A Cultural History of America: Chapter 1 (Patreon)

America is a strange country by nearly any metric. Americans believe that they are “exceptional” and a one of a kind nation. Depending on the mood, this can either come in the form of believing America is a “City on a Hill”, as described by John Winthrop, a notable Puritan leader, or “The World’s Last Best Hope” as said by Abraham Lincoln. This view holds that America is a practically God-chosen nation, with a divine mission to fix the world. When America fails to reach these lofty standards, it calls itself “double damned”, between the crimes of African Slavery and the extermination of the Native Americans. Americans are some of the most critical people in the world of America. By making America heinous of such crimes, they still make America special, with the tyranny of guilt creating a profound narcissism, which ignores the crimes every nation has made.

I don’t like viewing nations as exceptional. However, as we will see, America is still one of the strangest nations in history. Whether that is good or bad is entirely at the reader’s discretion. It baffles foreigners and Americans alike. In simple terms, this book is meant to go into the ways and reasons for why America is so individual. This book owes a debt to all my foreign friends, who forced me, as a historian, to reflect upon my own nation and explain all its bizarreness. I don’t believe in long Introductions that most people skip and so let’s get to the point. Why is America the way t is? What does it mean and what will it mean? Let’s find out.

A Tale of Two Civilizations

American history is strange to write in one important way. Most nations have a prehistory. So does America, but it’s barely relevant to the current nation. France or China, or almost all nations for that matter, came into being since some semi-mythical ancient warlord took over a region with a relatively similar ethnic population and founded a feudal dynasty. Although historians have retroactively tried to create them, there was no one moment in which France or China came into existence. For France or China, the study of their prehistories are deeply important. Reading about pre-Roman Gaul indicates much of what France is today. The Gauls are the modern French’s ancestors and created many superstitions and “Gallicisms” that still exist today and have founded historic France’s social model to a great degree. This is why Gallic archaeology was so emotional for the French nation for such a long period. Most nations in the world are similar. In India, deciphering the hidden words of the Mahabharata, a text with parts likely written close to 3,200 years ago, is vital to understanding the current Indian religious and social milieu. The argument over whether the ancestors of the North Indians came from Central Asia 4,000 years ago is so heated inside India’s academic circles since India is similar enough a society to 4,000 years ago that the topic still carries immense emotional weight.

The United States is quite different, in which it does not have the benefit of a mythical past. Many Americans can trace the name of their ancestors who came over to found America and the boat they came over on. Similarly, America has a very specific founding date, July 4th, 1776, in which America turned from a British Colony to its own state. Similarly, America’s prehistory is that of an entirely different people and civilization from that of the current United States. If you want to understand modern America’s culture, the best prehistory to look backwards upon is Europe’s. However, the natives were not completely transitory. They remain in modern America in more ways than is commonly known. They knew the land much longer and their mark remains. Thus, to understand modern America, we shall look at the histories of two different regions before 1600, England and the Native Americans.

First Settlement

The story of the settlement of the New World has been through many separate iterations, with the one that we currently have likely being disturbingly far from the truth that will eventually emerge in the future. The date for the initial settlement of the New World by humanity has been continually pushed further back. At the turn of the 19th century, it was put somewhere around the birth of Christ, and then, due to the discovery of the Clovis spearpoint, sat around 13,000 BC until the 21st century. By around 2010, the new date for first humans in the New World was around 20,000 BC. This was completely thrown out of the water with the discovery of 300,000 year old spearpoint lodged in a mammoth in California. This was occurring concurrently with the evolution of modern humans in Eastern Africa, meaning it must have been some earlier variety of human.

As the accumulation of archaeological and genetic information gradually puts humanity’s cradle in an arc stretching from South Africa deep into Asia in Mongolia and as evidence suggests that early humans have been wandering the Old World for millions of years, it seems more and more plausible that humanity’s history in the New World is even longer than the currently supposed date. It would be a neat explanation if the various reports of ape-men around North America, such as Bigfoot and Florida’s skunk ape, are in fact some long lost variety of early hominid. Prehistory is exceptionally humbling since it continually discards our most sacred theories every few decades. Expect this summary in of itself to become horribly outdated in several decades time.

The original view of the human settlement, taught ad nauseam in Elementary schools across the country, goes something like this. During the last ice age, sea levels were significantly lower due to massive amounts of the world’s ice being locked up in the polar glaciers. This resulted in islands like Britain and Japan being attached to the Eurasian mainland, while there was also a land-bridge between Alaska and Siberia. Siberia, due to having a very dry climate at the time and terrible winds, meant snow could never collect and thus develop glaciers. This surprisingly allowed one of the most windy and cold places in the world to be habitable for humans. As the world began to warm around 14,000 BC, the two main glaciers in North America, the Laurentide, based out of Labrador, and the Cordilleran, based out of the Canadian Rockies, split, thus resulting in a bridge of dry land between the two glaciers stretching down to the Great Plains. Humans poured through this gap, into the American Great Plains, spreading all the way down to Patagonia in a matter of a thousand years, hunting the megafauna into extinction at the same time. This tiny group of settlers from Siberia was supposed to be the progenitors of the entirety of the Native Americans.

The truth that we have found is far more complicated. Firstly, the discovery of evidence of human habitation in Patagonia, at the tip of South America of all places, before the supposed opening of the ice gap between the glaciers, put a serious dent in the theory. Secondly, the genetics and archaeology started to show a far more complex view, one in which many waves of migration likely mixed to form the modern native Americans.

One of the surprising things about the settlement of the New World was that the modern Siberians were very underrepresented. This comes from a fallacy in that we assume that the world 13,000 years ago had a similar racial makeup to what it does today, a concept that genetics research is demolishing with cruel consistency. For example, modern Native Americans have around 1/3 ancient European ancestry going back thousands of years. This can be explained by genetics results that point to the ancestors of most modern Northern Europeans originally hailing from Central Asia and Siberia. Meanwhile most of the inhabitants of Europe itself during the ice age have been wiped out, likely by genocide, in the centuries since. Similarly, the discovery of massive amounts of Polynesian ancestry going back thousands of years among Native Americans, especially in an arc straddling the Pacific coastline through Central and South America, is likely explained by the ancestors of the Polynesians themselves coming originally from Taiwan and Southern China. Before the opening of the pathway between the glaciers, it would make sense if fisherman from modern China, hugging the Pacific Rim, were able to reach the New World, a voyage that would have required never leaving a coastline. In general, the largest ancestral group among Native Americans is not Siberians, but ancestors of the modern Mongolians alongside the Ainu, or the practically extinct indigenous inhabitants of Japan, who were likely once dominant across a large swath of East Asia before the invention of agriculture.

The migration through the ice gap does seem to have occurred, but it was not the first migration and was not done by modern Siberians, but predominantly by the relatives of modern Europeans, Mongolians and Ainu. These various discrete racial groups took millennia to mix into the current combination that makes up modern Native Americans. This results in the discovery of awkward things like that of a 9,000 year old very European looking skull in Oregon. Another being the discovery in the Brazilian Amazon of a 13,000 year old skull that looks very much like an Australian Aboriginal. This makes sense given the relatives of the modern Australian Aboriginals were the indigenous inhabitants of South-East Asia before the invention of agriculture.

There were also other waves of immigration in the millennia after the ice age. Genetic information suggests that the native inhabitants of Ecuador have a good amount of shared genetics with the Neolithic inhabitants of Southern Japan, with shared pottery from around 6,000 BC. Around 4,000 BC, there was a migration of “genuine” Siberians across the Bering straight into the Canadian Arctic, becoming the Inuit. This migration across Northern Canada took a long time and one of the great ironies of history is that the Vikings actually arrived in Southern Greenland first, and thus would have a better argument to being “indigenous” than the Inuit. Another Siberian branch turned southwards and became the Apache.

Limitations in the New World

Ecologically, North America is not that different from the temperate climates of Eurasia. Both lie in the temperate zones, stretching from the Arctic Ocean deep into the Tropics. Both have every biome, every temperature, great grasslands, tall mountains, internal river systems etc.. One can draw countless comparisons saying Vancouver has a climate like Dublin’s, Los Angeles like Cairo’s, or New York like Beijing’s but that’s largely superfluous. Similarly, in depth analyses of the different parts of North America’s geography are subjects of later study in this book.

However, this truly begs the question, why were the Europeans so much better technologically, by a a margin of thousands of years, than the native inhabitants of the New World, if geographically, the climates are somewhat equivalent. The main reason is due to the limiting factors that incurred from North America’s lack of domesticable animals and crops.

Useful domesticable animals are almost always large herd mammals. Humanity’s relationship with these animals is determined in a large part by how long humans have lived with them. In Africa, for example, where the ancestors of modern humans had lived for millions of years, animals have learned to view humans as predators. . Humans had been hunter gatherers for so long in Africa that the wildlife couldn’t imagine them as anything else. For this very reason, the megafauna survived in Africa better than in the rest of the world, since the animals were more acclimated to human ways of doing thingsThe lion, rhinoceros, cheetah and others used to inhabit practically the whole world, even the Americas, but survive mostly in Africa today for this reason. For similar reasons, African diseases are the most deadly since they have evolved over millions of years to parasite upon and kill humans. Whole regions, such as a majority of Tanzania, had practically no human settlement until the 20th century for this very reason. Reasons like this, among others, were why Africa was so lightly developed until recently, since animal domestication came late and once human numbers passed a certain threshold, they were cut down by disease.

In Eurasia, humans arrived later than Africa, and at a higher level of development, which meant that some of the animals; like the mammoth, cave bear, dire wolf etc..., went extinct due to their inability to deal with man. Meanwhile others like the cow, sheep, horse etc…, remained domesticable. Modern humans haven’t been outside Africa long enough for non-African diseases to learn to cull humans effectively, which allowed large civilizations to develop in Eurasia.

The New World is very much the opposite of the situation in Africa. By the time the humans reached the Americas, they were even more developd and the animals were even more naive. Practically all large domesticable animals were wiped out in the Americas, leaving only the South American llama and alpaca, animals of limited utility. The sad irony is that the Americas were the biological powerhouses of the ice age world. The most diverse and populatous centers go megafauna 12,000 years ago were the American Great Plains, in the area around Texas, and the South American Pampas. The horse and camel themselves evolved in North America and from there migrated into Eurasia. Without these large domesticable animals, the native peoples of the Americas were at an immense disadvantage, being incapable of using them for their great superiority in muscle power, speed and meat producing ability. The only domesticated animals in the New World were the dog, llama, alpaca and turkey.

The extinction of the megafauna and end of the ice age in fact resulted in a decline in the standard of living in North America. A large part of this is due to North America facing one of the closest things in human history to an actual apocalypse. Around 11,000 BC, the climate, which had been warming at a rapid pace, turned in a matter of decades to colder than the previous low point of the Last Ice Age, an event called the Younger Dryas .This could either have been caused by a comet hitting the Canadian Arctic or by a change in glacial water flows from the Canadian Arctic, disrupting the Gulf Stream. This resulted in a global crisis, which likely resulted in the invention of agriculture in the Middle East and East Asia alongside the final extinction of the megafauna, who were pushed beyond the point of no return. In the United States, we see evidence for the complete collapse of the advanced Ice Age cultures and even signs of cannibalism. We actually see a devolution in cultural development lasting thousands of years. This continued even after this crisis, with much of the current United States being wetter during the Last Ice Age. This meant that large reasons of America, such as the South-West and Great Plains became significantly dryer after the end of the Last Ice Age. Similarly, with the decline of large animals to hunt, diet became more based upon small game and plants.

Over time, this resulted in the invention of agriculture in what is currently modern Mexico. This was a legendary process in some ways, with the progenitor of modern corn being so genetically different and inedible as to have made the process take hundreds of years of genetic engineering before something edible at all could be produced. North America was in some ways just plain unlucky, it took thousands of years longer to get domesticable crops than Eurasia, who naturally had wheat, barley, rice, millet etc…. This is an important factor to consider, in that agriculture was discovered 5,000 years later in the New World than the Old. If we looked at the Old World 5,000 years after their invention of agriculture, they had a level of development far more primitive, without any cities or empires, than that seen in the New World. The fact the Native Americans attained such a high level of civilization without even the use of domesticated animals makes it even more impressive. The Native American empires are difficult to calibrate to a certain year of development in Eurasia. The lack of metallurgy, and writing outside Central America, before contact definitely would put them in a Neolithic Stone Age level of development, however, the logistical abilities of states like the Aztec and Inca was equal to what the Romans or Persians could muster in the centuries before the birth of Christ. The question is further complicated by us likely seriously underestimating the abilities of Stone Age societies in the Old World during prehistory. How much less impressed by the Aztecs and Incas would we be if the Spanish never discovered them and we only knew them from the archaeological record?

From Mexico, corn, beans and squash spread north into the modern United States. Unlike in Eurasia and Africa, where the spread of agriculture resulted in a genocide of the previous non-agricultural inhabitants, in the New World, this process seems to have been mostly peaceful. This resulted in a far greater cultural diversity in the New World than the Old, with 5 times as many languages in the Americas as in the Old World. There were no truly massive lingual groups like the Indo-European, Semitic, Sino-Tibetan or Bantu(caused mostly by genocide), which tied the Old World together. This seems to reflect a good degree of peacefulness in Prehistoric America. The bow, arriving from Siberia into Alaska in 3,000 BC, only reached the majority of the United States in 500 AD, suggesting a lack of military competition that would have spurned the weapon’s adoption by other tribes. This is difficult to say, however, we know of practically no peaceful tribal peoples either from archaeology, history or the current world and so there could be a missing data point here.

Jared Diamond’s thesis from “Guns, Germs and Steel” that the Americas were held back by their North-South shape, while Eurasia was pushed ahead by its East-West, which resulted in an easier spread of agriculture through climatically similar regions, does not work in the Americas. For one example, the climatic shifts were gradual enough that Mexican crops were capable of being grown in a range stretching from Chile to Canada. Similarly, climatically similarly East-West regions are often larger in the Americas than they are in the Old World. The United States east of the Rockies is, for example, horizontally wider than China proper, who developed mostly in isolation from the rest of the world to become at times, the world’s most advanced and prosperous society.

Native America

Speaking of Native America is an oxymoron. The native population had no sense of collective identity since they didn’t know of any other continents. When Europeans first arrived, the natives tried to use the Europeans inside their own local tribal conflicts, viewing the Europeans as secondary to their own local wars. The Huron always viewed the Iroquois as a greater threat than the French and the Pueblo always worried more about the Apache than the Spanish.

The main line of demarcation that did exist in the Americas before the arrival of the Europeans was the line of agriculture, a line stretching diagonally from New Mexico to the St Lawrence River, north of which there was no agriculture. In the agricultural region, there were two main centers of civilization, one based around the banks of the Mississippi and the other among the Pueblo of South-West. It seems rational that the center of American civilization would be in the warmer climes along the easily navigable banks of the Mississippi. The center of the Mississippian civilization, Cahokia, was across the river from modern St. Louis, a geographically very reasonable spot where the Missouri and Ohio rivers meet. At its height, around 1200, Cahokia had a population of 10,000-20,000, making it larger than London. Regions of the American South-East had population densities equal to Medieval Europe. This civilization, of which we know practically nothing, seemed to stretch from the Atlantic coast of the American South to the Dakotas and from Texas to Western Pennsylvania. Excavations from Cahokia demonstrate a massive trade network pulling in areas as far away as Mexico and Wyoming. There clearly was bustling trade in the Americas in the Pre-Colombian era, with truly massive Pre-Colombian copper mines discovered in the Upper peninsula of Michigan, which likely dated from 4,000 BC.

The first wave of Mississippi expansion occurred in the 8th century, follower by a brief dark age, followed by reaching an apex from 1000 to 1200, which was also the climax of the Medieval Warm Period. One must think of Ancient Sumer and Egypt, who’s Golden Ages were often interspersed with centuries of barbarian invasions, chaos and climatic failures. All evidence points to the Mississippian civilization being in stark decline by the time the Europeans showed up, likely due to the Mini Ice Age. Cahokia had been abandoned, and archaeology shows evidence of multiple cities being burned in the Great Plains by the native hunter gatherer tribes. However, all things considered, when the Spanish first arrived in the early 16th century, the tribes of the South-East were still developed, wealthy and advanced societies. They seemed to have a hierarchical, somewhat matriarchal society.

North-east of the Mississippians were the Iroquoian and Algonquin speaking farming peoples. They hadn’t yet settled down into developed cities and were semi-nomadic, moving villages every 20 years or so, after denuding the soil, afterwards burning the next region to improve the soil’s fertility. The Natives were masters of managing the land, creating what amounted to game parks by a combination of strategically burning land to improve fertility and planting fruit trees. The first Europeans spoke of the forests they saw as nearly parklike.

In the South-West, the Pueblo built an irrigation society on the banks of the Rio Grande River. It followed similar rises and declines. The native structures in this region are exceptionally impressive and make beautiful panoramas. The Pueblo built megalithically in stone. Like the Mississippians, they were already in clear decline by the time the Europeans arrived. This was partially their own fault, in that they gradually deforested the American Southwest, a once wooded region, thus creating erosion and destroying the quality of the soil and lowering rainfall. This brings us to a major misconception about the Native Americans. They were no more in tune with their environments than their counterparts in the Old World. In fact, the Native Americans were in many ways more destructive of their environments, as has been shown with declines in Aztec and Maya civilization due to soil erosion and deforestation, since they were more dependent on single crops. In Europe, for example, animals were grazed on fallow land, thus providing protein and letting the land regain fertility. Although beans did maintain soil quality well, the Natives had few alternatives for protein or to their staple crops. Although, thankfully it did not occur in North America, the only advanced cannibalistic societies in the World were in Latin America, possibly due to lack of other sources of protein. The search for protein was also an important part of Native American politics. For the tribes in the Eastern United States, hunting lands were easily several times the size of the actual inhabited territories. Although the Cherokee only really inhabited the Southern Appalachians, they waged wars against all the neighboring peoples, gaining hunting grounds encompassing most of the states of Kentucky, Tennessee, much of Northern Alabama and the Southern Piedmont. In other words, their hunting grounds were larger than many European kingdoms of the era. Similarly as we will see in several chapters, by the late 17th century, the Iroquois hunting grounds stretched from Central Pennsylvania to the Mississippi River.

It would be easy to think that the natives north of the agriculture line were primitive savages, but that was also not the case. The Great Plains and Mountain region, alongside Arctic Canada, were very lightly settled, but the fishing communities on the Pacific coast were very advanced, probably the most so of any hunter gatherer group in the world due to the immense wealth of the fishing opportunities in the region. The hunter gatherer tribes in the region had social structures more reminiscent of farming peoples than anything else, with strong hierarchical states and permanent large villages. A large group of scholarship now believes that the hunter gatherer lifestyle was more appealing than agriculture and so we must wonder if the tribes of the Pacific Northwest’s ability to maintain a larger population density while remaining hunter gatherers must be an immense point to their credit.

A final point that must be made about the Native Americans is that they were in no way peaceful. This is a common misconception springing mostly from Rousseau and later academic’s wishful thinking. The possibly low conflict states of 4,000 BC had completely fallen out by the European’s arrival. The Natives, like practically everyone in the world at the time, were in a near permanent state of war. A combination of the archaeological record and the records of the newly arrived Europeans point to incessant inter-tribal warfare. Like all tribal peoples, in fact, the Natives had a significantly higher death rate than the large urbanized states in places like Western Europe, sometimes by a factor of ten times the death rate among the male population. As mentioned before, the bitterness between the native groups was so great that when the Europeans arrived, the native peoples considered them secondary to their preexisting tribal conflicts and as a tool to be used for regional hegemony.

Armageddon

Imagine 90 percent of your society dying out. The only things that spring to mind that could produce those sort of casualty statistics are alien invasions and asteroid strikes. Most simulations of nuclear wars end up with fewer casualties. However, this very fate was what the native peoples of the New World dealt with due to the arrival of European diseases. The Natives had no immunity to the diseases the Europeans had cultivated due to their 10,000 year relationship with domesticated animals. The New World had been remarkably healthy due to the lack of domesticated animals. This had two main positive effects. Firstly, it meant that native civilizations thrived in the tropics, in places like the Yucatan or the Amazon, where in the Old World they would have been torn apart by disease. Sadly, with the introduction of African diseases, like malaria and yellow fever, into the American tropics, whole regions became denuded of their native population, who could no longer survive in their native environments. Secondly, likely the reason that the natives had advanced much further in their 6,500 years with agriculture than the Old World civilizations was that for the first 5,000 years of the Old World’s relationship with agriculture, total human numbers either stagnated or actively declined. This is somewhat surprising given that agriculture can support significantly more people than a hunter gatherer lifestyle. The reason for this was that it took the Eurasians 5,000 years to fully acclimate to the diseases their animals gave them. The Native population of the Americas was slammed with those 5,000 years of deaths from disease in a matter of a little more than a century. For the countless diseases the Europeans, and just as importantly the Africans, gave the Americas, such as smallpox, typhoid, malaria, yellow fever and even the suddenly deadly common cold, the natives likely only gave the Europeans one, syphilis. This created an immense collapse in Native numbers. Some tribes were completely wiped out. One must think of the early 17th century Squanto, a Massachussetts Patuxet who was taken to Europe as a slave and when he finally returned to home, his entire tribe to a man had been wiped out.

This immense decline was taken advantage of by the European powers. Although the Vikings and Polynesians likely reached the Americas first and evidence points towards the Portuguese, English and Basques having some knowledge of its existence, the first person to truly connect the Old with the New World was Christopher Columbus, in service of the Spanish Crown, in 1492. For the next century, largely since the other Western European powers were busy with internal strife due to the Reformation, Spain, and secondarily Portugal, were the only European powers to own territory in the Americas. Portugal constructed a somewhat laissez faire colonial state in Brazil while the Spanish built a truly enormous colonial empire in what is now Latin America. The Spanish used their technological advantages and the massive weakening of the native states due to the plagues to, often with armies numbering only several hundred, take over native empires like the Aztec and Inca, which numbered 20 and 11 million respectively. For a comparison, France and Germany in the 17th century had populations numbering practically the same as the Aztec and Inca numbers above respectively.

The Spanish conquistadors were heavily disaffected aristocrats with little interest in work. In fact they often considered even the suggestion of work to be demeaning to their (in most cases barely) aristocratic blood. Thus they looked for population and wealth centers that they could easily exploit. Funnily enough, the wealthier and most militarily powerful states in the Americas were those that fell first, since the Spanish could target their preexisting power centers and use native power structures to maintain power over the large native populations. However, this meant that the decentralized, more lightly settled and lacking in gold or silver modern United States held little attraction. There were bloodthirsty and gold obsessed conquistadors who did venture into the current United States. They were in general driven on by rumors of more cities of gold, of another Aztec or Inca empire alongside the banks of the Mississippi. The real truth was often laughable. When Coronado arrived in New Mexico, searching for the “7 Cities of Gold”, he instead found the few mud huts remaining from the Pueblo’s declining civilization. The native population was entirely incentivized to lie about some bonanza one hundred miles further north in order to just get the Conquistadors to leave. One of the great cruel ironies of history is that the Conquistadors would often torture the natives for information on gold sources. However, not realizing that gold wasn’t as common in the real world as in their imaginations, they forced the natives to invent centers of gold that misled them. Using his immense superiority in military technological and administrative ability, Coronado nonetheless enslaved the native Pueblo and made “New Mexico” a Spanish colony.

Hernando de Soto had a similar adventure in the American South-East. Starting in Florida, he hacked his way into South Carolina and Tennessee and towards the Mississippi River, after walking back to Mexico through Texas. Hernando de Soto arrived before this region was devastated by disease. He found developed, hierarchical and advanced societies that were more than capable of matching his military force. The native peoples of the South-East were continually able to beat his force back and onto the defensive. He left the South-East more due to the ferocity of the native defense than any other factor.

The Spanish ended up having a minimal influence in the modern United States. Unlike the British, the bulk of the Spaniards arrived in the 16th century and then the population decayed, meaning there was little population growth to create pressures to migrate north from the Spanish colonies in Mexico or Cuba. Even much of the North of Mexico, inhabited by warlike nomadic tribes, only came under control by Spanish speakers in the late 19th century. The Spanish yearly wagon train to bring supplies to New Mexico from Central Mexico was tenuous and dangerous at best. The Spanish influence was in simple terms limited to their feudal possession in New Mexico and a handful of forts in Florida. The native peoples of Florida, the Seminoles, were some of the best warriors in the Western Hemisphere and combined with Florida’s swampy nature, made it unattractive for European colonization. The Spanish attempted to create colonies further north in modern day Virginia and South Carolina but these either failed due to internal reasons or destruction by the natives. The only other Spanish influence in the modern United States was created due to fear of influence by other European powers. The Spanish maintained a permanent presence in Texas due to the French colony in Louisiana and the colony in California was formed as a counterpoint to the Russians spreading down from the Pacific North-west.

The Spanish colonies in the modern United States were haphazard at best. The main purpose of the Spanish colonial enterprise was to squeeze as much revenue out of Peru and Mexico while the rest of the empire was circumstantial. By the time Mexico declared independence in 1821, the colonial population of Spanish Texas, a region far larger than the nation of France, was 6,000. Spanish Texas was so poor that the governor for many years slept in the prison, which was the best built building in the province. Even in the late 18th century, the cavalry detachments here fought with lance and without pistol, effectively 400 years behind the contemporary European technology. California, due to the natural fertility of the soil was wealthier, but no less of a backwater. The Spanish enslaved the native population, dividing them into feudal estates, and the society was almost entirely dependent upon stock-raising, with an economy barely linked to the rest of the world.

The greatest irony is that climatically, the American South-West was far better suited to Spanish colonization than Anglo-Saxon. The earliest Spanish explorers of Texas commented upon how similar the climate of Texas was to the high plains of Spain and how fertile the land was. In this time period, the native population was tiny, and without the horse, immobile. The Spanish system of land tenure, based around water supply and with emphasis upon a combination of ranching and farming would have been perfect for the region. If the Spaniards had settled even a moderate number of Spainards in the region in the 17th century, they could have recreated Spain in the New World.

In the long run, an animal brought by the Spanish unseated the possibility of their control in the Great Plains and South-West, the horse. Although an invasive species, the climate of the Great Plains was perfect for the horse and they quickly came to dominate the region. Horse herds quickly came to number in the thousand. The natives were also quick to pick up this technology. The native hunter gatherer peoples of the Great Plains went from being a backwards and geopolitically unimportant people to suddenly being influential power brokers in the region. Their newfound mobility meant that they could traverse larger regions to hunt and travel. They drove the native agrarian peoples out of much of the Great Plains and also made life hell for the Spanish. The Apache and Comanche forced the Spanish in the Southwest into a permanent defensive position. The Comanche, especially, formed a powerful empire controlling the center of Texas. The Spanish missions in the region were fortified outposts of a losing civilization.

England

Founded by Germanic barbarians after the Fall of Rome, England occupies an island in the North Atlantic off the North-West coast of Europe. They pushed the native Celtic population to the periphery and were then conquered by French speakers who assimilated after several centuries. In 1600, at the verge of its colonization of the New World, England could either be viewed as a relative backwater to events on the Continent or the most developed nation in the world.

In the Middle Ages, England was one of the few de facto unified states in Europe. In most Medieval States, such as the Holy Roman Empire or Hungary, the king had barely any power while the nobility were effectively independent, with intermittent extremely capable dynasties which were able to unify their nations successfully for a century or two. A notable exception to this could be France, but even the King of France’s power was often tenuous in the provinces. England was the main exception to this rule, having been a very unified state since the 10th century. England had no warring states period and far less internal conflict than practically any other state in Europe. Ironically enough, England was held together for parts of this by maintaining external wars, mostly in France, in which the nobility was bribed into loyalty through foreign lands and tribute. This had profound effects on the English and thus American identity. With such a long history of unity, England could develop institutions the depth of which had no rival. England’s Parliamentary system was capable of creating compromise between the monarchy and the aristocracy. The main powers that be were accountable to each other, creating a strong degree of property rights. English courts were some of the most fair in Europe. An interesting story is that James 1, King of Scotland, was on the road to take the English throne, ordered a thief to be executed. The English authorities had to explain to him that a trial was necessary in England. This resulted in a certain degree more humanity, as England was the only country in Europe in which horrifying public torture, such as the rack and disembowlment was banned, with all executions done with hanging or decapitation. We can see this trend across all of English society. England had significantly lower crime and murder rates than any other nation in Europe alongside lower inequality.

This stability also resulted in the growth of the merchant classes and urbanization little seen in other countries in Europe. England was the European country where one worried the least about having one’s life’s work stolen by a rapacious member of the nobility. The English silver coin was seen as the most stable in Europe. England moved very early to a capitalist level of development, leaving a feudal system to an entirely money oriented one in the 15th century. Agriculture stopped being subsistence based, ie; for survival and done according to traditional modes, and instead export based and financial by the 16th century. Similarly, by the 16th century, the vast majority of wealth in England was not held by the nobility but by the untitled gentry class. The English nobility, unlike those on the Continent, which looked down upon business as dishonorable, took part in business and married into the financial elite. This meant that the English elite was always able to stay in lockstep with technological and economic developments. A big factor in this stability was England’s status as an island, which meant that the English didn’t have to keep a standing army, which could become a force for internal political instability. Standing armies often supported their own claimants to the throne and became tools of monarchical whim. England, as an island, instead invested in a navy. England’s island status also meant it was far less likely to face invasions or foreign conquests than practically any other nation in Europe.

This is the positive view. In many ways, England was a backwater in the Early Modern Period. In an era in which the vast majority of wealth came from the land itself, England was at a severe disadvantage to its far more fertile neighbors on the Continent. For example, France and Britain have comparable populations now of 65 million. In 1600, France had 17 million people and England, 3.5. Besides London, no city in England could shine a light to the great cities of the Continent like Paris, Naples, Constantinople or Antwerp. The reason so many of Shakespeare’s plays are set in Italy is that it was still seen as the cultural capital of Europe. Since the Middle Ages, England was no longer the only truly unified nation in Europe. The cannon had meant that the monarchs were capable of battering down their noble’s castles. This resulted in a series of great Continental powers like the Habsburgs, France, Sweden and the Ottoman Turk. The military arms race of the 16th century, in which mostly the French and Habsburgs invented the Scientific warfare that gave the West military preeminence was nearly entirely missed by the English, who stayed with antiquated armies of Longbowmen. England’s parliamentary system was seen as a quaint leftover of a conservative regime, while all the most “developed” states on the Continent had long since done away with their Parliaments, replacing them with the more “modern” absolute bureaucratic kingships. Similarly, England was entirely left out of the massive project of colonial expansion that had made Spain and Portugal so wealthy.

Many forward thinking Englishmen looked at the massive Spanish empire and overflowing Spanish coffers and considered how their own nation could perform a similar endeavor. Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Francis Drake were part of this school; pirates who founded failed colonies in South America and the Caribbean. Sir Walter Raleigh’s brainchild was the settlement of Virginia. The English came to two different conclusions from the Spanish. The first was that the main purpose of the empire was to export population. England was going through immense population growth at the time, compounded by the capitalization of agriculture, which resulted in many peasants being driven off the land, creating mass unemployment in the cities. These adventurers looked at the massive woods of Eastern North America and saw an opportunity. Similarly, they understood these colonies would be primarily based off work, while the Spanish Empire was primarily off enslaving the native population and mining precious minerals. The biggest reason in the centuries to come that Spain became poor while England rich, was that the English realized that gold was just a conduit to get what they wanted while Spain thought it was an end in and of itself. When the Spanish got gold to get rich, they ended up inflating their currency and destroying their country. When the English started manufacturing to get rich, they started the Industrial Revolution and took over the world.

America inherited these incredibly powerful institutions from the English. The nation that’s had the longest time since a regime shift is Britain, in 1688, followed by the United States second place in 1788. The US government has remained in practically the same form since being drafted by the Founders. The only time that private property was liquidated by the government in the United States on a large scale was during the American Civil War, when that property was other human beings and the dispossessed had actively rebelled against the government. The assumption that property rights will be respected and that the government will survive is so ingrained in America that it is taken for granted. This is not the case in most of the world, in which both government stealing of property or regime shifts have happened with frightening regularity.

England’s Heritage and Radical Protestantism

America is in many ways a projection of British civilization with some variation. This is entirely normal for colonial societies. Colonial societies tend to be extremified versions of the societies that created them. They also tend to become time capsules of the era that created them. This is since the early colonizers tend to hold onto their original culture very tightly in order to give themselves a sense of identity under strange circumstances. The colonies are also normally cut off from the currents of social change that change the home territories. This occurred with the Chinese in Malaysia, who are considered more Chinese than China itself or in as we shall see, practically every colony in the New World. Thus, to understand America’s culture, we must understand 17th century England’s culture.

Many stereotypical American behaviors can be traced to the England that the first founders were fleeing. America’s intense religiosity, with levels of devotion higher than practically any other developed nation, could be attributed to the fever pitch of religious fanaticism that was occurring in England at the time. The mid 17th century was a dark time, filled with war in nearly every country, compounded by the worst years of the Mini Ice Age triggering famines on a pretty regular basis. As people looked for answers, religious fanaticism gripped the whole continent of Europe.

Similarly, America’s strong libertarian stance on many issues, ranging from guns to government to healthcare can be drawn from the domineering and oppressive states of the 17th century. Practically every government in Europe was trying to centralize and crush often centuries old local rights. This wasn’t done for the population’s benefit but mostly so the monarchies could extract more taxes in order to perform better in their permanent states of war. If a modern Libertarian were to time travel back to the mid-17th century and describe Europe’s governments as domineering, intrusive, parasitic, militaristic and self serving, they would basically be right. Governments only even got the concept that they existed to serve their populations, rather than merely being vehicles of glory for the ruling family at the turn of the 18th century. The 17th century was an era of near permanent war, as the sprawling Habsburg empire that included much of Latin America, Central Europe, Spain, Italy, and the Low Countries, with colonies in Africa and Asia, fought with practically everyone else in Europe and much of the rest of the world for that matter. Enough time had passed since the Black Death and not enough agricultural reforms had taken place that much of Eurasia was stretching demographic and Malthusian limits. As the heavily agrarian population became hungry and desperate, wars and rebellions appeared everywhere across Eurasia.

When trying to place America in some cultural category, it would have to be placed among the European Protestant nations. Americans have the North European reputation for being very hard workers, a trait that comes from a combination of strong seasonality, in which those who don’t work freeze over the winter and by rule by less rapacious governments, who created a greater incentive to work since they didn’t just steal the population’s fruits. America is more Protestant than it may appear. Beyond just being a majority Protestant country today, the American Catholic Church went through a process of “Americanization” in the 19th century, in which it tried to convert to “American” values, a process which made the American Catholic Church immensely suspicious to the rest of international Catholicism. Those “American values” were in turn deeply rooted in Protestantism. Similarly, most agnostics in the United States come from Protestant households. Even when they shed off Christianity, they carry the assumptions of a society with thousands of years of Christian history and identity.

If one looks at the guilt-shame-fear index, or a sociological index to measure what motivates people in different societies, America is probably one of the most guilt based societies in the world. This means that Americans are powered more by internal feelings of inadequacy than anything else. Most of Western Europe and its settler societies are guilt based, but the United States is more so. This is opposed to the shame based societies of Asia and Africa, in which motivation is based on maintaining the honor of one’s social group, or fear based tribal groups in which one worries about direct physical punishment. Surprisingly, America does have a strong degree of honor based culture, normally associated with herder peoples, but this is strongly regional inside America and a topic for a future chapter. America’s heavily guilt based culture is likely from America’s Protestant nature, in that the central tenet of Protestantism is the believer’s personal relationship with God, in which the believer must stand alone before God’s judgment, with the Church’s aid being circumstantial.

This is in fact very important to understanding America as a whole. In a society in which people were uprooted from their homelands, often with nothing but themselves and the wilderness, in which people were cut off from their families and all preexisting social ties, motivation and sense of purpose came from oneself. The guiding hand of American individualism is the Protestantism in which worth was dependent upon one’s personal relationship with God.

This massive sense of guilt creates bizarre aberations in the American psyche. America will alternate between phases of immense guilt and jingoism. In the recent era the perfect example of this was the upwelling of patriotic fervor, followed by lengthy and often in-advised wars in the Middle East following 9/11, followed by the immense upwelling of self flagellation and guilt of the modern day left, which views all of American history as evil. This is a view fairly common in radical Protestantism, in which the modern day evangelicals or 17th century Calvinists would alternate between obsessing over their own sinfulness while also believing themselves to be God’s chosen people and trying to convert everyone else to their creed. This is an origin of America’s belief in being a “City on a Hill”, or being God’s chosen people who must convert the rest of the world to their superior ways. To be fair, many peoples around the world, whether the Chinese, French, British, Scots, Germans or Jews among others have viewed themselves in a similar lyarrogant light. It rarely occurs to Americans that they are one nation among many, struggling with similar issues and under similar constraints. However, this Crusading passion has done an incredible amount of good at the same time. As we will see later, American Protestantism ended slavery, foot binding in China, campaigned for workers’ rights and against nearly any other injustice.

Argentina, a brief Comparison

There’s a temperate, majority white, Christian nation colonized by a Western European power that fought a war of Independence against Britain, and then a civil war over states rights, abolished slavery and then, followed by wars of expansion against the native population, became a massive exporter of wheat and beef with massive economic expansion before the First World War. It’s known for its cowboy culture, steaks and dance culture. I’m not talking about the United States. In many ways Argentina and the United States are very similar, but if we were to look at the picture after the First World War, the differences would quickly outweigh the differences. Before World War 1, Argentina was one of the wealthier nations in the world, with a standard of living above France’s. By 2000, it was a considered a failed economy which only a fool would invest in before the government inevitably hyper-inflated the currency again. After World War 1, while the US went about massive expansion in every field, followed by becoming the most powerful nation on earth, Argentina collapsed into immense poverty due to the collapse in agricultural prices after World War 1. This was followed by decades of poverty, currency failure, dictatorship and isolationism. What was the key difference here that let Argentina, a nation geographically blessed in many ways with fertile soil, a temperate climate and navigable rivers fail while the United States blasted ahead?

Argentina is immensely usefulto understand the United States and especially the importance of America’s English heritage, because the two nations are only really different in one aspect, which nation colonized them. Although strangely enough, Argentina fought its war of Independence against Britain, it was colonized primarily by Spain, and the United States, by Britain.

Although England and Spain were both Western European nations, they held key differences. While England had very strong institutions and a balance of power inside its social system, this did not occur in Spain. In Spain, the monarchy was able to gain preeminence over the society, sidelining their Parliament, or”Cortes”. This was compounded by the cruel process of the Reconquista, as the North Spanish Christians reconquered Southern Spain from the Muslims. In much of Spain, this resulted in taking land from productive native Muslim farmers and giving it to the North Spanish rancher nobility, who immediately lowered the productivity of the land. The former Muslim farmers crowded into the cities as a permanent underclass, while the lower agricultural productivity from the ranches resulted in a strangling of long term urban development. Before Columbus discovered the New World, Spain was in many ways a poor nation. It was mostly a raw material based economy, with most of its manufactured goods shipped in from the Low Countries. Spain was a more stratified and aristocratic society than anywhere else in Western Europe. A very telling statistic is that the nobility made up 2 percent of England’s population but 10 percent of Spain’s. The Spanish nobility, unlike the English, looked down on any sort of business or trade as beneath their honor, demanding to have a class of serfs work to support them.

Due to the centuries of conflict between the Muslim and Christian sections of Spain, in which the Christians finally won out in 1492, Spain kept the Crusader fervor for centuries longer than any other nation in Europe. England, Germany and France evicted their Jews in the 1290s, Spain did so in the 1490s. Due to the centuries of fighting against the alien religion, the Spainards were obsessed with maintaining religious purity. This resulted in the expulsion of Jews and Muslims followed by a strict ban on Protestantism. The actual number of deaths caused by the Spanish Inquisition was quite low, numbering in the thousands, but the effect on Spanish society was quite large. Spain was left entirely out of the Reformation and mostly out of the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment, all of whose ideas the Spanish Crown banned. Instead, Spain develop a militant and intolerant form of Catholicism, one that it used the immense wealth it gained from its conquests in the New World to promulgate. In both England and Spain’s cases, the value systems of the home states were exported to the colonies.

While we compare Spain negatively to England now, we must remember that at the time, Spain was viewed as the great European power—the power of the future, while England was a quaint relic of the past. Spain held territory on every continent except Antarctica, had the largest treasury in the world (with the possible exception of Mughal India) and had the most modern military. The Spainards believed themselves to be the apex of civilization, cultivating the best remnants of Roman and Classical civilization with the Christian message. The Spanish aristocratic policies were not created by unthinking Neanderthals, but by some of the most educated men in Europe, trained at the university of Salamanca, who studied Roman law and Aristotle to make the most enlightened government. Everyone knew aristocracy, or rule by the wise, cultured and educated, was superior to the idiotic and downright dangerous democracy, which would put power in the hands of reactionary magnates and most terrifyingly, open the door to rule by the unlettered masses, who would destroy everything of beauty and culture. The Spainards would be shocked to hear that their colonies turned out immeasurably poorer and worse developed than the English’s, a nation of sea dogs, mercenaries and pirates.

The Spanish Colonial Experience

The Spanish faced regions immeasurably wealthier than the English. They conquered the silver and gold rich Aztec and Inca empires, numbering in the millions. Some say that Britain and Spain’s very different colonial policies were founded upon this key difference rather than internal differences between England and Spain. The very different policy the British carried out when they conquered India, a fabulously wealthy populous tropical land, point to this being incorrect. When the Spanish conquered these regions, the proud Spanish nobility enserfed the native population, creating a feudal society based around the encomiendas, or aristocratic land holdings. The natives were often conscripted for labor projects, with the biggest being the silver mines of Petosi in modern Bolivia, whose rich veins funded much of the Spanish military for the better part of a century. For the natives conscripted to serve in it, it was practically a death sentence.

More than 20 Spanish men arrived for every woman, meaning most relations were interracial and the Spanish dealt with this by creating a complex racial caste system with European born Spainards coming at the top of the social hierarchy and pure blood Africans technically on the bottom, but with mixed-race European-natives likely truly on the bottom. The Spanish worried that further European immigration would disturb this complex racial balance and so in all the Spanish Empire, a region significantly larger than the British Colonies, only 350,000 Europeans immigrated while in the British Colonies in America, it was 750,000, even though Spain had nearly triple England’s population.

The enserfed populations had little reason to work hard or efficiently, since it would just be stolen by their landlords. Populations actively stagnated and declined after the Spanish Colonization, as opposed to the British colonies where they grew exponentially. Cities were rare in Spanish America as the peasants were subsistence farmers and the economic demand for the elites could be satisfied by seasonal fairs. The economy remained overwhelmingly agricultural as the Spanish purposely set up European Spanish economic monopolies that strangled economic growth. All of Spanish trade with America was concentrated in two yearly convoys that travelled between designated ports at designated times with the designated monopolies. In theory, if someone wanted to trade something from Spain to Argentina, rather than just crossing the Atlantic directly, one had to sail from Spain to Panama, cross the straits of Panama, sail to Peru and then take the goods over a thousand miles by wagon to Argentina. In reality, the Argentines just traded illegally with other European powers like Portugal and Britain.

The Spanish government was obsessed with maintaining control over their colonial empire. They purposely modeled their empire upon the Roman Empire, which may have worked in a geographically concentrated region like the Mediterranean but became ridiculous in a multi continental empire in which voyages across the ocean could take nearly half a year(when you add in the colonial dominions in areas like the Philippines this is even more the case). The Spanish gave the local white populations in their colonial possessions as little power as possible, with the vast majority of power concentrated in the hands of the Peninsulares, or European born Spainards often appointed directly from Madrid. The local elites jockeyed for honorific titles through hosting public events, while all real decisions were controlled by the Peninsulares. The elites clustered in the cities to compete for favor from the central authorities while they left their lands to overseers, which was not conducive to efficient agriculture. The Spanish government was terrified of ideological disturbance in their colonies and thus banned any religions except Catholicism. Printing was quite rare in Spanish America and literature banned and thus even more so than Spain, Latin America missed out on the Protestant Reformation, Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution. Education was purposely discouraged among the peasantry, with the sons of the elite sent to foreign universities.

It isn’t entirely a black and white picture. Race relations were far more fair in Spanish America than British. In British America, the black and native Americans were completely excluded from public life, while in Spanish, both could become free members of society and upon occasion, gain positions of respect. Similarly, we must remember that for the 17th century at least, Spanish America was viewed with much more admiration than British. When walking through Mexico City, European aristocrats saw a civilization that made sense to them. There were Cathedrals, refined aristocrats, fine dining, a clear class structure and sense of order. British America would have appeared to be a rustic, poor, chaotic and wooden place by comparison. This brings us to our main point.

When Latin America gained independence the seeds of the fruit that was planted by the Spanish bloomed. The lack of a local leadership resulted in unstable regimes and constant instability inside the societies themselves. The lack of a trustworthy government resulted in no long term investments. The lack of education and preexisting developed economic systems kept the population in poverty. Argentina, after the price of agricultural prices went down after World War 1, didn’t have a large enough industrial sector to maintain their economy. This was followed by the rise of populist dictator Peron, who appeased the masses by further short term economic measures that ended up stifling the industrial sector by shutting off Argentina off from the rest of the world economy in order to support the elites already powerful in the Industrial sector, as well as hyper-inflating the currency. Once Peron lost power, the following democratic government, still corrupt, similarly hyper-inflated the currency, erasing the population’s savings, destroyed foreign investors and the functioning of the economy.

The reason I’m putting so much emphasis on Spanish America is as a way of understanding the United States in that Spanish America is much more representative of the rest of the world and history. Most places in history were aristocratic, anti-capitalist, pluralistic but ethnically divided and fearful of intellectual debate. By looking at Latin-America, we see how bizarre the United States and British heritage is. You took a strange society and had it create an even stranger society. When one wonders how the US could have been so ridiculously successful, while countries like Brazil or Russia, who are similarly geographically blessed in many ways, were not, one must look back to an extremely particular and bizarre set of social factors. A perfect example of this Nogales, a border town on the Arizona-Sonora border. Both sides of the border have the same geography, people and culture. However, one side is 3 times richer, has a majority high school education level and significantly lower infant mortality. One side has had democracy for nearly 200 years and the other, 20.