The only north American ruined cities I can think of are some Puebloan sites in the southwest. Aside from that, there's Cahokia, but if I understand it correctly Cahokia is "just" a series of mounds with pieces of buried physical culture rather than structures, monuments and temples.
I am personally familiar with the classic Mediterranean and have taken a few undergraduate courses on the archaeology of Anatolia and the Near East. While I do know that metallurgy was mostly unknown to the Native Americans (correct me if I'm wrong) we still have lots of paleolithic city ruins in the near east like Gobekli Tepe.
In a kind of narrative sense, why did 17th century America look more like "unspoiled wilderness" than "post apocalyptic landscape" despite the continent relatively recently having a large population?
In US schools (at least when I attended), a lot is taught about English colonization, and some about Spanish exploration (though not as much about Spanish colonization). Yet I know there were also French, Portuguese, and Russian efforts. What kinds of policies characterized the approaches these and other powers took there?
Im just curious what the process was if you decided to leave your home in Britain and start a new life in The Americas. I was wondering primarily about the span of time immediately following the American Revolutionary War. Was it even possible to leave the British empire for a newly independent country?
Could it be that they quite simply couldn't even with all of their military might because contrary to the white supremacist "Dindus never haz a builded a civilisation!!" myth that Africans could've successfully beaten back every attack that whites launched against them due to being a military force to be reckoned with for centuries if not millenia before even knowing that people devoid of melanin exist and thus Albinoids decided to play it safe and trade with them for around 300 years before even trying to colonize the continent? I've heard this statement repeated a lot by historical scholars and I can understand why they'd say that. The "discovery" that there was a landmass equal to the whole of North America south of The Sahara Desert by Europeans in the 16th Century was just as big of a mindfuck to them as Columbus "discovering" what he thought was India, but whites only tried to launch a full on invasion of Africa at around the beginning of the 20th Century. What took them so long? Why didn't they wage an all out genocide on Black Africans and send boatloads of their peasant immigrants to repopulate the continent like they did in both North and South America including The Caribbean? Obviously this type of moral bankruptcy wasn't beneath the European at this point in history as witnessed first hand by Native-Americans both south and north of the equator so what stopped them from trying the same shit with us in Africa?
What do y'all think about this theory?
Guys, you all know that Latin America speaks generally Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese. I wonder the old native language of locals before assimilation. What were used to be spoken before Spanish and Portuguese.
While I'm aware that European influences have survived decolonization in many parts of Africa, it's clear that the native ethnic groups retained far more of their culture and their language than their counterparts in the Americas. Africa is not a "Europeanized" continent, whereas every country in the Americas speaks either English, Spanish, or Portugese as their primary language. I suppose one exception to this would be South Africa. I'd also be interested to know why it, specifically, has retained so much European influence.
The First wave of European colonization began with Castilian Conquest of the Canary Islands, and primarily involved the European colonization of the Americas, though it also included the establishment of European colonies in India and in Maritime Southeast Asia. During this period, European interests in Africa primarily focused on the establishment of trading posts there, particularly for the African slave trade.The wave ended with British annexation of Kingdom of Kandy in 1815 and founding of colony of Singapore in 1819.
The reason I ask this question is because I was recently told that:
- The reason so many British, Irish, German, Italian and Eastern European people moved to places like Australia, Brazil, Argentina, the USA and Canada was because the peasants there lived in utter misery and they left because they had nothing left to lose. Hence why the Indigenous people in these countries are a marginalised community and are now a tiny part of their population.
- The reason why some Spanish colonies like Peru, Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador and Bolivia still have majority-indigenous populations is because the average Spanish peasant had a slightly better standard of living, and were therefore not desperate to leave. Hence why these countries still have a culture mainly based around their Indigenous peoples.
- The reason why Dutch colonies either got conquered into other nations' colonies, or became reliant on the loyalty of a majority-indigenous population in the case of Indonesia, is because the Dutch peasants also enjoyed a slightly better standard of living. The Dutch colonists were traders, not peasants fleeing misery.
- French colonies such as Quebec also got conquered into other nations' colonies because French colonists were few in number because French peasants weren't fleeing misery. There were also French protestants settling the New World to escape persecution in France, but they were either killed by other European settlers or simply moved to the protestant colonies of Britain.
Obvious
... keep reading on reddit ➡In this scenario, Africa would basically have kept all of her natural resources and African-Americans would never have been brought en masse to the Americas.
Did the medieval/early modern Muslim kingdoms in Nigeria and Mali know about the Muslim states in Sudan, Somalia, and the Swahili coast? Was horizontal land travel possible in Saharan Africa and the wetter regions to the south?
How many centuries would it take, estimated, for their society to evolve imperialism, assuming they did?
I'm trying to set up a table top game that is inspired by my rather limited understanding of that time in history (the players basically got a jump on colonization before any of the power players).
I want to know about major themes and events in that part of history, as well as anything about the cultures of the natives. My own education in the subject is from a middle school class almost a decade ago and I'm struggling to find resources online, although that is mostly due to the fact that I'm not sure how to search for things like that. Any recommendations for resources to pick through would also be helpful.
Thanks in advance.
This is something I've been wondering for a while. I think that the natives could have made their lands technologically advanced with the materials underground that they would probably find eventually. Any ideas?
I know since Germany wasn’t Germany back then, and rather the HRE, but let’s just say, the emperor at the time (or some loose company like a German version of the Virginia Company) set out into the new world to make a colony for the German people. Where would they have landed, and how would that of affected the political borders at the time? I’m no historian, so maybe something else could of happened in order to make this happen, I don’t know. But let just say this hypothetically happened. What would the above questions look like?
