Would New World Polynesians reduce the impact of European diseases?
- Thread starter WryWren
- Start date
Well, anyway I disagree that the survival of the kingdom is what made the difference, when comparing it to say California one might look at the genocide(s) in California but really the reality is that the Californian native population was likely around the same as Hawaii(150k to 700k, I say 200k for Hawaii and 300k for California) and yet the population of California today is 20 times the one of Hawaii, this alone explains the difference in the % of natives in the 2 states without even needing to invoke or bring up the massacres in California.I did say "American" state, after all.
Why would pre-industrial population ratios be relevant in post-industrial settings with very different demographic underpinnings?
One thing that is clear is that native Hawaiians have a much greater degree of continuity, not just cultural but political, than native Californians. California is hardly (say) a direct descendant of a native Tongva principality annexed to the US after a century of internationally recognized independence. Even absent anything like the institutional guarantees (reserves, status, etc) available to native Californians, native Hawaiians are still pretty influential.
Going back, again, to the original discussion, you will need to advance Polynesian state building considerably, to not just create archipelagic monarchies like those of Hawaii and Tonga but to have them project their power.
Why wouldn't it be? Do you think that if Hawaii had 15 million people the % of native Hawaiians would still be 6-21%? California and Hawaii were settled more or less around the same time.
Anyway on the topic of contact, isn't this pretty much what already happened? I believe contact in Chile has been proven by the presence of chickens, I heard people making the argument that they also contacted California coastal populations.
twovultures
Donor
OP does speak about having earlier and more sustained contact without a pause. Assuming that the Chilean chickens and California boats are evidence of contact (color me skeptical for a variety of reasons) there are scenarios where an earlier and more sustained contact causes more transformation.
So is your thesis that disease was the overriding factor in indigenous depopulation, and violence either very little or not at all? I ask because I'm not 100% clear what you're trying to argue.
Seemingly it was not the major factor for the difference between the relative amount of native Californians and Hawaiians, otherwise you'd have to argue that Californian natives were inevitably going to re-grow at a much faster rate than Hawaiians without genocides did which doesn't make sense to me. In practice the numbers of mixed and non mixed native Hawaiians and Californians is around the pre-contact numbers for both(maybe double for Californians, but I'm not sure if the native figures include natives form other states), so how can the massacre of Californians be a major factor for a non-existing difference?
If Californians adopted chickens and other Polynesian subsistence strategies and their number grew bigger then I imagine that, if colonization still happened, you would expect their modern population to match the pre-contact one and THAT would be the reason for higher absolute and relative number of natives today.
kholieken
Banned
Native American (or any non-Eurasian population) would always suspectible to Eurasian disease. But Population with larger genetic diversity/variation would have larger number of survival when encountering novel disease. European disease would still be devastating.
Basils
Banned
It might help. But Polynesians coming around 1200 AD really wouldn’t add that much diversity. It would be in limited areas and limited amounts.
Did they ever prove if people from Easter island reached the main land? As they were Polynesian iirc
They more or less have, between introducing chickens, the spread of sweet potatoes (the word "kumara" resembles the word for sweet potato in Quechua and Aymara), and human genetic evidence. Additionally, a very small island east of Rapanui, Islas Salas and Gomez, has archaeological evidence of Polynesians at least stopping there as well as has a recorded Rapanui name meaning "on the way to Hiva" and is mentioned in a myth.
I'd say the evidence is plenty apparent and counter evidence, like the oft-cited sweet potato genetics study, tends to be flawed.
Not so much at the same time, and not nearly in the same ways. Most notably, the native Hawaiians were not subjected to a near-systematic campaign of genocide in the mid-20th century by American settlers who had wholly absorbed their state into the US. That surely pushed down percentages.
I would argue that, if California had been settled in the Hawaiian model, with Californian natives maintaining an internationally recognized state over the 19th century that got absorbed peacefully at the century's end into the US, we would have a notably higher percentage of Californian natives in the population of California. Why not? If Californian natives had to deal only with disease, not disease aggravated by the collapse of their polities and systematic campaigns of mass murder, they would have to be more numerous.
It is somewhat like Vinland, I think, in that the contact seems to have been relatively brief, late, and with a geographical periphery distant from the major centres. The Polynesian contact seems to have been more notable, given the evidence for the chicken and sweet potato being transferred and even evidence of migration, but not much more notable. In both case IMHO even a best-case scenario would not be enough to change the underlying dynamics.
Basils
Banned
That would be one way. Smallpox may have been the biggest killer. Wonder if removing it, would it reduce native mortality? Or was the cocktail deadly enough that 90% was going to die anyways even if you took out or neutralized one?
Lusitania
Donor
You then bring the same diseases that addicting Europe and we’re present in China/Japan to the west coast. Therefore destroying the natives from west instead of east.What about having more one-way trips from Japan to the New World a la Otokichi et al in 1834? Or from China?
The diseases were terrible, but IMHO the factors that militated against substantial recovery related most strongly to a highly disruptive colonialism. Imagine what would have happened to Europe and the Middle East if, after the Black Death, the whole region had been conquered by a technologically superior external power that set to waging multiple costly wars of conquest, breaking down or outright destroying key social institutions, enlisting survivors as forced labourers, et cetera.
Isn't that the Balkans?
inb4 an Ottoboo tells me that "some" peasants wanted their children to be slaves and that therefore the child levy was morally beyond criticism
edit: I think the more important thing suppressing the native populations after the epidemics was the settlement of the New World. Native populations could only rebound so much with the best lands and resources monopolized by the larger settler population.
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I would not say so. Perhaps it could have been, but Christianity did survive as the majority faith in the Balkans despite conversion. What is more, most of the Muslims seem to have retain more or less close ties with Christians, most notably in sharing languages. Christian churches were even integrated into the imperial system and allowed substantial authority over their flocks.
The analogous situation in the Americas would be for Christianity to be limited to minority populations and certain specific districts, with indigenous faiths still surviving as tolerated belief systems. The American Christians, for their part, would still be speakers of different indigenous languages for the most part.
The only situation in the Middle East and North Africa that might have come close to what happened in the Americas was not the Balkans but rather the Maghreb. My understanding is that some of the early conquerors there like the Banu Hilal (sp?) had been very disruptive to the established cultures in the area, perhaps explaining the marginalization of Berber and especially African Romance and the eventual disappearance of Christianity there. Even there, though, there was nothing like the disease-initiated depopulation that hit the Americas and Australasia.
You didn't mention demographic replacement previously, see my edit.
I don’t think so though, even after the Banu Hilal, many major polities in the Magreb was founded by the Berbers, not including the Almohads and Almoravids, so it required some of them to use the Berber Languages as language of state. As for African Romance, from what I read only remained in urban areas and increasingly tied with the Catholic Church , this requires a Muslim ruler to be tolerant of a suspected “fifth column” population, so their extinction as an ethnicity though not inevitable is highly unlikely, and requires an early PoD.
As I've shown, both the Californian and Hawaiian natives have re-grown at comparable rates and the only difference is the relative amount of non-natives that migrated and now live in the region, if you disagree you have to prove or reason why you think the Californian natives were going to regrow much faster than Hawaiian natives, if you do not think that then your argument is mathematically impossible.
Anatolia experienced a similar demographic turnover as southern Mexico and Peru, Reconquista era Granada probably experience a larged demographic turnover than most of Mesoamerica, so these are not hypotheticals... but there is still a huge difference as none of these regions suffered 90% declines in 1 century even if in the long term the demographic turnover was comparable, so using this logic it should be self-evident that violence over the larger period was higher in Anatolia and Granada than it was in Mesoamerica or the Andes.
The idea that what differentiated New World epidemics and their death rates is primarily violence is untenable because you would have to argue that the Spanish conquests were uniquely violent which I think it's not defensible.
You can just compare the lower demographic decline in the Philippines during Spanish rule, were the conquistadores going to the Philippines magically less likely to be violent despite the seemingly continuous chain of similar demographic turn-overs from Granada to the Canaries to the Americas?
If this idea was true doesn't this mean that we could imagine Europeans causing a 90% decline in South-East Asia or even India and East Asia? I don't think that's really possible.
Edit: Also I think it makes no sense to even consider North America, Brazil and the southern Cone to Mesoamerica and the Andes as one category, they should always be talked about separately, it's like comparing Manchuria and the North China plain, or Hokkaido and the rest of Japan etc.
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