Week Six - Chapters 14, 15, & 16

With the majority of my education on the history of the Americas coming from elementary school (which included colorful crayon drawings of the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria), I was somewhat fascinated by the role that disease played in the destruction of the Native Americans.  I was always under the impression that Europeans came in and simply militarily conquered the original inhabitants of the “New World.”  The text indicated that in some areas up to 90% the Native American peoples died from disease brought by the Europeans and Africans.  This of course had an impact on the available slave workforce which impacted their ability to grow food which in turn affected their source of an adequate amount of food.  Pretty elementary but not really anything that I can say I thought about before.

Moving onto the building up of the Russian empire and Geoffrey Hoskins statement, “The British had an empire, Russia was an empire.”  The Russians were able to utilize their own existing means in which to expand their empire whereas the countries of Europe were forced to use only what they were able to bring over by boat.  This allowed their Russians to build a strategy to slowly expand their borders akin to a virus.  This provided them certain benefits when it came to trade and commerce.  When it came to obtaining goods from the America’s the Russians simply traded their furs for American gold and silver.  There was no need to fund overseas trips using funds that could be better spent expanding and defending the empire at home.  

On has to wonder what would have happened if there had been an African Empire; a nation in which the people and civilization had progressed enough to defend themselves and their borders from other nations looking for slave labor.  Where would the workforce that other nations used to build their newly conquered lands?  As mentioned in the text, the African population was not necessarily chosen so much as they ended up being the largest mass of people left from which to draw from.  Not to mention the inclination that stereotyping of blacks as an inferior race began as early as the 14^th century and has continued to this day worldwide.  Finally, I find it interesting that Africa as a continent is still considered to be a third world country.  Could one surmise that this began when their peoples were pillaged and since that time their culture has never really been able to regain its footing in the world again?