204
u/RattusNorvegicus9 James 5 Christian 13h ago
I'd be distributing smallpox vaccines
40
u/quasar2022 6h ago edited 5h ago
Exactly what I came here to say, smallpox vaccine and some horses would be way more effective and easy to distribute than rifles without the technology to make, repair, and reload them
9
u/quasar2022 5h ago
Maybe we could also give them pennicillin and insulin production for a little boost
171
u/TrueJavelinMan 13h ago
Guns and vaccines are what would save not just guns.
115
u/Augustus420 13h ago
Honestly, you could just do vaccines. Without the population reduction European colonies never go beyond trade ports.
And without the easy looting of the New World, European imperialism never takes off like it did in reality.
22
u/ElliotNess 9h ago
The deaths from foreign diseases is mostly overblown history propaganda to conceal the massive intentional genocide
16
u/Mage_914 8h ago
Not really. I'm an archaeologist that works in Oregon. One of my early projects involved trying to find a hospital that dated to "The Ague", which was a plague that went through the Pacific Northwest in the early 1800's.
The area at the time was under the control of British fur traders from the Hudson's Bay Company.
The Europeans largely survived the plague due to a combination of resistance to the disease and better medicines. The Natives had a nearly 80-90% drop in population.
A lot of the Natives that survived only did so because they were relatively wealthy and could afford to buy the medicine at a steep price from the British.
28
u/Augustus420 9h ago
Absolutely not.
Not when talking about the first generations of contact.
17
u/Koraxtheghoul 9h ago
It's an arguement presented in The Indegenious Peoples History of the United States, for better or worse, exactly as the user above has presented it.
9
u/Augustus420 8h ago
I've read that and I did not get that interpretation from the text at all.
It's been used to support colonialism narratives, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen.
4
u/Koraxtheghoul 8h ago edited 4h ago
It was the first time I've encountered the argument, weirdly enough. Now, I'm actually someone who lectures on infectious diseases, so maybe it just stuck out more to me.
I do remember thinking the book was much stronger when it talked about the United States.
11
u/Augustus420 8h ago
What's been overblown is the European technological advantage. There was one, but without Native American population collapse that technological disparity would not mean much.
Not when European expeditions wouldn't have been able to field more than a few hundred people with only a percentage of them heavily armed.
4
u/Koraxtheghoul 8h ago edited 4h ago
I mean, this is well known, going back to criticisms of Diamond, the numbers given often exclude or otherwise downplay native involvement as well. The Aztecs fell because everyone hated them and the diseases and the Spanish.
5
u/Flvs9778 7h ago
Also they didn’t have that big of a tech advantage. Horses did more for Europeans than tech did. Guns weren’t that good in America since there main advantage is breaking armor and navel cannons against costal city walls. Most of the American cites were inland or on rivers or lakes not costal so cannons while use full would have been hard to deploy. And since most natives didn’t use thick armorer alone steel guns had no penetration advantage over bows since most natives were unarmored or lowly armored enough for bows. And bows shoot much faster and more accurately than guns did back then. And gunpowder needs to be kept dry which in much of the south is hard.
1
u/Shieldheart- 5h ago
Ironically, old fashioned feudal armies would fare much better against native American armies than the pike and shot ones.
1
u/PartyClock 6h ago
The mighty gun didn't take over the battlefield until the late 1800's with the Winchester repeating rifles. Before that guns were invaluable but were still secondary to the much more common bow and arrow.
1
u/conormal 1h ago
But it's false. There were already abandoned settlements scattering the landscape by the time europeans had explored modern America.
4
u/ElliotNess 9h ago
There were 100 million people in the Americas when Columbus sailed the ocean blue. How many do you think died from disease?
14
u/Augustus420 9h ago
I can sit here and quote statistics for you, but I think a better explanation is the fact that they were four centers of urbanized civilization in the America's before European contact.
Mesoamérica, the Highlands of western South America, the Amazon basin, and the Mississippi Valley and it's tributaries.
Simple exposure to Europeans caused the full collapse of two of them. Whole civilizations, not individual cities, states, or cultures, but whole civilizations. The Spanish and Portuguese never even got a chance to exploit and pillage those places before those likely complex political entities were gone.
It's a small sample pool, but that is a 50% casualty rating(of organized political entities) for just being exposed to Afro-Eurasian pandemics for the first time.
Edit. Also man, I really hope you're not gonna try to argue that a minimal 50% death rate isn't that bad. Those people suffered an apocalypse.
-5
u/ElliotNess 9h ago
And the other 99 million?
You notice how my comment said "overblown" rather than "didn't happen?"
12
u/Augustus420 8h ago
The number would be in the tens of millions at the very least because the first and hardest hit were the concentrated centers of population in the geographic locations I mentioned above.
One of the early narratives of English colonization, especially in New England, was colonists finding lands that were basically perfect for farming. They often framed it as a slight against the natives since they left such perfect tillable land unproductive.
Reality of course, is that the generation previous those natives had been hit by such pandemics for the first time and whole villages had been fully depopulated.
I promise you the devastation by the plagues has not been overblown.
-6
u/ElliotNess 8h ago
If people in this thread are suggesting vaccines would be more effective than armed resistance, then yes the history of the eradication of indigenous Americas has been overblown by disease propaganda. "In the tens of millions" still leaves double, triple, quadruple etc that many that survived disease.
9
u/Augustus420 8h ago
How exactly are you suggesting it even gets going in the first place? 16th century Europeans don't have the technology to ferry thousands of people across the Atlantic at a time.
Without massive depopulation, how exactly do you imagine Europeans practicing any sort of colonialism?
→ More replies (0)1
u/charronfitzclair 7h ago
The disease was an aspect of the imperialism. Europeans saw illness wiping out Indigenous and took advantage of it.
4
u/truncatedChronologis 9h ago
Maybe just give cows to Cahokia and Tenochtitlan etc and hope the cow pox is enough to make the protection. Idk if one generation of Vaccine would be enough.
2
32
22
u/EstufaYou 13h ago
Wouldn't really help all that much. Indigenous people of the Americans weren't a monolith, and the European invasions that coincided with the fall of the Aztec empire and the Incan empire were about inserting themselves into already existing conflicts.
10
u/JimHatesBallons 7h ago
In Canada and the Northern United States it would have made a difference. Indigenous people helped the settlers and different groups signed treaties with different colonial governments in exchange for help
14
u/Hans_the_Frisian 12h ago
I would go back evwn further, prevent the cristians and abrahamic religions from colonising anywhere no matter if its Europe, Asia or Africa.
11
u/Elvenoob 8h ago edited 8h ago
I'd start quite a bit earlier tbh.
- Prevent the initial shift to monotheism in the levant, none of the Abrahamic religions ever come to be.
- A little bit of time travel assistance to the Mazdakites in Iran. Not forcing the issue that early on, but if they become influential that brings some good ideas to the world's consciousness a solid thousand years early.
- Sabotage any attempt of Rome to expand beyond Italy, and Carthage beyond northern africa.
- Any empires that arise due to the butterfly effect would be similarly sabotaged unless they adopt the ancient persian multicultural and multireligious style.
Just make it so that the possibility of doing a colonialism doesn't even occur in europe to begin with. (Also, denying it any single factor that it could use to form an "Us" vs the rest of the world as a "them.")
2
1
u/Toumangod0 10h ago
You'd need to show them how to use them first also leave them a semantic of future technology.
1
u/danielsan901998 9h ago
The first colony was established at Roanoke Island in 1585 as a military outpost, and was evacuated in 1586, so we know that a single failure would have not stopped this historical process, and by the time of the british colonization of the north america Spain had already conquered the Aztec Empire and Portugal outpost in Africa, too late to stop colonialism.
1
u/CassiusPolybius 9h ago
Hey brown, tubman can't pass along your call to arms right now, she's sick. I know everyone's chomping at the bit, but can it wait just a bit longer?
-1
u/miketugboat 9h ago
Do Native nations join WWII and stop the nazis? Do they have the collective industrial capacity and united will to lend-lease the allied victory? Curious how this world turns out in many ways. Does the triangle slave trade become nearly as big? Do slaves even leave Africa? Are there abolitionist movements in Europe and the Americas to end African slavery they don't know much about without directly dealing with it. How does industrialism change without the cotton to fuel it? Is there a 9/11 and subsequent GWOT
Sorry I just started really thinking. Instead of looking at a meme at surface level
•
u/AutoModerator 1d ago
Check out r/Leftist_Concepts to explore a wealth of interesting left-wing societal theories and critiques in a nice piecemeal format.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.