Most early immigrants to the Western hemisphere were NOT white

[csziggy]

As a response to this thread: Thank God white people populated America

From 1493 by Charles C. Mann:

For millennia, almost all Europeans were found in Europe, few Africans existed outside Africa, and Asians lived, nearly without exception, in Asia alone. . .Colon's voyages inaugurated an unprecedented reshuffling of Homo sapiens: the human wing of the Columbian Exchange. . . Europeans became the majority in Argentina and Australia. Africans were found from Sao Paulo to Seattle, and Chinatowns sprang up all over the globe.

The movement was dominated by the African slave trade. . .For a long time the scale of slavery in the Americas was not fully grasped. The first systematic attempt at a count, Philip Curtin's The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census, did not appear until 1969, more than a century after its subject's extirpation. Partly stimulated by Curtin's study, David Eltis and Martin Halbert of Emory University, in Atlanta, led a remarkable effort in which scholars from a dozen nations pooled their work to create an online database of records from almost 35,000 separate slave voyages. Its most recent iteration, released in 2009, estimates that between 1500 and 1840, the heyday of the slave trade, 11.7 million captive Africans left for the Americas - a massive transfer of human flesh unlike anything before it. Roughly speaking, for every European who can to the American, three Africans made the trip.

The implications of these figures are as staggering as their size. Textbooks commonly present American history in terms of Europeans moving into a lightly settled hemisphere. In fact, the hemisphere was full of Indians - tens of millions of them. And most of the movement into the Americas was by Africans, who soon became the majority population in almost every place that wasn't controlled by Indians. Demographically speaking, Eltis has written, "America was an extension of Africa rather than Europe until late in the nineteenth century."

<SNIP>

This great transformation, a turning point in the story of our species, was wrought largely be African hands. The crowds thronging the streets of the new cities were mainly African crowds. The farmers growing rice and wheat in the new farms were mainly African farmers. The people rowing boats on rivers, then the most important highways, were mainly African people. The men and women on the ships and in the battles and around the mills were mainly African men and women. Slavery was the foundations institution of the modern Americas.
pp. 366-368.

Mann goes on to say that it was not until the nineteenth century that European immigrants dominated the Americas. May take: It is not surprising that this latter wave of immigrants were ignorant or uncaring of the vast contributions of their African predecessors. It is also not surprising that the eugenics, KKK, Nazis, and white power movements all seem to be dominated by the descendants of that later wave of immigrants to the Americas.

Americans (even white Americans such as myself and NOT just US Americans) should be fully aware of our history and of the massive contribution that the involuntary immigrants have made to creating our cultures. Without the slave trade this hemisphere would be a completely different place. In fact, there are areas where European incursions might have been completely unsuccessful without their African slaves. I wonder if in those locations the Indians might have been able to better survive?

[lagomorph777]

1. Columbus was not the first European, and Africans may have preceeded him

by at least 2,000 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_trans-oceanic_contact_theories#Claims_of_Africa_and_Middle_East_contact

[csziggy]

3. So far there is no definitive proof of early African contact with the Americas

Superficial appearance is not enough to make any conclusions, as in the Olmec head you picture.

While there are claims of early Welsh (Prince Madoc) and other groups (Romans) visiting the Americas, there is no hard proof. The Viking settlement in Canada is proven and there are indications they at least visited farther south (tree nuts that would not have grown as far north as the discovered settlement), it is pretty certain they did not endure. Even the Greenland colonies of the Vikings died out due to climatic shifts.

The book I quoted covers the exchange of culture, biologicals, and people after the Columbus (who he calls by the name used during his lifetime, Colon) contact in the Americas. Mann's previous book, 1492, covers the contact period, the culture of the American Indians prior to contact, and how the Indians were affected by the contact. In none of the archeological and historical material Mann referenced is there any indication that earlier contacts with the Eastern Hemisphere had significant impact on the Western Hemisphere.

While claims of earlier contacts are interesting and the contacts were possible, overall they did not affect world history the way the Columbus contact has.

[lagomorph777]

4. I agree on that. Columbus was (as far as we can tell) the first European slaveholder

in the Western Hemisphere.

And I know the numerous other transoceanic (and transatlantic) theories are unproven, but a number of them do have some backing evidence.

[csziggy]

5. I have to correct my other statement!

In another part of "1493" Mann has as section on Nunez de Balboa, the first Spaniard to see the Pacific according to most European histories. In 1500 he traveled to Hispaniola, drove up his debts to the point that in 1510 he snuck aboard a ship bound for the South American mainland to get to the first Spanish settlement there, in what is now Columbia, near the boarder with Panama. In negotiating with the local residents, he heard tales of another sea and people with more gold. In 1513 Balboa set off with an expedition to find the gold and a new sea.

He arrived at a domain named Quarequa, named for its ruler who tried to stop the entrance of the Spanish expedition. After a battle in which nearly all the men were killed, Balboa and his men entered the village:

Left behind in Quarequa's village were women, children, and some African slaves - "black men with big bodies and big bellies, and long beards and crooked hair," as one report described the a year and a half later. The Spaniards had been stunned to see them, and stunned again when they were told that an entire community of escaped African slaves existed just two days' walk away. Indians and Africans had been fighting for years, each side forcing captives from the other into slavery.

The Spaniards' identification of the slaves as Africans is unlikely to be mistaken - they were traveling with at least two. Nor does the story seem to be apocryphal: half a dozen Spanish sources attest to it. Not one of these sources, however, drew out the implications. First, the existence of escaped slaves in the mountains likely meant that Africans, not Europeans, were the first people from across the Atlantic to settle on the mainland - and to see the Pacific from the American side. Second, it meant that the isthmus was a good place for maroons* to evade capture. The latter fact would come to preoccupy the Spanish crown.
pp. 446, "1493"

In earlier parts of Mann's discussion of African slave trade, he covers that the large scale European import of African slaves to the Americans did not begin until 1520 when the Indian population had been decimated by disease and mistreatment. While there were some Africans who traveled with some Spaniards, mostly they were bondsmen or servant rather than the forced labor type of slaves that became prevalent in the Americas in later centuries. They were few and the fates of most of the Africans who accompanied the Spanish were documented at least as well as the fates of the Europeans in the Americas.

[lagomorph777]

6. Wow, that is interesting.

It does leave a lot of open questions!

[Angry Dragon]

2. interesting