Mexico in 1520. Not only is this estimate based on dubious population calculations that are often derived from depopulation estimates, but this estimate assumes all of the decline in population at that time was due to disease and none was due to war or enslavement. To make matters worse, they report the 1548 epidemic in Mexico as a virgin soil epidemic when it probably wasn’t, but was actually an endemic form of haemorraghic disease (that didn’t affect the locals; that wasn’t transported back to Europe; and which makes a mockery of this article’s idea that Mexicans were uniquely vulnerable to foreign diseases because they didn’t have large domestic animals, when in fact a humble mouse basically exterminated their entire culture).
I used this article to find more information about other sources; it was through this article that I learnt, for example, that many estimates of population rely on depopulation estimates from the 16th century, which are then used to estimate how many people died (do you see the problem here?) I found Henige’s book through this article. This article is a model example of how little knowledge we have of population in 15th century America, and how much of it is dependent on the opinions of 17th century idiots – because it cites almost all of them!
Now I’m off to prepare some colonial violence!
February 3, 2020 at 8:35 am
Henige seems to argue that because estimates vary widely, we can’t know anything. You argue that because Henige (and others) think the population estimates worthless we can attribute the bulk of population losses to causes other than disease.
For a flavour of how population can be estimated other than from explorers anecdotes: http://www.public.asu.edu/%7Emesmith9/1-CompleteSet/MES-05-CitySize.pdf
This leaves room for large variation. Normal in this sort of thing (there are still major disagreements over the population of imperial Rome – estimates range from c500,000 to well over a million). But it does give a lower bound – Tenochtitlan had at least 100,000 people, and we know of over 600 Aztec urban centres. This puts the population of highland Mexico somewhere in the low millions (10 per cent would be a very high urbanisation rate for a pre-industrial culture).
Now contrast the Mexican trajectory with that of England. Both were taken over by a violent and oppressive band of adventurers, who dealt ruthlessly with local resistance (see the Harrying of the North), and imposed their own culture (it was 150 years before a King of England spoke English). Yet the English (pop c500,000) re-emerged. Ditto the Philippines or many other places. What explains the difference?
February 3, 2020 at 2:28 pm
Peter T, there are some problems with that paper you reference, the primary one being that it relies on the explorers’ estimates, again using old studies to get estimates of population. It’s central estimate of population for Tenochtitlan gives that city the same population density as modern San Francisco, even though cities in Mexico never had high rise buildings. An alternative recent reference suggests that 50,000 is a better estimate of population in that city. Again, even the lower bound is too high, which is the consequence of combining estimates that are wrong.
The reasons for the difference between what happened in Britain and Mexico are obvious. For starters, the technology gap is not the same, but most importantly the lack of extermination and slavery policies. It’s not disease! This might be the case for Mexico but again (and how many times do I have to say this?) the disease that wiped out the Mexicans was a local disease from a rat, that spread quickly because of the social changes caused by colonization.
When these population and disease estimates were made it was still 250 years before Florence Nightingale would develop the tools to calculate the relative mortality rates due to war and disease, which she presented in the Crimean war. Until then nobody had any idea how to do this. Yet the theory you’re putting forward is entirely dependent on being able to do this thing that no one was able to do for the first 250 years of the colonial era. You simply can’t make the claims you’re making with anything resembling the confidence you show, and we have a lot of evidence from Europe’s experience with the plague, and more recent evidence from novel influenza, that the inherited immunity idea doesn’t apply. It really is that simple!
February 3, 2020 at 4:06 pm
Faustus – it MAY have been a local disease. Smallpox epidemics (with devastating effect) are well-documented for both North and South America (I cited the Inca case – where a similar demographic collapse occurred – and see the reasoning from climate for North America). Some as late as the early 20th century for the Canadian north-west.
A few thousand Spaniards cannot exterminate a few million, any more than a few thousand Normans could exterminate the English (or the Irish – and they certainly tried there) and the slavery and forced labour came after the collapse.
btw – you so realise that one motive for denying the role of disease is to deny also that the locals were numerous (‘It was empty land, your honour, just lying there’).
I’m not claiming to know exactly what it was, but I think that you cannot deny that introduced diseases played a major role without ignoring multiple lines of evidence.
I’ll leave it there.
February 3, 2020 at 4:17 pm
I hope you will at least admit that the “virgin soil” theory is on shaky ground!
February 3, 2020 at 6:55 pm
If that means the diseases were not unusually virulent, I will defer to your expertise. In which case, the issue was probably the sheer number of different plagues that arrived within a very short period.
February 4, 2020 at 8:37 am
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrying_of_the_North
February 4, 2020 at 10:01 pm
I think you guys need to think about the trajectory that your logic is putting you on here. Apparently you want to believe that in a single year King William – without guns, and operating with technology not that different from that of his enemies – killed or expelled 75% of the population of a part of England, but you don’t want to accept that in 25 years the Spanish – with guns and galleons – could not do similar damage in the island of Hispaniola or in Mexico, and it must have been disease that did it. But at the same time you want me to ponder how the English “bounced back” from this massive slaughter, while the Mexicans didn’t – presumably because disease is somehow different to war when the population is rebounding? You also want me to believe the population and mortality estimates of the 16th century from people like Las Casas, but don’t want me to consider that Las Casas himself thought all the mortality was from war, and want me to instead think that an incalculable portion of the mortality must have been from disease. Furthermore you want me to believe that there was more genocidal intent in William’s one year campaign in the north of England than in the 25 years the Spanish spent despoiling Mexico before smallpox finally arrived.
This is a dangerous line of thought you guys are heading down and I think you should reconsider it.
February 5, 2020 at 6:15 am
No, I don’t. Have you confused me with Fox Mulder?
You suggested that there was a difference between what happened in the conquest of Mexico and what happened in the Norman Conquest because there was no Norman exterminationist policy. I thought it was possible that you didn’t know much about the Harrying of the North, and that’s what made it seem worth mentioning that there’s a Wikipedia article on that specific topic with that specific title, which perhaps you wouldn’t have known and wouldn’t have thought to check if I hadn’t mentioned it. Now you know, you can read it for yourself (if you feel like it) and form your own views.
Having got that far, I thought it was worth quoting the summary to show that there’s disagreement about what happened, that some historical accounts are considered implausible by some historians, and that (although there isn’t agreement) it is suggested by some that there were exterminationist policies, all of which seems also to be true of the history of colonialism in general.
February 5, 2020 at 2:21 pm
Further to the above:
If you set out to establish your own political authority in a territory already inhabited by other people, then fatal violence is a predictable outcome, and therefore your action (whatever label is applied to it) is morally culpable, regardless of whether there is an overt exterminationist policy, a purely tacit and implicit exterminationist policy, or a genuinely intended policy of opposite intent. The British government sent expeditions to Australia with instructions to claim territory and settle there but also with instructions to establish good relations with the indigenous inhabitants; for the purposes of evaluating culpability it doesn’t matter whether they understood that the instructions were in conflict, because they should have understood. People can be culpable for the foreseeable consequences of their actions even when they weren’t intended.
For the purposes of evaluating culpability, it doesn’t matter whether the Harrying of the North reflected a consciously conceived genocidal intent. However, if you raise the question, it seems worth pointing out that some historians have suggested that perhaps it did, although the point doesn’t seem to be clearly settled (and perhaps can’t be).
(The evaluation probably has to become more granular for anybody concerned with evaluating the culpability of specific individuals, but I’m less interested in that.)