Graeber also explores the question what defines a society, and how at certain points some groups of people identified their culture through "schismogenesis" more so in oppositional context to against other group(s)
It's a massive book, but really refreshing and full of delightful little anecdotes and footnotes all through out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%81lvar_N%C3%BA%C3%B1ez_Cab...
I found a book on his trip in a "little library," and was surprised they never mentioned this guy once in history class, at least enough for me to remember. Fascinating, sometimes funny story as well.
Also it makes me realize that all indigenous peoples across what you call the Americas have been/are being subjected to all kinds of discrimination and systematic extermination, from North America all the way to the island of Tierra del Fuego, and of course here in Colombia. We all try to hide our own past for some reason and feel ashamed of it while ignoring the spaniard/european culture and beliefs they brought there have huge flaws compared to what was already here for thousands of years.
https://www.science.org/content/article/feeding-gods-hundred...
80-90% of the natives died from European diseases before they had a chance to oppose the invaders. This was purely accidental! 300 years before germ theory, no one knew how and why this happened, but in the end conquering nations that were mostly dead already isn't that hard.
Of course, the conquistadores were incredibly cruel by modern standards, as were the natives. But that's not why they won.
not only horrific but the biggest hollocaust in the entire human history, with around 34 million people killed from 1500 up to 2025
with that said, people romanticize them too much. canibalism, war and also a (probably) big impact in one of the most rich ecosystems of Earth: the Amazon was ripped with their practices of burning stuff and planting dominant species among the forest that reduced for sure the amount of biodiversity in their +15,000 years of existence there. tho not defending EU ppl ripping out their forest till the border of rivers
Does this number include deaths due to introduced diseases?
The continued belittling of indigenous forestry practices contributes to out of control wildfires.
This implies that the biodiversity is a result of (or, at the very least, supported by) the indigenous practices, which is a far cry from your claim that biodiversity suffered from those practices.
i still think despite their impact, they were exemplar compared to what we had on the rest of the world (but i never studied Asia). but it's not like they were magicians that had no impact on anything and lived in complete synergy with nature by increasing biodiversity. and if you think cultivating biological dominant species across a forest has no impact i suggest you to research on the many examples of alien flora effects on various ecosystem on modernity or even try to throw some Hawaiian Baby Woodrose somewhere out their native land to check how much these species take over anothers. they probably killed and reduced species expression to settle themselves there. but cest la vie. living has an impact after all
Most historians pinpoint it at around 5-15 million. Communist Russia (3-20 million) and Communist China (15-40 million) both killed more.
i went to check on the doc. i watched (https://youtu.be/laW_Yf6N4kU?si=vi3KY9prfdqfNybC&t=1176) and i have to make a correction: they point out that the majority of the 80 million people living on America were killed on the first 100 years of colonization. they do talk impartially as it being one of the biggest holocaust known to the humanity. i don't agree on excluding death numbers from disease. it wasn't something like the Black Death (25 million) where effected countries weren't in war, nor they were also being blown out of existence by superior (war) technology
and 80 million aren't even the highest estimations historians suggest [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_the_Indi... ¶ some historians point up to 100 million people killed
One could see the mass appeal of a faraway king who promises three square meals, a decent lodging, a reasonable legal system, and preaches unconditional brotherly love, to every human being. And even if some of those things are only true some of the time, when taken in aggregate, this led to these people winning just often enough that the scales tipped in their favor over time.
And while most non-Western civilizations were certainly superior over certain time periods in some aspect, those who ended up not being conquered, either had constant contact with the West to know what to expect, or recognized their own shortcomings and rapidly endeavored to remedy them.
I don't think military conquest of a faraway land can be maintained without the consent of the populance, certainly not as a profitable endeavor, and that usually involves offering something to the populance they couldn't get otherwise.
There are plenty of examples of people subjugated for centuries who have kept their religion, customs and identity, likewise most of the jihadists who shout 'Death To America!' probably still like Star Wars.
If being good at running a civilisation means being good at making war and enslaving, then we objectivly were better, as we conquered and they lost.
But if civilized means being in higher spirit and have a more happy population, then the proof needs to be different.
In a couple hundred years these populations in many ways were quite indistinguishable from their conquerors, as they adopted their customs and ways of running society.
Many of these conqured peoples while becoming Westernized culturally, didn't escape the yoke of their conquerors until much later.
This process was repeated in Latin America.
I know there are a lot of politically motivated people are interested in simple stories of the virtuous locals versus the evil West, but the same story played out pretty much everywhere over different continents and timeframes.
I'm not sure if Romes conquest of the Gauls was any less brutal than the Spanish conquest of Mexico.
The Mayan and the Aztecs were roughly at a similar level of development as ancient Sumer or Babylon: good agricultural practices, irrigation, astronomy, elaborated culture, rich mythologies, very basic metallurgy, early state structures, etc.
Sumer and Babylon were great civilisations whose legacy can still be traced today. The same is true for the Maya and the Aztec. Had you visited any of them in their prime, you would have been awed by their skill and sophistication.
And yet, think of everything that happened in Eurasia between Hammurabi and Columbus, and you will get a sense of how wide the gap was when the two worlds met.
The Aztecs are noteworthy because of having an empire to conquer.
I am not suggesting that their civilizations did not have artistic or cultural merit, but I think even in a fictional alternate history where the Spanish decided to peacefully trade with Montezuma, I bet a couple hundred years later these people would've had mechanical looms and walked around in tailored suits just the same as their European counterparts.
Not to speak of an what an empire gaing such powerful technologies and ideas about running society would've done to its neighbors.
Unfortunately, what actually happened was brutal invasion and dehumanization.
"We are higher developed than this other group, therefore we have the right to subjugate them, take all their resources, enslave them and even kill them" was essentially the classic justification of colonialism for a long time.
The 2014 Ukraine invasion worked because the nation was splintered and demoralized, and the Russians could just roll in and take what tey wanted. The 2022 didn't because the Ukrainians were unified and willing to fight, despite a much higher degree of military readiness on the Russian side.
But going back, over time, the native population became serfs, picked up the language, culture, religion of their conquerors, they even intermarried to a significant degree. Latin America is full of people with both European and native ancestry to some degree.
Yes they were serfs, but so were most European peasants at that time.
And only a couple hundred years later, as the Spanish empire collapsed, these people, culturally Westernized at this point, threw off the yoke and formed their independent countries, with Mexico starting it's own empire.
I just cannot imagine a credible scenario in which even if Western colonial powers didn't manage to conquer the territory of Mexico, they wouldn't have been Westernized to a significant degree, by the Aztec rulers themselves starting a Meiji style modernization.
You aren't entertaining, you aren't insightful, you aren't even that creative. You aren't an original source on anything, you're just regurgitating UFO memes that went stale 20 years ago and vague woo-woo shit that only seems profound to the utterly ignorant.
I won't engage with you again.
Amazing to think at the very moment Europe was entering the Dark Ages, the Vikings were starting to raid, and Muhammad was having his visions, this civilization had built something comparable to what the Roman Empire had done in italy..
We haven't left anyone something. It could very well be that we climbed the ladder and burned it behind us.
The "dark ages" never happened the way it is imagined in pop-culture. There was a genuine decline at the fringes, which includes Britain which maybe why it was so ingrained in Anglophone culture, but also history written by imperialists like Gibbon who thought the decline of Empires an intrinsically bad and regressive thing.
The Eastern Roman Empire went on, the western broke up into successor states. Some things got worse, some things got better, there was progress made (especially for women and people at the bottom like slaves), and the early medieval period laid the foundations for progress later on.
> Muhammad was having his visions
Is that a bad thing? I know less about the history of that region than some others, but I think you need to look at prior conditions in places such as the Arabian peninsula to assess that.
I think they were just setting the Age of Man here. Time framing it in history so others would know when we are talking about. It's fine.
They definitely did. Books stopped being published, even the slightest deviation from the ideas of an all-powerful church and nobility would be progressively punished by censors, mutilation, or execution, and basic reasoning skills atrophied in service of weird nonsense theological arguments that make current postmodern academic culture look reasonable.
We don't know what normal people were doing, technology advanced at a snail's pace, we don't even know where many cities and towns were located. We know far more about the Romans and the Greeks than we know about some parts of Dark Age Europe. We're very lucky that some sense of religious nostalgia for the Classical age (from the fact that the Christian religion was an outgrowth of the late Roman state) kept them from losing or destroying all of the knowledge and documents of antiquity.
The Western world was saved from 1000 years of stupidity by the Protestants. It wasn't that they were geniuses, but that they thought that there was some value to the individual other than service to the imbred descendants of Roman generals. This reinvented the concepts of philosophical disagreement and intellectual productivity in Europe.
The "there was no Dark Ages" revision is from people who would love to take us back to the Dark Ages. Nostalgic for the rule of elites, unfettered by the opinions of a population kept uneducated and on the edge of starvation. People associate the slaver culture of the US South with hillbillies, but they associated themselves, with their elaborate gowns and ballrooms, with a renewal of European culture, with the slaves playing the part of the serfs.
Catholicism is the only reason we didn't reach our current level of technical and intellectual development 1000 years ago. Somehow, with their weakness, Catholics have generally become far more intellectually sound than the psychopathic libertarian elites that own us now. Their nihilism and narcissism will end up giving us another 1000 years of darkness.
We've gone from a history described entirely in terms of nobles arguing with and sleeping with each other to a present entirely described in terms of oligarchs arguing with and sleeping with each other. The last few hundred years will one day probably be described as the "Popular Period." Historians will describe it as the short span of history in which it is trivially easy to find the price of a loaf of bread, or the rules of card games. "At least 20% of the commercial writings from that period have survived."
Medieval Christian societies were by and large certainly less brutal than ancient Greek and Roman states which were based on conquest and subjugation and extreme exploitation of slave labour. While admittedly some things did regress we have to thank Christianity for introducing the concept of universal human right (at least on a basic level) which is not something that existed in any shape or form back in e.g. 0 AD.
> basic reasoning skills atrophied in service of weird nonsense theological arguments
Scientific method was pretty much invented in Christian universities. Of course the model they were operating on was "somewhat" flawed but the methods they invented to reason about it were certainly a stepping stone to
> Greeks than we know about some parts of Dark Age Europe
Yes there was an ~200-300 year gap.
> 1000 years of stupidity by the Protestants
The same people who brought back witching burning (coincidentally a wide spread ancient Roman practice which the church tried to stamp out with various degrees of effort and success during most of the early to high middle ages)?
> Catholicism is the only reason we didn't reach our current level of technical and intellectual development 1000 years ago.
lol... let's not get silly. Just how much technological progress do you think there was between e.g. ~ 300 BC and 400 AD? It was clearly much less rapid than e.g. between 1000 and 1400 AD.
Seems like it was more complex than that :
> Authors have debated whether witch trials were more intense in Catholic or Protestant regions; however, the intensity had not so much to do with Catholicism or Protestantism, as both regions experienced a varied intensity of witchcraft persecutions.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_trials_in_the_early_mode...
Then :
> The Witch Trials of Trier took place in the independent Catholic diocese of Trier in the Holy Roman Empire in present day Germany ... Between 1587 and 1593, 368 people were burned alive for sorcery in twenty-two villages, and in 1588, two villages were left with only one female inhabitant in each
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trier_witch_trials
However:
> The son of a Puritan minister, Hopkins began his career as a witch-finder in March 1644 and lasted until his retirement in 1647. Hopkins and his colleague John Stearne sent more accused people to be hanged for witchcraft than all the other witch-hunters in England of the previous 160 years From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Hopkins
Note that in Scotland and England, witches were hanged, not burned.
>Catholics have generally become far more intellectually sound than the psychopathic libertarian elites that own us now. Their nihilism and narcissism will end up giving us another 1000 years of darkness.
Yeah, unlike the champions on killing 'witches', you know, the Germanic protestants.
Meanwhile, the Spanish Inquisition was depicted as brutal, but, trust me, you would prefer to be trialed by them that some bastard ruthless lord or worse, the villagers being more brutal than the Church itself.
Read about Alphonse X and the Book of Games. A book from the 13th century, Middle Ages, and yet more knowledgeable than the 90% of the self-called "Enlightened" Anglo-Saxon/Germanic protestants reinventing the wheel after the School of Salamanca from similar origins.
Humanism? Trades and agreements between nations? Modern Economics on value and production? It's all there from that School in Castille.