Yep, the exact counterfactual here is pretty tricky.
I think the trickiest moral part is how you relate in terms of interfacing with the existing legal system and existing property rights.
I think if you try to respect either of these, you are in for a really bad time, and my guess is the default outcome is that the Northern American continent roughly ends up similar to the Southern American continent. I think that would be quite bad! North America really is in a much better place than South America.
And then I also think there is a pretty decent chance that without North America, democracy never actually sweeps the world. Maybe you even get so unlucky that you reverse the industrial revolution (an outcome I don’t consider impossible as things were just brewing around that time), which would of course be maximally catastrophic, though I do think overall unlikely.
Like, the minimum thing that IMO needed to have happened to get good outcomes on the North American continent is for most of the land to be transferred away from native populations and towards the settling nations, and for the legal system of the continent to be replaced by something more like the American legal system (as opposed to whatever patchwork of tribal customs was governing things).
There are some ways this could have happened with very minimal violence. You can imagine buying all the land, but my strong guess is that you would have failed at that and if you had treated the existing population to have property rights over the continent, you would have failed to establish the boundary of an actually new nation. I think the next best choice would have been eminent domain with actually generous compensation, though unfortunately it wasn’t (to my knowledge) actually the case that early settlers, or colonizing nations, were in a good spot to generously compensate the people whose lands they were taking. Colonies generally barely broke even in those early years, and so there wasn’t a lot of surplus to go around.
Ah, ok. My understanding is that the peoples of North America didn’t have a strong sense of land ownership the way Europeans did, it was more “we take care of the land for ourselves and future generations, and the land takes care of us”. I think the peaceful resolution there would have involved a discussion between cultures so they could map and understand each other’s ontologies and ways of thinking. I expect the amount of land the colonists would have wanted to own for their own use would have been trivial for the natives to relinquish at first. And I dunno, if people think charter cities or seasteads or whatnot can have an impact by being an example of better governance --> thriving, why not small colonies with better legal systems? Of course there’s having to, y’know, fight the British. But probably the Native Americans could have helped with that (did help with that, actually? Except mostly on the British side, because they were concerned about colonial expansionism. Imagine a counterfactual where the colonies and the pre-existing population were on good terms, during the American Revolution...)
I certainly think if it had been legally possible at the time to have city-states or charter cities run by the native Americans, that would have been an absolutely amazing outcome.
Unfortunately I think city states and charter cities require really stable government and political borders and this wasn’t feasible at the time. I might be wrong about this. I also don’t think the political theory or political will for this alternative history was there in any meaningful sense (again, I think the closest analog we have is how governance of South America ended up shaking out, though it’s of course not perfect).
Similarly for small states. The US controlling the continent coast-to-coast has been hugely useful for trade and prosperity and governance. I am pretty federalist and think states should have more power, but I don’t think that extends into thinking that multiple nation states on the US continent would have been better (I think South America, and Europe in the 20th century both show different ways of how that would by default go wrong, I think).
Yep, the exact counterfactual here is pretty tricky.
I think the trickiest moral part is how you relate in terms of interfacing with the existing legal system and existing property rights.
I think if you try to respect either of these, you are in for a really bad time, and my guess is the default outcome is that the Northern American continent roughly ends up similar to the Southern American continent. I think that would be quite bad! North America really is in a much better place than South America.
And then I also think there is a pretty decent chance that without North America, democracy never actually sweeps the world. Maybe you even get so unlucky that you reverse the industrial revolution (an outcome I don’t consider impossible as things were just brewing around that time), which would of course be maximally catastrophic, though I do think overall unlikely.
Could you elaborate a bit? This part is not clear to me, but seems quite important.
Like, the minimum thing that IMO needed to have happened to get good outcomes on the North American continent is for most of the land to be transferred away from native populations and towards the settling nations, and for the legal system of the continent to be replaced by something more like the American legal system (as opposed to whatever patchwork of tribal customs was governing things).
There are some ways this could have happened with very minimal violence. You can imagine buying all the land, but my strong guess is that you would have failed at that and if you had treated the existing population to have property rights over the continent, you would have failed to establish the boundary of an actually new nation. I think the next best choice would have been eminent domain with actually generous compensation, though unfortunately it wasn’t (to my knowledge) actually the case that early settlers, or colonizing nations, were in a good spot to generously compensate the people whose lands they were taking. Colonies generally barely broke even in those early years, and so there wasn’t a lot of surplus to go around.
Ah, ok. My understanding is that the peoples of North America didn’t have a strong sense of land ownership the way Europeans did, it was more “we take care of the land for ourselves and future generations, and the land takes care of us”. I think the peaceful resolution there would have involved a discussion between cultures so they could map and understand each other’s ontologies and ways of thinking. I expect the amount of land the colonists would have wanted to own for their own use would have been trivial for the natives to relinquish at first. And I dunno, if people think charter cities or seasteads or whatnot can have an impact by being an example of better governance --> thriving, why not small colonies with better legal systems? Of course there’s having to, y’know, fight the British. But probably the Native Americans could have helped with that (did help with that, actually? Except mostly on the British side, because they were concerned about colonial expansionism. Imagine a counterfactual where the colonies and the pre-existing population were on good terms, during the American Revolution...)
I certainly think if it had been legally possible at the time to have city-states or charter cities run by the native Americans, that would have been an absolutely amazing outcome.
Unfortunately I think city states and charter cities require really stable government and political borders and this wasn’t feasible at the time. I might be wrong about this. I also don’t think the political theory or political will for this alternative history was there in any meaningful sense (again, I think the closest analog we have is how governance of South America ended up shaking out, though it’s of course not perfect).
Similarly for small states. The US controlling the continent coast-to-coast has been hugely useful for trade and prosperity and governance. I am pretty federalist and think states should have more power, but I don’t think that extends into thinking that multiple nation states on the US continent would have been better (I think South America, and Europe in the 20th century both show different ways of how that would by default go wrong, I think).