Re: Brithenig/Aelyan North America (was: Re: Languages in theBrithenig universe)

John Cowan wrote:

>> But even if that were the case, that doesn't explain everything.  How, for
>> example, did the Europeans prevent the introduction of new diseases from
>> exterminating large numbers of indigenous people?  Or, if there was indeed
>> such extermination *there*, how did the indigenous peoples recover from
>> it sufficiently to establish autonomous states?
>
>The Black Death exterminated 35%+ of the European population, but no countries
>were destroyed as a result.
That's hardly the same thing.  Just some of the differences:

(1)  The death rates among the Native Americans was probably much higher
than among Europeans suffering from the Black Death.  This is just a wild
guess, but the figure 50%-100% (depending on area) rings a bell.  The
Black Death was pretty horrific, but it didn't wipe out entire cities and
tribes.

(2)  The extermination caused by the Black Death was not followed by
intensive colonisation.  If the Black Death had been introduced by, say,
conquering Mongols instead of Italians trading in the Crimea, the nations
of Europe would probably have fared a lot worse.

(3)  Unless you count the Iroquois Nations and other such alliances,
the indigenous peoples north and east of Mexico/Arizona were not
organised into what we would call nations, so any nation-building would
have had to come after massive depopulation rather than before.  Europe,
by contrast, was already beginning to organise into nation-states by
the time they got hit by the Black Death.

Massive extermination due to disease seems to be an inevitable
consequence of large-scale colonisation (Jared Diamond has a lot of
interesting things to say about this in his book "Guns, Germs, and
Steel", which, even if you don't agree with his arguments, should
be required reading for all conculturists).  Thus, it seems to me that
the only way in which the indigenous Americans could have survived
in sufficient numbers to establish nation-states is if European colonisation
had been a *lot* more gradual and a *lot* less fanatical there than here.

Matt.