 Hi, this is Professor Gerald Friedman, Department of Economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. And today we're going to talk about the European settlement of the New World, at quotation blocks. Of course it was new only for the Europeans. And they spent several hundred years trying to deny that there was really anybody else here. Native peoples were here for thousands of years. And there were lots and lots of them. The native peoples constructed huge cities. Nowadays, we pretty well agree that they had a population greater than that of Europe. Over a hundred million people. There are empires, the size of the Roman Empire or the Chinese Empire. The Incas empires covered an area stretching, that would stretch from Britain down to Iran if we're superimposed on Europe. The city of Cusco at the center drew water supplies from thousands of square kilometers of land with huge engineering systems transporting the water to the city. You don't need to do that unless you have a lot of people. You can't do that unless you have a large population. Just keep in mind for every person working and digging a ditch in a city or handling government affairs, there have to be five, ten people in the countryside working grown crops for them and transporting those crops. Cities on the scale that we understand the Incas, the Aztecs and some of the other native peoples had cities of 10, 20, 30,000 people in the middle of what is now Missouri or 100,000, 150,000 people in the Andes Mountains and in the Inca Empire. These cities required a hint of land of millions for their sustenance. That said, and the Europeans knew it at the time. They knew that there were major civilizations there, but they very quickly forgot it. And European historians have spent centuries understating the accomplishments of native peoples. Now, I'm not here to defend the native peoples or anything like that. That's not my interest. My interest is in how the historiography was shaped and what we can understand from it and how that affected the development of what became European America. Now the Europeans understated because they wanted to rationalize stealing the land and killing and enslaving the native peoples. No problem with that. It's a lot easier to justify stealing people's lands if you say, oh, they weren't really here. They didn't really exist. And they didn't use the land for anything anyway. They were just walking around on it, killing deer occasionally. And to be sure, the old European story made sense because, after all, in one of the great mysteries of human history, a few dozen, no more than a few hundred Spaniards were able to conquer these huge empires. It's a lot easier to explain how Pizarro with 168 men could conquer the Incas if you think the Incas weren't very much. Or Cortes with a few dozen men on a few horses could conquer the Aztecs if you think the Aztecs, they're only a few thousand Aztecs, not 40 or 50 million. So if the native peoples had a huge population and the Europeans were able to conquer them so easily, how do we put these together? Well the answer is that something very, very bad happened to the native peoples. The Europeans would have done it if they knew how, but they didn't. It was an accident. It was the worst catastrophe in human history. Background, 25,000 years ago, not sure exactly when, but quite a while ago, a small group of Asians from northeast Siberia took a walk. They walked across what was then a little narrow land bridge that connected what is now Alaska with Siberia over what is now the Bering Straits. The land bridge disappeared and there was very, very little contact, not no contact, but very little contact between the peoples in what we now call the Americas and the larger population of humans in Eurasia, Africa. For all that period, for 20,000 years plus, the peoples in what we call the Americas were separated. They were separated in terms of the diseases that they did not get. So there was a whole disease environment in Europe, Europe, Asia, Africa. All these diseases that were developed, smallpox, the bubonic plague, tuberculosis, various other respiratory diseases, various other plagues, all these diseases developed and they didn't come to the New World until Columbus. Columbus brought them because the Europeans, having been exposed to these things since birth, just breathed germs. Germs didn't kill the Europeans because the Europeans had evolved to survive these germs or they had gotten them when they were children and there were a lot of diseases like measles and chickenpox that are no big deal if you get them as kids, but if you get them as adults, they can be deadly. So the Europeans just kind of walked around with giant breeding grounds of bacteriological weapons without meaning to. On top of that, remember, it was a small group, maybe only a few thousand who crossed over from Siberia, very narrow gene pool, lots of inbreeding. We have a population of 150 million or so that grew from a thousand people. There's a lot of inbreeding that people didn't even realize after thousands of years that they were sleeping with their cousins. Everybody was a cousin. Everybody had the same genes. Everybody was susceptible to the same diseases and they had no experience, no antibodies. So the Europeans walked in. The story is that the Arawak Indians of the Caribbean, 500,000 or a million people living in the Caribbean islands, when Columbus arrived, by his second voyage, they're just a few hundred left. They'd all died of smallpox and the other diseases he brought with them. All these diseases, 20,000 years of diseases, hit the native peoples at once and it spread like wildfire. Worse, it spread like pigs. The Europeans had pigs on their boats. You eat food, so you bring pigs. You feed the pigs and you eat the pigs. Some of the pigs you don't eat. Some of them got away. They get on the island or they get on mainland. Hernando de Soto, while he was looking for the fountain of youth, had pigs with him. Some of them got loose. Pigs carry disease. Europeans don't think about it. They didn't do it deliberately. It's not like a century or two later when Lord Jeffrey Amherst deliberately gave blankets infected with smallpox to the native peoples in New England to try to do some genocidal ethnic cleansing. That was deliberate, but that was small potatoes. De Soto killed millions and millions with his pigs without meaning to. He didn't think about them as disease vectors, but oh, they were. He walked through what is now the Southeast United States, seeing cities populated with thousands and thousands of peoples, with walls, with roads. The next European who went there, it was deserted. They had all died, partly because of a few dozen pigs. The native people said the breath of the white man kills, they were right, but it was also the breath of their horses, their pigs, and their dogs that killed. Chronicles would report mountains of dead bodies, something like going to Auschwitz after the liberation, except Auschwitz was intended. This was not. The natives gave something back. Syphilis. The Germans called it the French disease, the British called it the German disease, the French called it the Spanish disease. Well, it probably was the Spanish disease. It seems to have come back on Columbus' first voyage. As I said, the French called it the Spanish disease, the Germans called it the French disease. The native peoples would call it revenge. There's another irony here. The Europeans could never have conquered America except for the diseases that they did not understand, and the diseases they didn't mean to transmit. But having conquered America, they couldn't use their conquest because there's nobody to work for them. And there weren't enough Europeans willing to cross the Atlantic to work. So who would work for them now that the native populations were dead? The answer, which we'll talk about next time, is Africans. And that's where we'll go next, to Africa. Thank you. Have a good day.