A popular starting point of European colonialism is 1415, the conquest of Ceuta. If you make a huge change like “no colonialism” from that point onward, do you think after 500 years there would still arise a recognizable Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia? There’s no way. Everything would be different. (And not like South America either, because South America was shaped by colonialism entirely.)
Heck, I might even be ok with Europe being expansionist! Just do it like most empires, conquer and rule. The amount of extermination and enslavement that Europeans did is abnormal even for empires, it’s completely above and beyond. Clearing entire continents would make even Mongols go WTF.
Could a “conquer and rule” empire lead to widespread progress? Go look at a Roman aqueduct, they’re all over Europe and they’re still standing now. Could it create a big alliance? Yes. Could everything be fine? Yes. I’m not saying it would. But I also see no reason why the genocides were necessary.
A popular starting point of European colonialism is 1415, the conquest of Ceuta. If you make a huge change like “no colonialism” from that point onward, do you think after 500 years there would still arise a recognizable Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia? There’s no way. Everything would be different. (And not like South America either, because South America was shaped by colonialism entirely.)
Yep, totally. But clearly this is a fully general counter-argument against any intervention far back in time, and I think the best approximation we have for what good things were the result of the colonialist strategy were the good things that did materialize as a result of the colonialist strategy. Of course, feel free to make arguments that some thing was just a stroke of luck, or an outlier, or something like that, but I currently think arguing from real history is the best we have here.
Heck, I might even be ok with Europe being expansionist! Just do it like most empires, conquer and rule. The amount of extermination and enslavement that Europeans did is abnormal even for empires, it’s completely above and beyond. Clearing entire continents would make even Mongols go WTF.
I feel like you are not really modeling the tradeoffs here. Also, I somewhat object to this characterization. Yes, of course no previous government was capable of clearing entire continents, but rates of enslavement and killing of foreign adversaries were pretty comparable in past conquests when similarly divergent populations came into conflict. Some examples from Claude:
Ancient conquest episodes — very high short-term extraction
Roman conquests produced some extraordinary single-event enslavement rates:
Epirus, 167 BCE: After defeating Macedon, Rome sacked 70 cities in Epirus and enslaved roughly 150,000 people — a substantial fraction (plausibly a third to a half) of the region’s population in a single campaign.
Carthage, 146 BCE: The city had perhaps 200,000-500,000 inhabitants before the siege. Most died; the roughly 50,000 survivors were enslaved. Extraction rate for the city: essentially 100% of survivors.
Jerusalem, 70 CE: Josephus claims 97,000 enslaved after the siege (his numbers are probably inflated but directionally indicative). The city and surrounding Judean population was devastated.
Gaul (58-50 BCE): Caesar’s own writings claim he enslaved a million Gauls and killed another million, out of a population perhaps 5-8 million. If even partly accurate, that’s 10-20% of the entire Gallic population enslaved over roughly a decade.
The pattern: when a city resisted and was taken by storm, Roman convention allowed enslaving essentially all survivors. Cities that surrendered often kept their freedom. So extraction rates were bimodal — near 0% or near 100% depending on outcome.
Greek city-state conflicts
Melos, 416 BCE: Athens killed all adult men and enslaved all women and children — the entire surviving population.
Thebes, 335 BCE: Alexander destroyed the city and enslaved roughly 30,000 survivors.
Again, when the ancient “sack” convention activated, extraction approached totality for that specific community.
Mongol conquests (13th c.)
The Mongols killed more than they enslaved, but extraction rates from conquered cities were catastrophic. Cities like Merv, Nishapur, and Baghdad saw population losses of 50-90% through killing, enslavement, and flight combined. Skilled craftsmen were systematically enslaved and relocated — near-100% extraction of specific skilled subpopulations.
Ottoman devşirme and slave raids
The Crimean Tatar slave raids into Eastern Europe (15th-18th c.) captured roughly 1-2 million Slavs. For specific border regions of Ukraine and Russia in bad decades, this meant losing several percent of population per decade — sustained demographic pressure, though extraction rates per raid from a given village could approach 100% when a settlement was hit.
The scale of most of these is of course much lower, and much of the population was not located in the city states that were sacked, so there are really substantial differences here, but still, in various conflicts past conquests had similarly if not more intense rates of displacement and enslavement.
I think the greatest tragedy throughout all of this was the introduction of foreign diseases, which to my current understand was responsible for >90% of the fatalities. But that tragedy was no ones fault in particular, and I don’t think there was any realistic way to prevent this.
And then the resulting populations practically had no shot of meaningfully assimilating into something like a Pax Romana. The cultural and language and operational differences between the American settlers and the native Americans were vastly greater than any conflict that we are familiar with from the ancient world (most similar maybe to the situation that the Mongol horde faced, which also had no chance of meaningfully establishing dominion over the area of its conquest and so largely just killed and raided, IIRC resulting in ~10% of the human population dying at the time).
And again, none of this excuses the terrible atrocities committed. I am still strongly against them and condemn them and there is a decent chance if I was transported back into that time with my current moral opinions I would spend my life trying to stop these things. I am just arguing that these were not a moral hole so big that you can’t dig yourself out from them, and that a fraction of them (far from all) were the costs of doing business and conquest. I agree that in as much something like a Pax Romana conquest of the Americas was feasible, it would have been much better.
European colonialism often involved clearing a place of its previous inhabitants and resettling it, which is meaningfully different and worse than the behavior of most empires. Especially given the scale.
For purposes of building a Pax, this was not necessary. The Romans managed fine, they had Africans and Germans in the same empire, and a variety of client states as well. And the French got along fine with Native Americans when they wanted to. The rhetoric about “populations that can’t meaningfully assimilate”, also known as the rhetoric about “savages”, is always a lie. It’s downstream of the desire to remove a population and settle the place yourself.
European colonialism often involved clearing a place of its previous inhabitants and resettling it
That’s how the English often proceeded in North America (and Australia, for that matter), but it’s not nearly so accurate a description of how the Spanish did things. Conquistadors aimed more to make themselves lords over an enslaved/enserfed native population, not to wipe them out and replace them with Spanish immigrants.
And there was a lively debate within Catholic Spain about whether it was theologically and philosophically correct to conquer native populations. (Do Christians have an obligation to forcibly stop pagans from committing atrocities like human sacrifice upon one another? Are the pagans “natural slaves” incapable of developing morality on their own? Or must we respect that they have rational souls and can be converted and assimilated through cultural manipulation?)
Yeah, I mentioned enslavement in previous comments. Since Oliver is mostly interested in the part about North America, we can just talk about extermination because that’s what happened there.
A popular starting point of European colonialism is 1415, the conquest of Ceuta. If you make a huge change like “no colonialism” from that point onward, do you think after 500 years there would still arise a recognizable Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia? There’s no way. Everything would be different. (And not like South America either, because South America was shaped by colonialism entirely.)
Heck, I might even be ok with Europe being expansionist! Just do it like most empires, conquer and rule. The amount of extermination and enslavement that Europeans did is abnormal even for empires, it’s completely above and beyond. Clearing entire continents would make even Mongols go WTF.
Could a “conquer and rule” empire lead to widespread progress? Go look at a Roman aqueduct, they’re all over Europe and they’re still standing now. Could it create a big alliance? Yes. Could everything be fine? Yes. I’m not saying it would. But I also see no reason why the genocides were necessary.
Yep, totally. But clearly this is a fully general counter-argument against any intervention far back in time, and I think the best approximation we have for what good things were the result of the colonialist strategy were the good things that did materialize as a result of the colonialist strategy. Of course, feel free to make arguments that some thing was just a stroke of luck, or an outlier, or something like that, but I currently think arguing from real history is the best we have here.
I feel like you are not really modeling the tradeoffs here. Also, I somewhat object to this characterization. Yes, of course no previous government was capable of clearing entire continents, but rates of enslavement and killing of foreign adversaries were pretty comparable in past conquests when similarly divergent populations came into conflict. Some examples from Claude:
The scale of most of these is of course much lower, and much of the population was not located in the city states that were sacked, so there are really substantial differences here, but still, in various conflicts past conquests had similarly if not more intense rates of displacement and enslavement.
I think the greatest tragedy throughout all of this was the introduction of foreign diseases, which to my current understand was responsible for >90% of the fatalities. But that tragedy was no ones fault in particular, and I don’t think there was any realistic way to prevent this.
And then the resulting populations practically had no shot of meaningfully assimilating into something like a Pax Romana. The cultural and language and operational differences between the American settlers and the native Americans were vastly greater than any conflict that we are familiar with from the ancient world (most similar maybe to the situation that the Mongol horde faced, which also had no chance of meaningfully establishing dominion over the area of its conquest and so largely just killed and raided, IIRC resulting in ~10% of the human population dying at the time).
And again, none of this excuses the terrible atrocities committed. I am still strongly against them and condemn them and there is a decent chance if I was transported back into that time with my current moral opinions I would spend my life trying to stop these things. I am just arguing that these were not a moral hole so big that you can’t dig yourself out from them, and that a fraction of them (far from all) were the costs of doing business and conquest. I agree that in as much something like a Pax Romana conquest of the Americas was feasible, it would have been much better.
European colonialism often involved clearing a place of its previous inhabitants and resettling it, which is meaningfully different and worse than the behavior of most empires. Especially given the scale.
For purposes of building a Pax, this was not necessary. The Romans managed fine, they had Africans and Germans in the same empire, and a variety of client states as well. And the French got along fine with Native Americans when they wanted to. The rhetoric about “populations that can’t meaningfully assimilate”, also known as the rhetoric about “savages”, is always a lie. It’s downstream of the desire to remove a population and settle the place yourself.
That’s how the English often proceeded in North America (and Australia, for that matter), but it’s not nearly so accurate a description of how the Spanish did things. Conquistadors aimed more to make themselves lords over an enslaved/enserfed native population, not to wipe them out and replace them with Spanish immigrants.
And there was a lively debate within Catholic Spain about whether it was theologically and philosophically correct to conquer native populations. (Do Christians have an obligation to forcibly stop pagans from committing atrocities like human sacrifice upon one another? Are the pagans “natural slaves” incapable of developing morality on their own? Or must we respect that they have rational souls and can be converted and assimilated through cultural manipulation?)
Yeah, I mentioned enslavement in previous comments. Since Oliver is mostly interested in the part about North America, we can just talk about extermination because that’s what happened there.