American Colonies: The Settling of North America

by Alan Taylor

The colonial intermingling of peoples—and of microbes, plants, and animals from different continents—was unparalleled in speed and volume in global history.

Until lumped together in colonial slavery, the African conscripts varied even more widely in their ethnic identities, languages, and cultures. A very partial list of West African peoples includes Ashanti, Fulani, Ibo, Malagasy, Mandingo, and Yoruba. In general, their languages differed from one another more than English did from French or Spanish. Most diverse of all were the so-called Indians. Divided into hundreds of linguistically distinct peoples, the natives did not know that they were a common category until named and treated so by the colonial invaders.

European, African, and Indian—were in flux when they encountered one another in the colonies; in the process of those encounters they defined an array of new identities as Americans.

Unlike the French and the Spanish, the British colonies relied in war primarily on local militias of common people, rather than on professional troops. That increased the political leverage of common men as it involved them in frequent conflicts with Indians and in patrolling the slave population.

In sum, white racial solidarity developed in close tandem with the expansion of liberty among male colonists.

Genetic and skeletal (especially dental) evidence suggests special affinities between Native Americans and the peoples of Siberia.

Through some combination of climatic change and the spread of highly skilled hunters, almost all of the largest mammals rapidly died out in the Americas. The extinctions comprised two-thirds of all New World species that weighed more than one hundred pounds at maturity—including the giant beaver, giant ground sloth, mammoth, mastodon, and horses and camels. It is ironic that horses and camels first evolved in North America and migrated westward into Asia, where they were eventually domesticated, while those that remained in the Americas became extinct.

The native peoples of North America spoke at least 375 distinct languages by 1492.

Cultural differentiation did not mean cultural isolation. Trade networks developed over very long distances. Archaeologists have found that some relatively small and highly valued objects could pass hundreds and even thousands of miles through multiple bands.

Although highly productive, corn rapidly depletes the soil of nutrients, especially nitrogen. Repeated crops in the same fields led to diminishing yields. In the southwest, between 1130 and 1190, an especially prolonged period of drought years exacerbated the subsistence crisis, setting off a chain reaction of crop failure, malnutrition, and violent feuds.

Founded in 1300, Acoma is probably the longest continuously inhabited community within the United States.

Natives regarded the nocturnal dreamworld as fundamentally more real and powerful than their waking hours. They also provoked visions by prolonged fasting and isolation (sometimes aided by ingesting psychotropic plants).

The Christian alienation of spirit from nature rendered it supernaturally safe for Europeans to harvest all the resources that they wanted from nature, for they offended no spirits in doing so. In wild plants and animals, the colonizers simply saw potential commodities: items that could be harvested, processed, and sold to make a profit.

As a result, colonizers regarded as backward and impious any people, like the Indians, who left nature too little altered. By defaulting in their divine duty, such peoples forfeited their title to the earth. They could justly be conquered and dispossessed by Europeans who would exploit lands and animals to their fullest potential.

Spain, Portugal, and France were hybrid economic cultures in which capitalist enterprise remained inhibited by feudal traditions and especially powerful monarchs. By comparison, England and the Netherlands more quickly and more fully developed capitalist societies, in which the means of production—land, labor, and capital—were privately owned, available for sale, and devoted to harvesting or making commodities for sale in pursuit of profit.

Although Christianity was compatible with the emergence of capitalism, that does not mean that they lacked tensions. Indeed, the materialism and individualism encouraged by capitalism profoundly troubled early modern clergymen.

The Iberian reconquista opened the western mouth of the Mediterranean to Christian shipping at the same time that the Turkish conquests tightened Muslim control over the eastern Mediterranean.

Involving bulkier commodities, especially grain, the new routes also demanded ships with larger cargo capacities. The relatively shallow and more protected Mediterranean Sea favored maneuverable vessels with triangular lateen sails, while the longer hauls and stormier waters of the Atlantic Ocean demanded strong and durable ships with square sails.

After 1450 the Portuguese wisely negotiated commercial treaties with African rulers, who permitted the construction of a few small fortified trading posts on the coast. The fortifications served primarily to keep away rival European vessels.

Offering a warmer climate superior to the Mediterranean for the cultivation of sugar, the Madeiras and the Canaries became Europe’s leading suppliers by 1500.

To produce sugar, the colonists developed the plantation mode of production. A plantation was a large tract of privately owned land worked by many slaves to produce a high-value commodity for export to an external market.

At first, most of the slaves were Guanche, but they inconveniently and rapidly died from the new diseases. To replace the dead, the colonists imported Africans to work the sugar plantations. West African societies had long enslaved war captives and convicted criminals for sale to Arab traders, who drove them in caravans across the Sahara to the Mediterranean. This caravan trade was relatively small in scale, with a volume of only about one thousand slaves per year in the early fifteenth century.

By 1500, the Portuguese annually bought about eighteen hundred African slaves, primarily to labor on the Canaries and Madeiras.

In 1487 the Portuguese mariner Bartolomeu Dias discerned how to use the counterclockwise winds of the South Atlantic to get around southern Africa.

In popular histories and films, Columbus appears anachronistically as a modernist, a secular man dedicated to humanism and scientific rationalism, a pioneer who overcame medieval superstition. In fact, he was a devout and militant Catholic who drew upon the Bible for his geographic theories.

Columbus hoped to convert the Asians to Christianity and to recruit their bodies and their wealth to assist Europeans in a final crusade to crush Islam and reclaim Jerusalem. Such a victory would then invite Christ’s return to earth to reign over a millennium of perfect justice and harmony.

What deterred Europeans from sailing due west for Asia was not a fear of sailing off the edge of the world but, instead, their surprisingly accurate understanding that the globe was too large.

Breaking with geographic orthodoxy, Columbus dared the westward trip to Asia because he underestimated the world’s circumference as only 18,000 miles, which placed Japan a mere 3,500 miles west of Europe.

At Hispaniola, Columbus discovered that the Taino Indians had killed the thirty-nine men he had left behind the year before. In the Spanish deaths, Columbus found the pretext for waging a war of conquest.

Columbus’s slaughter and enslavement of Indians troubled the pious Spanish monarchs, who declared in 1500 that the Indians were “free and not subject to servitude.” But Ferdinand and Isabella failed to close the legal loophole exploited by Spanish colonizers. It remained legal to enslave Indians taken in any “just war,” which the colonists characterized as any violence they conducted against resisting natives.

Columbus antagonized most of the colonists, who bristled at his domineering manner and hot temper. As a Genoese upstart, Columbus commanded little respect among the Spanish colonists, especially when he sought to enrich himself by restricting their undisciplined pursuit of easy wealth. Violent mutinies and more violent reprisals by Columbus induced the monarchs to revoke his executive authority in 1500.

Probably two-thirds of the Hispaniola colonists died during the first decade of settlement, 1493–1504. But the natives suffered even more severely, as the colonists shared their diseases and forced the Taino to provide food and labor.

From a population of at least 300,000 in 1492, the Taino declined to about 33,000 by 1510 and to a mere 500 by 1548.

Although not genocidal in intent—for the Spanish preferred to keep the Taino alive and working as tributaries and slaves—the colonization of Hispaniola was genocidal in effect.

Some especially ravaged peoples lost their autonomous identity, as the few survivors joined a neighboring group. Consequently, the Indian nations (“tribes”) of colonial history represent a subset of the many groups that had existed before the great epidemics.

Unwittingly, the Europeans imported those African diseases into the American tropics and subtropics with the slaves brought to work on their plantations. Those African maladies then added to the epidemics that devastated the Native Americans.

Passing from Siberia into North America about twelve thousand years ago, the Paleo-Indians spent many generations in the subarctic, where the long and bitter winters discouraged many pathogenic microbes that thrive in warmer climes. Moreover, the arctic rigors tended quickly to kill humans suffering from debilitating diseases, leaving a healthier population of survivors. And as nomadic hunter-gathering peoples scattered over an immense territory, the Paleo-Indians did not sustain the “crowd diseases” that need a steady succession of hosts.

Three factors helped develop especially powerful pathogens in the Old World. First, long-distance trade and invasions were more routine in Europe and Asia, providing vectors for the exchange and mutation of multiple diseases. In effect, the Old World diseases benefited from a much larger pool of potential hosts.

Second, urbanization was older and more widespread in the Old World than in the New—and especially virulent diseases develop where people live in permanent concentrations.

Cities were fewer in North America, largely restricted to central Mexico, and usually much cleaner than their European counterparts.

Third, the people of Europe, Africa, and Asia (but not the Americas) lived among large numbers of domesticated mammals, including cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, and horses, which share microscopic parasites with humans, encouraging the development of new and especially powerful diseases as viruses shift back and forth between the species.

Colonists interpreted the diseases as sent by their God to punish Indians who resisted conversion to Christianity. Indians blamed the epidemics on sorcery practiced by the newcomers.

Because kinship ties defined native society and culture, the rapid destruction of so many relatives was profoundly disorienting and disruptive. Natives lamented that their guiding elders were all dead “and their wisdom is buried with them.”

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the colonizers did not intentionally disseminate disease. Indeed, they did not yet know how to do so. Especially during the sixteenth century, the colonizers valued Indian bodies and souls even more than they coveted Indian land. They needed Indians as coerced labor to work on mines, plantations, ranches, and farms. And Christian missionaries despaired when diseases killed Indians before they could be baptized. Only later, and almost exclusively in the English colonies, did some colonists cheer epidemics for depopulating the lands that they wanted for settlement.

the European colonizers had expected to live as economic parasites on the labor of many Indians, but the epidemics upset their best-laid plans. Left with large tracts of fertile but depopulated lands, the colonists cast about for a new source of cheap and exploitable labor that was less susceptible to disease. Beginning in 1518 to Hispaniola, the colonizers imported growing numbers of slaves from West Africa.

Prior to 1820, at least two-thirds of the twelve million emigrants from the Old to the New World were enslaved Afr...

The demographic and colonial history of Africa offers an instructive contrast to North America. Despite inferior firepower, until the nineteenth century the Africans more than held their own against European invaders because African numbers remained formidable. Unlike the Native Americans, the Africans did not dwindle from exposure to European diseases, with which they were largely familiar. On the contrary, African tropical diseases killed European newcomers in extraordinary numbers until the development of quinine in the nineteenth century.

Without a demographic advantage, colonial rule proved short-lived as the Africans reclaimed power during the twentieth century.

In 1519, Spanish soldiers marveled that the great Aztec city of Tenochtitlán was much larger and yet far cleaner than anything they had known at home. An expansion of the food supply offers a better explanation for the European growth.

After 1492 the European diet improved, in part from enhanced longdistance transportation for produce and better techniques for rotating and fertilizing traditional grain crops. But above all, the improvement derived from the adoption of new food crops first cultivated in the Americas.