In the colonization of NA, how was it that the Europeans already had muskets while the Native Americans were still using traditional weapons? I doubt it’s because theres a lack of resources?
In: 4
There are basically four answers out there that get offered up for this question:
1. They aren’t more “advanced” in all ways. You’re really just talking about military technology (and not, say, whether their societies were more “free” than the Native American ones, or the rate of starvation, or whatever). Western European military technology was better in part because they were waging large-scale wars against each other for a few hundred years before they ended up North America, and as a result the societies that flourished were the ones who figured out better ways to kill each other.
2. It’s a quirk of the different environments; Eurasian societies had certain things (like access to certain types of animals that proved amenable to domestication, which led to them having more exposure to zoonotic diseases, which led to a lot of other things) that gave them a significant edge against those in the New World.
3. There isn’t a single useful answer here; it’s a quirk of history that these societies developed differently. It just turned out that Western Europe was in a position to be really good at conquering other types of societies in the 15th century or so. It is essentially a random thing.
4. The European people were just inherently better than those of the New World from a biological perspective, or because of their religion, or their culture, or whatever.
Looking at those, #4 is basically not taken seriously by anyone anymore, and the other explanations are usually offered up as alternatives to that one. #4 is the one that many colonizers offered up as _their_ explanation for why they were fit to take over other peoples. The best it gets us is the cultural self-justification for these actions — why many (but not all) Europeans didn’t feel guilty doing things that by their own moral standards were pretty heinous.
Lots of people find #2 appealing (basically the Jared Diamond thesis), but most historians and anthropologists do not, and they see it as just a repurposed version of #4, though that is not how Diamond saw it. Basically they see it as Diamond saying, “oh, it’s just because of the environment, not because the Western Europeans were murderous bastards.” And when you look at many of his examples and evidence they don’t really hold up all that well.
Most scholars I know of give a version of #1 (aka, “the question is built on invalid or unstated premises”) or #3 (aka, “it’s just sort of random”). #1 feels like a dodge, which it sort of is, and #4 feels kind of empty and untestable.
I find if you merge aspects of #1, #2, and #3 together, you get something that sort of feels to me like a plausible model. Different societies developed differently in different parts of the world in part because of the different environmental and resource circumstances they found themselves in (#3), but also for cultural and historical reasons that are essentially random (#4). The result of all of this is that around the 15th century, a few places in one region of the world were basically optimized to be colonizers, in the sense that they had developed pretty sophisticated ways of killing people from a distance, technology for traveling long distances, and had a mindset that led them to be drawn towards the idea that it would be a totally acceptable thing to find a bunch of people who were different than them (which at first they saw mostly as a matter of religion, later “race”) and turn their societies into factories for exporting stuff that the colonizers wanted. Lastly, we’d want to acknowledge (per #1) that just because the European societies were very good at taking over other nations (especially ones already decimated by disease, as was in the New World), that doesn’t mean they were more “advanced” in every way (in some ways they were remarkably “backward” compared to the societies they exterminated).
Now to give a more compelling account of all of the above you’d want to go into a lot more detail not just about the Europeans but also the colonized peoples and also the societies that were powerful but didn’t become colonizers (e.g., the “China question” — China had many of the technologies necessary to do this kind of colonization campaign, but didn’t do it — why?). And you’d trace the different quirks and directions and paths taken and not taken that led to the result.
The advantage of merging all three of those models is that you get quite a lot of flexibility, don’t have to believe any of this was “inevitable,” and don’t let anyone off the hook for doing genocidal things, but at the same time you acknowledge that while human culture is wonderfully flexible, it is probably rooted in some way to the conditions under which it develops (aka, the environment), although not necessarily in a strictly deterministic way (it is not as simple as saying, “if you have this kind of food, you end up with this kind of society”).
Anyway, there is no simple or single agreed-upon answer here. There is not even an agreement on how exactly the best way to frame the question is. But the above are my thoughts as someone who has read about this for some time. If you want to see two extreme versions of this answer, Jared Diamond’s _Guns, Germs, and Steel_ is the standard “environmental determinism” answer, whereas David Graeber and David Wengrow’s _The Dawn of Everything_ is an extreme “it’s all just culture and all kind of random” answer. I do not know of any work that synthesizes them exactly as I have above.
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