Summary
The Shape of Things to Come
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Great Empires and the Arrival of Europeans
Before European arrival, civilizations like the Incas and Aztecs thrived with significant advancements in science and agriculture, comparable to European empires. Despite their sophistication, these native populations were unprepared for the arrival of Europeans.
The Biological Catastrophe
The primary threat posed by Europeans was not weaponry or numerical superiority, but the introduction of Old World diseases. Because Native Americans lacked prior exposure to domesticated animals and historical plagues, they had no acquired immunity to illnesses such as smallpox, typhus, influenza, and measles. These diseases decimated millions, effectively crippling the Aztec and Inca empires by destroying leadership and infrastructure. Similar patterns occurred in North America, where an estimated 90 percent of the indigenous population was wiped out within a century of contact, clearing the way for European settlement and the eventual creation of new, mixed-race societies.
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The Shape of Things to Come
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Central and South America had seen the rise and fall of great civilizations before; the Olmecs had been gone for more than a thousand years and there were only remnants of the great Mayan Empire. But when the Europeans arrived, the Incas and the Aztecs were at their peak, still spreading their influence over their respective regions. They were creative, ingenious, and brilliant in their scientific and agricultural growth, and they both had built empires as great as any in Europe.
But despite the diversity of native populations and the existence of several strong empires in South America, Native Americans were wholly unprepared for the arrival of Europeans. It was not European technology that proved the greatest threat, though their weapons of war were more advanced, nor the number of Europeans that came to the Americas, for at first those numbers were tiny in comparison to the populations of the native tribes and empires. The greatest weapon brought by the Europeans was one they did not even realize they had: biology.
Having had no contact with the outside world, with its domesticated animals and history of plagues, the Native Americans for the most part had lived free of the types of terrible diseases that had ravaged the populations of Asia, Europe, and Africa for millenia. Thus, they lacked the immunities built up over generations when faced with the deadly epidemics brought by the European invaders. They quickly began to fall not to sword or gunshot, but to smallpox, typhus, influenza, diphtheria, and measles. Disease quickly decimated native communities by killing millions, and war and slavery finished them off.
The Aztecs were betrayed by their own ruler, Montezuma, and by the very people they subjugated, as the Spanish enlisted both as allies. But it was smallpox that really destroyed the seat of their power at Tenochtitlan.
The Spaniards’ diseases also made their way to the Incas, killing much of the population including the royal family, thereby leaving the empire without a leader and in the midst of chaos. When the conquistadors arrived, they conquered the Incas far more easily.
In North America, disease played a part as well, though the more spread out nature of the North American native population allowed them to weather it somewhat better. Still, millions were felled by disease even before the English began to arrive and truly begin taking over North America in the 1600s. While the exact numbers are unknown, scholars estimate that nearly 90 percent of the Native American population was wiped out within the first century of contact with European explorers. Entire peoples were made extinct, and their lands were repopulated by the children of their conquerors. And as those who survived mixed with Europeans and the African slaves they brought with them, new races were created and new empires began to rise as New World and Old World mixed.