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.
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.