As a result of Columbus's voyage, they found much more, a whole “New World” inhabited by numerous peoples. Having conquered these peoples with lightning speed, the Europeans began the merciless exploitation of the natural and human resources of the continent they had captured. It was from this moment that the breakthrough began, which by the end of the 19th century made Euro-American civilization dominant over the rest of the peoples of the planet.

The remarkable Marxist geographer James Blaut, in his pioneering study The Colonial Model of the World, paints a broad picture of early capitalist production in colonial South America and shows its key importance for the emergence of European capitalism. It is necessary to briefly summarize his conclusions.

Precious metals

Thanks to the conquest of America, by 1640 Europeans received from there at least 180 tons of gold and 17 thousand tons of silver. This is official data. In fact, these figures can easily be multiplied by two, taking into account poor customs records and widespread smuggling. The huge influx of precious metals led to a sharp expansion of the sphere of monetary circulation necessary for the development of capitalism. But, more importantly, the fall of gold and silver allowed European entrepreneurs to pay higher prices for goods and labor and thereby seize the dominant heights of international trade and production, pushing aside their competitors - groups of non-European proto-bourgeoisie, especially in the Mediterranean region. Leaving aside for now the role of genocide in the extraction of precious metals, as well as other forms of capitalist economies in Colombian America, it is necessary to note Blaut's important argument that the very process of extracting these metals and the economic activity necessary to support it was profit-generating.

Plantations

In the 15-16th centuries. Commercial and feudal sugar production developed throughout the Mediterranean and in West and East Africa, although honey was still preferred in Northern Europe due to its lower cost. Even then, the sugar industry was an important part of the proto-capitalist sector of the Mediterranean economy. Then, throughout the 16th century, there is a process of rapid development of sugar plantations in America, which replaces and displaces sugar production in the Mediterranean. Thus, taking advantage of the two traditional benefits of colonialism - “free” land and cheap labor - European proto-capitalists eliminate their competitors with their feudal and semi-feudal production. No other type of industry, Blaut concludes, was as important to the development of capitalism before the 19th century as the sugar plantations in Colombian America. And the data he provides is truly amazing.

So in 1600, 30,000 tons of sugar were exported from Brazil with a selling price of 2 million pounds sterling. This is about twice the value of all British exports that year. Let us recall that it is Britain and its commercial wool production that Eurocentric historians (i.e., 99% of all historians) consider the main engine of capitalist development in the 17th century. That same year, per capita income in Brazil (excluding the Indians, of course) was higher than in Britain, which only later caught up with Brazil. By the end of the 16th century, the rate of capitalist accumulation on Brazilian plantations was so high that it allowed production to double every 2 years. At the beginning of the 17th century, Dutch capitalists, who controlled a significant part of the sugar business in Brazil, carried out calculations that showed that the annual rate of profit in this industry was 56%, and in monetary terms, almost 1 million pounds sterling (a fantastic amount for that time). Moreover, these profits were even higher at the end of the 16th century, when the cost of production, including the purchase of slaves, was only one-fifth of the income from the sale of sugar.

Sugar plantations in America occupied a central place in the development of the early capitalist economy in Europe. But besides sugar, there was also tobacco, there were spices, dyes, and there was a huge fishing industry in Newfoundland and other places on the East Coast of North America. All this was also part of the capitalist development of Europe. The slave trade was also extremely profitable. Blauth estimates that by the end of the 16th century, the colonial economy of the Western Hemisphere employed up to 1 million people, about half of whom were employed in capitalist production. In the 1570s, the huge Andean mining town of Potosi had a population of 120,000, more than the population of European cities such as Paris, Rome or Madrid at the time.

Finally, about fifty new species of agricultural plants, cultivated by the agricultural genius of the peoples of the “New World”, fell into the hands of Europeans, such as potatoes, corn, tomatoes, a number of varieties of pepper, cocoa for chocolate production, a number of legumes, peanuts, sunflowers, etc. -potatoes and corn became cheap substitutes for bread for the European masses, saving millions from devastating crop shortages, allowing Europe to double food production in the fifty years from 1492 and thus providing one of the fundamental conditions for creating a market for wage labor for capitalist production.

So, thanks to the works of Blaut and a number of other radical historians, the key role of early European colonialism in the development of capitalism and its “centering” (centratedness is a neologism of J. Blaut - A.B.) begins to emerge precisely in Europe, and not in other areas of the world proto-capitalist development . Vast territories, cheap slave labor of enslaved peoples, robbery of the natural resources of the Americas gave the European proto-bourgeoisie a decisive superiority over its competitors in the international economic system of the 16th and 17th centuries, allowed it to rapidly accelerate the already existing trends of capitalist production and accumulation and, thus, initiate the process of social -political transformation of feudal Europe into a bourgeois society. As the famous Caribbean Marxist historian S.R.L. wrote. James, “the slave trade and slavery became the economic basis of the French Revolution... Almost all the industries that developed in France in the 18th century were based on the production of goods for the Guinean coast or for America.” (James, 47-48).

At the heart of this fateful turn in world history was the genocide of the peoples of the Western Hemisphere. This genocide was not only the first in the history of capitalism, not only stands at its origins, it is both the largest in terms of the number of victims and the longest extermination of peoples and ethnic groups, which continues to this day.

"I have become death, the Destroyer of Worlds."
(Bhagavad Gita)

Robert Oppenheimer remembered these lines when he saw the first atomic explosion. With much greater right, the ominous words of the ancient Sanskrit poem could be recalled by the people who were on the ships Niña, Pinta and Santa Maria, when 450 years before the Explosion, on the same dark early morning, they noticed a fire on the leeward side of the island, which they later named in honor of the Saint Savior - San Salvador.

Twenty-six days after testing a nuclear device in the New Mexico desert, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima killed at least 130,000 people, almost all of them civilians. In just 21 years after Columbus landed on the islands of the Caribbean, the largest of them, renamed Hispaniola by the Admiral (present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic), lost almost all of its indigenous population - about 8 million people, killed, died from disease, hunger, slavery labor and despair. The devastating power of this Spanish "nuclear bomb" on Hispaniola was equivalent to more than 50 Hiroshima-type atomic bombs. And that was just the beginning.

Thus, by comparing the first and “most monstrous in terms of size and consequences of genocide in world history” with the practice of genocides in the 20th century, historian from the University of Hawaii David Stanard begins his book “American Holocaust” (1992), and in this historical perspective lies, in my opinion view, the special significance of his work, as well as the significance of Ward Churchill's subsequent book, A Minor Question of Genocide (1997), and a number of other studies in recent years. In these works, the destruction of the indigenous population of the Americas by Europeans and Latinos appears not only as the most massive and long-lasting (until today) genocide in world history, but also as an organic part of Euro-American civilization from the late Middle Ages to Western imperialism of the present day.

Stanard begins his book by describing the amazing richness and variety of human life in the Americas before Columbus's fateful voyage. He then takes the reader along the historical and geographical route of genocide: from the extermination of the indigenous inhabitants of the Caribbean, Mexico, Central and South America, to the turn north and the destruction of Indians in Florida, Virginia and New England, and finally through the Great Prairies and the Southwest to California and the Pacific Coast of the Northwest. The following part of my article is based primarily on Stanard's book, while the second part, genocide in North America, uses Churchill's work.

Who was the victim of the most massive genocide in world history?

The human society destroyed by the Europeans in the Caribbean was in every respect superior to their own, if closeness to the ideal of a communist society is taken as a measure of development. It would be more accurate to say that, thanks to a rare combination of natural conditions, the Tainos (or Arawaks) lived in a communist society. Not the way the European Marx imagined it, but communist nonetheless. Residents of the Greater Antilles have reached a high level in regulating their relationships with the natural world. They learned to get from nature everything they needed, not by depleting it, but by cultivating and transforming it. They had huge aqua farms, in each of which they raised up to a thousand large sea turtles (the equivalent of 100 head of cattle). They literally “collected” small fish from the sea, using plant substances that paralyzed them. Their agriculture was superior to that of Europe and was based on a three-tier planting system that uses combinations of different plant types to create favorable soil and climate conditions. Their homes, spacious, clean and bright, would be the envy of the European masses.

American geographer Karl Sauer comes to the following conclusion:

“The tropical idyll that we find in the descriptions of Columbus and Peter Martyr was largely true.” About Tainos (Arawak): “These people did not need anything. They took care of their plants and were skilled fishermen, canoeists and swimmers. They built attractive homes and kept them clean. Aesthetically, they expressed themselves in wood. They had free time to play ball, dance and play music. They lived in peace and friendship." (Standard, 51).

But Columbus, that typical European of the 15th and 16th centuries, had a different idea of ​​the “good society.” On October 12, 1492, the day of "Contact", he wrote in his diary:
“These people walk around in what their mother gave birth to, but they are good-natured... they can be made free and converted to our Holy Faith. They will make good and skillful servants.”

That day, representatives of the two continents met for the first time on an island that the locals called Guanahani. Early in the morning, a crowd of curious Tainos gathered under the tall pines on the sandy shore. They watched as a strange boat with a hull like a fish skeleton and bearded strangers in it swam to the shore and buried itself in the sand. Bearded men came out and pulled her higher, away from the foam of the surf. Now they stood opposite each other. The newcomers were dark-skinned and black-haired, with shaggy heads and overgrown beards, and many of their faces were riddled with smallpox, one of the 60 to 70 deadly diseases they would bring to the Western Hemisphere. There was a heavy smell coming from them. In Europe in the 15th century, people did not wash. At a temperature of 30-35 degrees Celsius, the aliens were dressed from head to toe, with metal armor hanging over their clothes. In their hands they held long thin knives, daggers and sticks sparkling in the sun.

In his logbook, Columbus often noted the amazing beauty of the islands and their inhabitants - friendly, happy, peaceful. And just two days after the first contact, an ominous entry appears in the journal: “50 soldiers are enough to conquer them all and force them to do whatever we want.” “The locals allow us to go wherever we want and give us everything we ask from them.” What surprised the Europeans most was the incomprehensible generosity of this people. And this is not surprising. Columbus and his comrades sailed to these islands from the real hell that was Europe at that time. They were the real fiends (and in many ways the scum) of the European hell, over which the bloody dawn of primitive capitalist accumulation rose. We need to tell you briefly about this place.

Hell called Europe

In hell, Europe was waging a fierce class war, frequent epidemics of smallpox, cholera and plague devastated cities, and even more often death from hunger decimated the population. But even in prosperous years, according to a 16th-century historian of Spain, “the rich ate and ate to their heart’s content, while thousands of hungry eyes looked greedily at their gargantuan dinners.” So precarious was the existence of the masses that even in the 17th century, every "average" increase in the price of wheat or millet in France killed an equal or twice as large percentage of the population as US casualties in the Civil War. Centuries after Columbus's voyage, the city ditches of Europe still served as public toilets, with the entrails of killed animals and the remains of carcasses left to rot in the streets. A particular problem in London were the so-called. “Poor holes” are “large, deep, open pits where the corpses of the dead poor were piled, in a row, layer upon layer. Only when the hole was filled to the brim was it covered with earth.” One contemporary wrote: “How disgusting is the stench that comes from these pits filled with corpses, especially in the heat and after the rain.” Little better was the smell emanating from living Europeans, most of whom were born and died without ever washing themselves. Almost every one of them bore traces of smallpox and other deforming diseases that left their victims half-blind, pockmarked, scabbed, rotting chronic sores, lame, etc. The average life expectancy did not reach 30 years. Half of the children died before they turned 10.

A criminal could be waiting for you around every corner. One of the most popular methods of robbery was to throw a stone from a window onto the head of the victim and then search him, and one of the holiday entertainments was to burn a dozen or two cats alive. During the famine years, the cities of Europe were rocked by riots. And the largest class war of that era, or rather a series of wars collectively called Peasant Wars, claimed more than 100,000 lives. The fate of the rural population was not the best. The classic description of the French peasants of the 17th century, left by La Bruere and confirmed by modern historians, sums up the existence of this largest class of feudal Europe:

“Sullen animals, males and females, scattered across the countryside, dirty and deathly pale, scorched by the sun, chained to the earth, which they dig and shovel with invincible tenacity; they have a kind of gift of speech, and when they straighten up, you can see human faces on them, and they really are people. At night they return to their lairs, where they live on black bread, water and roots."

And what Lawrence Stone wrote about a typical English village can be applied to the rest of Europe at that time:

“It was a place full of hatred and malice, the only thing that bound its inhabitants were episodes of mass hysteria, which for a time united the majority to torture and burn the local witch.” There were towns in England and on the Continent in which up to a third of the population were accused of witchcraft, and where 10 out of every hundred townspeople were executed on this charge in one year alone. At the end of the 16th and 17th centuries, more than 3,300 people were executed for “Satanism” in one of the regions of peaceful Switzerland. In the tiny village of Wiesensteig, 63 “witches” were burned in one year. In Obermarchtal, with a population of 700, 54 people died at the stake in three years.

Poverty was such a central phenomenon of European society that in the 17th century the French language had a whole palette of words (about 20) to denote all its gradations and shades. The Academy's Dictionary explained the meaning of the term dans un etat d'indigence absolue: “one who previously had no food or the necessary clothing or a roof over his head, but who has now said goodbye to the few battered cooking bowls and blankets that constituted his main possessions.” working families."

Slavery flourished in Christian Europe. The Church welcomed and encouraged him; it was itself a major slave trader; I will discuss the significance of her policies in this area for understanding genocide in America at the end of the essay. In the 14th and 15th centuries, most slaves came from Eastern Europe, especially Romania (history repeats itself in modern times). Little girls were especially valued. From a letter from one slave trader to a client interested in this product: “When the ships arrive from Romania, there should be girls there, but keep in mind that small slaves are as expensive as adult ones; Of those that are of any value, not one costs less than 50-60 florins.” Historian John Boswell notes that "10 to 20 percent of women sold in Seville in the 15th century were pregnant or had babies, and these unborn children and infants usually went to the buyer with the woman at no additional cost."

The rich had their own problems. They craved gold and silver to satisfy their habits for exotic goods, habits acquired since the time of the first crusades, i.e. the first colonial expeditions of Europeans. Silks, spices, fine cotton, drugs and medicines, perfumes and jewelry required a lot of money. So gold became for Europeans, in the words of one Venetian, “the veins of the entire state life... its mind and soul. . .its essence and its very life.” But the supply of precious metals from Africa and the Middle East was unreliable. In addition, wars in Eastern Europe drained European coffers. It was necessary to find a new, reliable and preferably cheaper source of gold.

What can we add to this? As can be seen from the above, brutal violence was the norm of European life. But at times it took on a particularly pathological character and seemed to foreshadow what awaited the unsuspecting inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere. In addition to the everyday scenes of witch hunts and bonfires, in 1476 a man in Milan was torn to pieces by a mob and then eaten by his tormentors. In Paris and Lyon, Huguenots were killed and cut into pieces, which were then openly sold on the streets. Other outbreaks of sophisticated torture, murder and ritual cannibalism were not unusual.

Finally, while Columbus was searching Europe for money for his sea adventures, the Inquisition was raging in Spain. There and throughout Europe, those suspected of apostasy from Christianity were subjected to torture and execution in every form of which the inventive imagination of the Europeans was capable. Some were hanged, burned at the stake, boiled in a cauldron, or hung on the rack. Others were crushed, their heads were cut off, they were skinned alive, they were drowned and quartered.

This was the world that the former slave trader Christopher Columbus and his sailors left behind in August 1492. They were typical inhabitants of this world, its deadly bacilli, the killing power of which was soon to be experienced by millions of human beings living on the other side of the Atlantic.

Numbers

“When the white masters came to our land, they brought fear and withered flowers. They disfigured and destroyed the color of other nations. . . Marauders by day, criminals by night, murderers of the world." Mayan book Chilam Balam.

Stanard and Churchill spend many pages describing the conspiracy of the Euro-American scientific establishment to conceal the actual population of the American continent in the pre-Columbian era. The Smithsonian Institution in Washington was and continues to be at the head of this conspiracy. And Ward Churchill also talks in detail about the resistance that American Zionist scientists, specializing in the so-called strategic area for the ideology of modern imperialism. "Holocaust", i.e. of the Nazi genocide against European Jews, have contributed to the attempts of progressive historians to establish the actual scale and world-historical significance of the genocide of Native Americans at the hands of “Western civilization.” We will address this last question in the second part of this article, which focuses on genocide in North America. As for the flagship of official American science, the Smithsonian Institution, until very recently, promoted as “scientific” estimates of the pre-Columbian population made in the 19th and early 20th centuries by racist anthropologists like James Mooney, according to which no more than 1 100,000 people. Only in the post-war period, the use of agricultural analysis methods made it possible to establish that the population density there was an order of magnitude higher, and that back in the 17th century, for example, on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, now a resort place for the richest and most influential Euro-Americans, 3 thousand Indians lived. By the mid-60s. estimates of the indigenous population north of the Rio Grande rose to at least 12.5 million by the time of the European invasion. In the Great Lakes region alone, by 1492, up to 3.8 million lived, and in the basin of the Mississippi and its main tributaries - up to 5.25. In the 80s new research has shown that the population of pre-Columbian North America may have been as high as 18.5, and the entire hemisphere as high as 112 million (Dobyns). Based on these studies, Cherokee demographer Russell Thornton made calculations to determine how many people did and did not live in North America. His conclusion: at least 9-12.5 million. Recently, many historians have taken the average between the calculations of Dobyns and Thornton as the norm, i.e. 15 million as the most likely approximate number of indigenous people in North America. In other words, the population of this continent was about fifteen times higher than what the Smithsonian Institution claimed back in the 1980s, and seven and a half times higher than what it is willing to admit today. Moreover, calculations close to those carried out by Dobyns and Thornton were known already in the mid-19th century, but they were ignored as ideologically unacceptable, contradicting the central myth of the conquerors about the supposedly “primordial”, “desert” continent, which was just waiting for them to populate it .

Based on modern data, it can be said that when Christopher Columbus landed on one of the islands of the continent soon called the “New World,” on October 12, 1492, its population was between 100 and 145 million people (Standard). Two centuries later it had declined by 90%. To this day, the most “lucky” of the once existing peoples of both Americas have retained no more than 5% of their former numbers. In terms of its size and duration (to this day), the genocide of the indigenous population of the Western Hemisphere has no parallel in world history.

So on Hispaniola, where about 8 million Tainos flourished until 1492, by 1570 there were only two miserable villages of the island’s indigenous inhabitants, about which 80 years ago Columbus wrote that “there are no better and more kind people in the world.”

Some statistics by region.

In the 75 years from the arrival of the first Europeans in 1519 to 1594, the population of Central Mexico, the most densely populated region of the American continent, fell by 95%, from 25 million to barely 1 million 300 thousand people.

In the 60 years since the Spanish arrived, the population of Western Nicaragua has dropped by 99%, from more than 1 million to less than 10 thousand people.

In Western and Central Honduras, 95% of the indigenous people were exterminated over half a century. In Cordoba, near the Gulf of Mexico, 97% in just over a century. In the neighboring province of Jalapa, 97% of the population was also destroyed: from 180 thousand in 1520 to 5 thousand in 1626. And so on throughout Mexico and Central America. The arrival of Europeans meant the immediate and almost complete disappearance of the indigenous population, who had lived and flourished there for many millennia.

On the eve of the European invasion of Peru and Chile, from 9 to 14 million people lived in the homeland of the Incas... Long before the end of the century, no more than 1 million inhabitants remained in Peru. And in a few more years - only half of this. 94% of the Andean population, between 8.5 and 13.5 million people, was destroyed.

Brazil was perhaps the most populated region of the Americas. According to the first Portuguese governor, Tome de Souza, the reserves of the indigenous population here were inexhaustible “even if we butchered them in a slaughterhouse.” He was wrong. Just 20 years after the founding of the colony in 1549, epidemics and slave labor on plantations brought the peoples of Brazil to the brink of extinction.

By the end of the 16th century, about 200 thousand Spaniards moved to both “Indies”. To Mexico, Central America and further south. By this time, from 60 to 80 million indigenous inhabitants of these areas were destroyed.

Columbus era genocidal methods

Here we see striking parallels with the methods of the Nazis. Already in the second expedition of Columbus (1493), the Spaniards used an analogue of Hitler's Sonderkommandos to enslave and exterminate the local population. Parties of Spanish thugs with dogs trained to kill people, instruments of torture, gallows and shackles organized regular punitive expeditions with inevitable mass executions. But it is important to emphasize the following. The connection between this early capitalist genocide and the Nazi one lay deeper. The Taino people, who inhabited the Greater Antilles and were completely exterminated within several decades, did not fall victim to “medieval” atrocities, not Christian fanaticism, or even the pathological greed of European invaders. Both of them, and the other, and the third led to genocide only when organized by a new economic rationality. The entire population of Hispaniola, Cuba, Jamaica and other islands was registered as private property, which was supposed to bring profit. This methodical accounting of a huge population scattered across the world's largest islands by a bunch of Europeans fresh out of the Middle Ages is most striking.

Columbus was the first to use mass hangings

From Spanish accountants in armor and with a cross there is a direct thread to the “rubber” genocide in the “Belgian” Congo, which killed 10 million Africans, and to the Nazi system of slave labor for destruction.

Columbus obliged all residents over 14 years of age to hand over to the Spaniards a thimble of gold dust or 25 pounds of cotton every three months (in areas where there was no gold). Those who fulfilled this quota were hung on their necks with a copper token indicating the date of receipt of the last tribute. The token gave its owner the right to three months of life. Those caught without this token or with an expired one had the hands of both hands cut off, hung them around the victim’s neck and sent him to die in his village. Columbus, who had previously been involved in the slave trade along the western coast of Africa, apparently adopted this type of execution from Arab slave traders. During Columbus's governorship, up to 10 thousand Indians were killed in this way on Hispaniola alone. It was almost impossible to fulfill the established quota. The locals had to give up growing food and all other activities in order to dig for gold. Hunger began. Weakened and demoralized, they became easy prey for diseases brought by the Spaniards. Such as the flu brought by pigs from the Canary Islands, which were brought to Hispaniola by Columbus's second expedition. Tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Tainos died in this first pandemic of American genocide. An eyewitness describes huge piles of Hispaniola residents who died from the flu, with no one to bury them. The Indians tried to run wherever they could: across the entire island, into the mountains, even to other islands. But there was no salvation anywhere. Mothers killed their children before killing themselves. Entire villages resorted to mass suicide by throwing themselves off cliffs or taking poison. But even more found death at the hands of the Spaniards.

In addition to atrocities that could at least be explained by the cannibalistic rationality of systematic profiteering, the genocide on Attila and later on the continent included seemingly irrational, unjustifiable forms of violence on a massive scale and in pathological, sadistic forms. Sources contemporary to Columbus describe how Spanish colonists hanged, roasted on spits, and burned Indians at the stake. Children were cut into pieces to feed the dogs. And this despite the fact that the Tainos initially offered virtually no resistance to the Spaniards. “The Spaniards bet on who could cut a person in two with one blow or cut off his head, or they ripped open their bellies. They tore babies from their mother's breasts by the legs and smashed their heads on stones... They impaled other children on their long swords, along with their mothers and everyone who stood in front of them.” More zeal could not have been demanded from any SS man on the Eastern Front, Ward Churchill rightly notes. Let us add that the Spaniards established a rule that for one killed Christian, they would kill a hundred Indians. The Nazis didn't have to invent anything. All they had to do was copy.

Cuban Lidice 16th century

The testimonies of the Spaniards of that era about their sadism are truly innumerable. In one often cited episode in Cuba, a Spanish unit of about 100 soldiers halted on the bank of a river and, finding sharpening stones in it, sharpened their swords on them. Wanting to test their sharpness, an eyewitness of this event reports, they pounced on a group of men, women, children and old people sitting on the shore (apparently specially rounded up for this), who looked in fear at the Spaniards and their horses, and began to rip open their bellies, chop and cut until you kill them all. Then they entered a large house nearby and did the same there, killing everyone they found there. Streams of blood flowed from the house, as if a herd of cows had been slaughtered there. Seeing the terrible wounds of the dead and dying was a terrible sight.

This massacre began in the village of Zukayo, whose residents had recently prepared a lunch of cassava, fruit and fish for the conquistadors. From there it spread throughout the area. No one knows how many Indians the Spaniards killed in this outburst of sadism before their bloodlust was dulled, but Las Casas estimates it to be well over 20,000.

The Spaniards took pleasure in inventing sophisticated cruelties and tortures. They built a gallows high enough so that the hanged man could touch the ground with his toes to avoid strangulation, and thus hanged thirteen Indians, one after another, in honor of Christ the Savior and his apostles. While the Indians were still alive, the Spaniards tested the sharpness and strength of their swords on them, opening their chests with one blow so that their insides were visible, and there were those who did worse things. Then, straw was wrapped around their dismembered bodies and burned alive. One soldier caught two children about two years old, pierced their throats with a dagger and threw them into the abyss.

If these descriptions sound familiar to those who have heard of the massacres in My Lai, Song Mai and other Vietnamese villages, the similarity is made even stronger by the term "pacification" that the Spaniards used to describe their reign of terror. But no matter how horrifying the massacres in Vietnam were, their scale cannot be compared with what happened five hundred years ago on the island of Hispaniola alone. By the time Columbus arrived in 1492, the population of this island was 8 million. Four years later, between a third and half of that number had died and been destroyed. And after 1496 the rate of destruction increased even more.

Slave labor

Unlike British America, where the immediate goal of genocide was the physical destruction of the indigenous population to conquer “living space,” genocide in Central and South America was a by-product of the brutal exploitation of Indians for economic purposes. Massacres and torture were not uncommon, but they served as weapons of terror to subdue and “pacify” the indigenous population. The inhabitants of America were considered as tens of millions of free labor of natural slaves for the extraction of gold and silver. There were so many of them that the rational economic method for the Spaniards seemed not to reproduce the labor force of their slaves, but to replace them. The Indians were killed by backbreaking work, and then replaced with a fresh batch of slaves.

From the highlands of the Andes they were driven to coca plantations in the lowlands of the tropical forest, where their organisms, unaccustomed to such a climate, became easy prey to fatal diseases. Such as "uta", which rotted the nose, mouth and throat and led to a painful death. So high was the mortality rate on these plantations (up to 50% in five months) that even the Crown became concerned and issued a decree limiting coca production. Like all decrees of this kind, it remained on paper, because, as a contemporary wrote, “on coca plantations there is one disease that is more terrible than all others. This is the unlimited greed of the Spaniards."

But it was even worse to end up in the silver mines. Workers were lowered to a depth of 250 meters with a bag of roasted maize for a week-long shift. In addition to backbreaking work, collapses, poor ventilation and violence by supervisors, Indian miners breathed toxic fumes of arsenic, mercury, etc. “If 20 healthy Indians go down a mine on Monday, only half can come out of it crippled on Sunday,” wrote one contemporary. Stanard estimates that the average life expectancy of coca harvesters and Indian miners in the early period of the genocide was no more than three or four months, i.e. approximately the same as in the synthetic rubber factory in Auschwitz in 1943.

Hernán Cortés tortures Cuauhtemoc to find out where the Aztecs hid the gold.

After the massacre in the Aztec capital Tenochtetlan, Cortés declared Central Mexico "New Spain" and established a colonial regime based on slave labor. This is how a contemporary describes the methods of “pacification” (hence “pacification” as the official policy of Washington during the Vietnam War) and enslavement of Indians to work in the mines.

“Numerous accounts from numerous witnesses tell of Indians being marched in columns to the mines. They are chained to each other with neck shackles.

Pits with stakes on which Indians were impaled

Those who fall down have their heads cut off. There are stories of children being locked in houses and burned, and stabbed to death if they walk too slowly. It is common practice to cut off women's breasts and tie weights to their legs before throwing them into a lake or lagoon. There are stories of babies torn from their mothers, killed and used as road signs. Fugitive or “wandering” Indians have their limbs cut off and sent back to their villages with their severed hands and noses hung around their necks. They talk about “pregnant women, children and old people, who are caught as many as possible” and thrown into special pits, at the bottom of which sharp stakes are dug and “they are left there until the pit is full.” And much, much more." (Standard, 82-83)

Indians are burned in their houses

As a result, of the approximately 25 million inhabitants who inhabited the Mexican kingdom when the conquistadors arrived, by 1595 only 1.3 million remained alive. The rest were mostly martyred in the mines and plantations of New Spain.

In the Andes, where Pizarro's gangs wielded swords and whips, the population fell from 14 million to less than 1 million by the end of the 16th century. The reasons were the same as in Mexico and Central America. As one Spaniard in Peru wrote in 1539, “The Indians here are completely destroyed and are dying... They pray with a cross that they be given food for God’s sake. But [the soldiers] kill all the llamas for nothing more than making candles... The Indians are left nothing for sowing, and since they have no livestock and nowhere to get it, they can only die of hunger.” (Churchill, 103)

Psychological aspect of genocide

Recent historians of the American genocide are beginning to pay more and more attention to its psychological aspect, the role of depression and stress in the complete destruction of tens and hundreds of peoples and ethnic groups. And here I see a number of parallels with the current situation of the peoples of the former Soviet Union.

The chronicles of the genocide have preserved numerous evidence of the mental “dislocation” of the indigenous population of America. The cultural war that European conquerors waged for centuries against the cultures of the peoples they enslaved with the open intention of their destruction had terrible consequences on the psyche of the indigenous population of the New World. Reactions to this “psychic attack” ranged from alcoholism to chronic depression, mass infanticide and suicide, and even more often, people simply lay down and die. Side effects of mental damage were a sharp drop in the birth rate and a rise in infant mortality. Even if disease, hunger, hard labor and murder did not lead to the complete destruction of the indigenous community, low birth rates and infant mortality led to this sooner and later. The Spanish noticed a sharp drop in the number of children and at times tried to force the Indians to have children.

Kirkpatrick Sale summed up the Taino reaction to their genocide:

“Las Casas, like others, expresses the opinion that what most struck the Tainos about the strange white people from the big ships was not their violence, not even their greed and strange attitude towards property, but rather their coldness, their spiritual callousness, their lack of love " (Kirkpatrick Sale. The Conquest of Paradise. p. 151.)

In general, reading the history of imperialist genocide on all continents - from Hispaniola, the Andes and California to Equatorial Africa, the Indian subcontinent, China and Tasmania - you begin to understand literature like Wells’s “War of the Worlds” or Bradbury’s “The Martian Chronicles” differently, not to mention Hollywood alien invasions. Do these nightmares of Euro-American fiction originate from the horrors of the past suppressed in the “collective unconscious”, are they not intended to suppress feelings of guilt (or, conversely, to prepare for new genocides) by portraying themselves as victims of “aliens” who were exterminated by your ancestors from Columbus to Churchill, Hitler and the Bushes?

Demonization of the victim

The genocide in America also had its own propaganda support, its own “black PR”, strikingly similar to that used by Euro-American imperialists to “demonize” their future enemy in the eyes of their population, to give war and robbery an aura of justice.

On January 16, 1493, three days after killing two Tainos while trading, Columbus turned his ships back to Europe. In his journal, he described the natives and their people killed by the Spaniards as "the evil inhabitants of the island of Cariba who eat people." As proven by modern anthropologists, this was pure fiction, but it formed the basis of a kind of classification of the population of Antilles, and then the entire New World, which became a guide to genocide. Those who welcomed and submitted to the colonizers were considered “affectionate Tainos.” Those natives who resisted or were simply killed by the Spaniards fell under the rubric of cannibal savages, deserving everything that the colonizers were able to inflict on them. (In particular, in the lair of November 4 and 23, 1492, we find the following creations of Columbus’s gloomy medieval imagination: these “fierce savages” “have an eye in the middle of their forehead,” they have “dog noses, with which they drink the blood of their victims, with which they cut the throat and castrate.")

“These islands are inhabited by Cannibals, a wild, unruly race who feed on human flesh. It is correct to call them anthropophages. They wage constant wars against the gentle and timid Indians for the sake of their bodies; these are their trophies, what they hunt for. They mercilessly destroy and terrorize the Indians."

This description of Coma, one of the participants in Columbus's second expedition, says much more about the Europeans than about the inhabitants of the Caribbean. The Spaniards preemptively dehumanized people they had never met, but who were to become their victims. And this is not distant history; it reads like today's newspaper.

“A wild and unruly race” are the keywords of Western imperialism, from Columbus to Bush. “Wild” - because she does not want to be the slave of a “civilized” invader. Soviet communists were also listed among the “wild” “enemies of civilization.” From Columbus, who in 1493 invented Caribbean cannibals with an eye on their forehead and dog noses, there is a direct thread to Reichsführer Himmler, who at a meeting of SS leaders in mid-1942 explained the specifics of the war on the Eastern Front:

"In all previous campaigns, Germany's enemies had enough common sense and decency to yield to superior force, thanks to their "old and civilized... Western European sophistication." In the Battle of France, enemy units surrendered as soon as they received warnings that “further resistance was pointless.” Of course, “we SS men” came to Russia without illusions, but until the last winter too many Germans did not realize that “Russian commissars and die-hard Bolsheviks are filled with a cruel will to power and an animal stubbornness that makes them fight to the end and has nothing in common with human logic or duty... but is an instinct common to all animals." The Bolsheviks were “animals”, so “devoid of all humanity” that “when surrounded and without food, they resorted to killing their comrades in order to last longer,” behavior bordering on “cannibalism.” This is a “war of annihilation” between “brute matter, the primitive mass, better to say, the subhuman Untermenschs led by the commissars” and the “Germans...” (Arno J. Mayer. Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The “Final Solution” in History . New York: Pantheon Books, 1988, p. 281.)

In fact, and in strict accordance with the principle of ideological inversion, it was not the indigenous inhabitants of the New World who engaged in cannibalism, but their conquerors. Columbus's second expedition brought to the Caribbean a large shipment of mastiffs and greyhounds trained to kill people and eat their entrails. Very soon the Spaniards began to feed their dogs human meat. Living children were considered a special delicacy. Colonizers allowed dogs to chew them alive, often in the presence of their parents.

Dogs eat Indians

Spaniard feeding hounds with Indian children

Modern historians come to the conclusion that in the Caribbean there was a whole network of “butcher shops” where the bodies of Indians were sold as dog food. Like everything else in Columbus's legacy, cannibalism also developed on the mainland. A letter from one of the conquerors of the Inca Empire has been preserved, in which he writes: “... when I returned from Cartagena, I met a Portuguese named Roge Martin. On the porch of his house hung parts of cut-up Indians to feed his dogs, as if they were wild animals...” (Standard, 88)

In turn, the Spaniards often had to eat their dogs, fed on human flesh, when in search of gold and slaves they found themselves in a difficult situation and suffered from hunger. This is one of the dark ironies of this genocide.

Why?

Churchill asks how to explain the fact that a group of human beings, even such as the Spaniards of the Columbus era, collectively obsessed with the desire for wealth and prestige, could over a long period of time display such boundless ferocity, such extreme inhumanity towards other people ? The same question was posed earlier by Stanard, who traced in detail the ideological roots of genocide in America from the early Middle Ages to the Renaissance. “Who are these people whose minds and souls were behind the genocides of Muslims, Africans, Indians, Jews, Gypsies and other religious, racial and ethnic groups? Who are they who continue to commit mass murder today?” What kind of people could commit these heinous crimes? Christians, Stanard answers and invites the reader to become acquainted with the ancient views of European Christians on gender, race and war. He discovers that by the end of the Middle Ages, European culture had prepared all the necessary preconditions for a four-hundred-year genocide against the indigenous inhabitants of the New World.

Stanard pays special attention to the Christian imperative of suppressing “carnal desires,” i.e. the repressive attitude towards sexuality in European culture instilled by the Church. In particular, he establishes a genetic connection between genocide in the New World and the pan-European waves of terror against “witches”, in whom some modern researchers see the bearers of matriarchal pagan ideology, popular among the masses and threatening the power of the Church and the feudal elite.

Stanard also emphasizes the European origins of the concept of race and skin color.

The Church has always supported the slave trade, although in the early Middle Ages it in principle forbade keeping Christians in slavery. After all, for the Church, only a Christian was a person in the full sense of the word. The “infidels” could become human only by accepting Christianity, and this gave them the right to freedom. But in the 14th century, an ominous change occurred in the policy of the Church. As the volume of the slave trade in the Mediterranean increased, so did the profits from it. But these incomes were threatened by a loophole left by the clergy to strengthen the ideology of Christian exclusivity. Earlier ideological motives came into conflict with the material interests of the Christian ruling classes. And so in 1366, the prelates of Florence sanctioned the import and sale of “infidel” slaves, explaining that by “infidel” they meant “all slaves of the wrong origin, even if by the time of their importation they had become Catholics,” and that “infidels by birth ” simply means “from the land and race of the infidels.” Thus, the Church changed the principle justifying slavery from religious to ethnic, which was an important step towards modern genocides based on unchanging racial and ethnic characteristics (Armenian, Jewish, Gypsy, Slavic and others).

European racial “science” did not lag behind religion. The specificity of European feudalism was the requirement for the genetic exclusivity of the noble class. In Spain, the concept of "purity of blood", limpieza de sangra, became central towards the end of the 15th century and throughout the 16th century. Nobility could not be achieved either by wealth or merit. The origins of “racial science” lie in the genealogical research of the time, which was carried out by a whole army of specialists checking pedigree lines.

The theory of “separate and unequal origins,” put forward by the famous Swiss physician and philosopher Paracelsus in 1520, was especially important. According to this theory, Africans, Indians and other non-Christian “colored” peoples descended not from Adam and Eve, but from other and lower ancestors. The ideas of Paracelsus became widespread in Europe on the eve of the European invasion of Mexico and South America. These ideas were an early expression of the so-called. the theory of “polygenesis”, which became an indispensable part of the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century. But even before the publication of Paracelsus's writings, similar ideological justifications for genocide appeared in Spain (1512) and Scotland (1519). The Spaniard Bernardo de Mesa (later Bishop of Cuba) and the Scotsman Johann Major came to the same conclusion that the indigenous inhabitants of the New World were a special race, destined by God to be slaves of European Christians. The height of the theological debates among Spanish intellectuals on the subject of whether the Indians were people or monkeys occurred in the mid-16th century, when millions of people in Central and South America died from terrible epidemics, brutal massacres and hard labor.

The official historian of the Indies, Fernandez de Ovieda, did not deny atrocities against the Indians and described “countless cruel deaths, innumerable as the stars.” But he considered this acceptable, for “to use gunpowder against the pagans is to burn incense for the Lord.” And in response to Las Casas' pleas to spare the inhabitants of America, theologian Juan de Sepulveda said: “How can one doubt that peoples so uncivilized, so barbaric and corrupted by so many sins and perversions were justly conquered.” He quoted Aristotle, who wrote in his Politics that some people are "slaves by nature" and "must be driven like wild beasts to force them to live rightly." To which Las Casas replied: “Let us forget about Aristotle, because, fortunately, we have the commandment of Christ: Love your neighbor as yourself.” (But even Las Casas, the most passionate and humane European defender of the Indians, felt forced to admit, that they are “possibly complete barbarians”).

But if among the church intelligentsia opinions about the nature of the native inhabitants of America could differ, among the European masses there was complete unanimity on this matter. Even 15 years before the great debate between Las Casas and Sepúlveda, a Spanish observer wrote that “ordinary people “universally consider as sages those who are convinced that the American Indians are not people, but “a special, third species of animals between man and ape and were created God, in order to better serve man.” (Standard, 211).

Thus, in the early 16th century, a racist apology for colonialism and suprematism was formed, which in the hands of the Euro-American ruling classes would serve as a justification (“defense of civilization”) for subsequent genocides (and those yet to come?). It is not surprising, therefore, that on the basis of his research, Stanard puts forward the thesis of a deep ideological connection between the Spanish and Anglo-Saxon genocide of the peoples of the Americas and the Nazi genocide of Jews, Gypsies and Slavs. European colonialists, white settlers, and Nazis all had the same ideological roots. And that ideology, Stanard adds, remains alive today. It was on this basis that US interventions in Southeast Asia and the Middle East were based.

List of used literature

J. M. Blaut. The Colonizer's Model of the World. Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History. New Yourk: The Giulford Press, 1993.

Ward Churchill. A Little Matter of Genocide. Holocaust and the Denial in the Americas 1492 to the Present. San Francisco: City Lights, 1997.

C. L. R. James. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York: Vintage, 1989.

Arno J. Mayer. Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?The “Final Solution” in History. New York: Pantheon Books, 1988.

David Stannard. American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World. Oxford University Press, 1993.

By the middle of the 16th century, Spain's dominance on the American continent was almost absolute, with colonial possessions stretching from Cape Horn to New Mexico , brought huge income to the royal treasury. Attempts by other European states to establish colonies in America were not crowned with noticeable success.

But at the same time, the balance of power in the Old World began to change: the kings spent the streams of silver and gold flowing from the colonies, and had little interest in the economy of the metropolis, which, under the weight of an ineffective, corrupt administrative apparatus, clerical dominance and lack of incentives for modernization, began to lag further and further behind from the rapidly developing economy of England. Spain gradually lost its status as the main European superpower and mistress of the seas. The many years of war in the Netherlands, huge amounts of money spent fighting the Reformation throughout Europe, and the conflict with England accelerated the decline of Spain. The last straw was the death of the Invincible Armada in 1588. After the largest fleet of the time was destroyed by English admirals and, to a greater extent, by a violent storm, Spain withdrew into the shadows, never to recover from the blow.

Leadership in the “relay race” of colonization passed to England, France and Holland.

English colonies

The ideologist of the English colonization of North America was the famous chaplain Hakluyt. In 1585 and 1587, Sir Walter Raleigh, by order of Queen Elizabeth I of England, made two attempts to establish a permanent settlement in North America. An exploration expedition reached the American coast in 1584, and named the open coast Virginia (Virginia) in honor of the “Virgin Queen” Elizabeth I, who never married. Both attempts ended in failure - the first colony, founded on Roanoke Island off the coast of Virginia, was on the verge of destruction due to Indian attacks and lack of supplies and was evacuated by Sir Francis Drake in April 1587. In July of the same year, a second expedition of colonists, numbering 117 people, landed on the island. It was planned that in the spring of 1588 ships with equipment and food would arrive in the colony. However, for various reasons, the supply expedition was delayed for almost a year and a half. When she arrived at the place, all the buildings of the colonists were intact, but no traces of people were found, with the exception of the remains of one person. The exact fate of the colonists has not been established to this day.

Settlement of Virginia. Jamestown.

At the beginning of the 17th century, private capital entered the picture. In 1605, two joint stock companies received licenses from King James I to establish colonies in Virginia. It should be borne in mind that at that time the term “Virginia” denoted the entire territory of the North American continent. The first of the companies, the Virginia Company of London, received the rights to the southern part, the second, the Plymouth Company, to the northern part of the continent. Despite the fact that both companies officially declared their main goal to be the spread of Christianity, the license they received gave them the right to “search for and extract gold, silver and copper by all means.”

On December 20, 1606, the colonists set sail aboard three ships and, after a arduous nearly five-month voyage during which several dozen died of starvation and disease, reached Chesapeake Bay in May 1607. Over the next month, they built a wooden fort, named Fort James (the English pronunciation of James) in honor of the king. The fort was later renamed Jamestown, the first permanent British settlement in America.

Official US historiography considers Jamestown to be the cradle of the country; the history of the settlement and its leader, Captain John Smith of Jamestown, is covered in many serious studies and works of art. The latter, as a rule, idealize the history of the city and the pioneers who inhabited it (for example, the popular cartoon Pocahontas). In fact, the first years of the colony were extremely difficult, during the famine winter of 1609-1610. out of 500 colonists, no more than 60 remained alive, and according to some accounts, the survivors were forced to resort to cannibalism to survive the famine.

In subsequent years, when the question of physical survival was no longer so pressing, the two most important problems were tense relations with the indigenous population and the economic feasibility of the existence of the colony. To the disappointment of the shareholders of the London Virginia Company, neither gold nor silver was found by the colonists, and the main product produced for export was ship timber. Despite the fact that this product was in certain demand in the metropolis, which had depleted its forests, the profit, as from other attempts at economic activity, was minimal.

The situation changed in 1612, when farmer and landowner John Rolfe managed to cross a local variety of tobacco grown by the Indians with varieties imported from Bermuda. The resulting hybrids were well adapted to the Virginia climate and at the same time met the tastes of English consumers. The colony acquired a source of reliable income and for many years tobacco became the basis of Virginia's economy and exports, and the phrases “Virginia tobacco” and “Virginia mixture” are used as characteristics of tobacco products to this day. Five years later tobacco exports amounted to 20,000 pounds, a year later it was doubled, and by 1629 it reached 500,000 pounds. John Rolfe provided another service to the colony: in 1614, he managed to negotiate peace with the local Indian chief. The peace treaty was sealed by marriage between Rolf and the chief's daughter, Pocahontas.

In 1619, two events occurred that had a significant impact on the entire subsequent history of the United States. This year, Governor George Yeardley decided to transfer some power to the House of Burgesses, thereby establishing the first elected legislative assembly in the New World. The first meeting of the council took place on July 30, 1619. That same year, a small group of Africans of Angolan descent were acquired as colonists. Although they were not formally slaves, but had long-term contracts without the right to terminate, it is customary to begin the history of slavery in America from this event.

In 1622, almost a quarter of the colony's population was destroyed by rebel Indians. In 1624, the license of the London Company, whose affairs had fallen into disrepair, was revoked, and from that time Virginia became a royal colony. The governor was appointed by the king, but the colony council retained significant powers.

Timeline of the founding of the English colonies :

French colonies

By 1713, New France had reached its greatest size. It included five provinces:

Canada (the southern part of the modern province of Quebec), divided in turn into three “governments”: Quebec, Three Rivers (French Trois-Rivieres), Montreal and the dependent territory of Pays d'en Haut, which included the modern Canadian and American Great Lakes regions, of which the ports of Pontchartrain (French: Pontchartrain) and Michillimakinac (French: Michillimakinac) were practically the only poles of French settlement after the destruction of Huronia.

Acadia (modern Nova Scotia and New Brunswick).

Hudson Bay (modern Canada).

New Earth.

Louisiana (central part of the USA, from the Great Lakes to New Orleans), divided into two administrative regions: Lower Louisiana and Illinois (French: le Pays des Illinois).

Dutch colonies

New Netherland, 1614-1674, a region on the eastern coast of North America in the 17th century that ranged in latitude from 38 to 45 degrees north, originally discovered by the Dutch East India Company from the yacht Crescent ( nid. Halve Maen) under the command of Henry Hudson in 1609 and studied by Adriaen Block and Hendrik Christians (Christiaensz) in 1611-1614. According to their map, in 1614 the Estates General incorporated this territory as New Netherland within the Dutch Republic.

Under international law, claims to territory had to be secured not only by their discovery and provision of maps, but also by their settlement. In May 1624, the Dutch completed their claim by bringing and settling 30 Dutch families on Noten Eylant, modern Governors Island. The main city of the colony was New Amsterdam. In 1664, Governor Peter Stuyvesant gave New Netherland to the British.

Colonies of Sweden

At the end of 1637, the company organized its first expedition to the New World. One of the managers of the Dutch West India Company, Samuel Blommaert, participated in its preparation, who invited Peter Minuit, the former general director of the colony of New Netherland, to the position of head of the expedition. On the ships "Squid Nyckel" and "Vogel Grip" on March 29, 1638, under the leadership of Admiral Claes Fleming, the expedition reached the mouth of the Delaware River. Here, on the site of modern Wilmington, Fort Christina was founded, named after Queen Christina, which later became the administrative center of the Swedish colony.

Russian colonies

Summer 1784. The expedition under the command of G.I. Shelikhov (1747-1795) landed on the Aleutian Islands. In 1799, Shelikhov and Rezanov founded the Russian-American Company, the manager of which was A. A. Baranov (1746-1818). The company hunted sea otters and traded their fur, and founded its own settlements and trading posts.

Since 1808, Novo-Arkhangelsk has become the capital of Russian America. In fact, the management of the American territories is carried out by the Russian-American Company, the main headquarters of which was in Irkutsk; Russian America was officially included first in the Siberian General Government, and later (in 1822) in the East Siberian General Government.

The population of all Russian colonies in America reached 40,000 people, among them the Aleuts predominated.

The southernmost point in America where Russian colonists settled was Fort Ross, 80 km north of San Francisco in California. Further advance to the south was prevented by Spanish and then Mexican colonists.

In 1824, the Russian-American Convention was signed, which fixed the southern border of the Russian Empire’s possessions in Alaska at latitude 54°40’N. The convention also confirmed the holdings of the United States and Great Britain (until 1846) in Oregon.

In 1824, the Anglo-Russian Convention on the delimitation of their possessions in North America (in British Columbia) was signed. Under the terms of the Convention, a boundary line was established separating the British possessions from the Russian possessions on the western coast of North America adjacent to the Alaska Peninsula so that the border ran along the entire length of the coastline belonging to Russia, from 54° north latitude. to 60° N latitude, at a distance of 10 miles from the edge of the ocean, taking into account all the bends of the coast. Thus, the line of the Russian-British border in this place was not straight (as was the case with the border line of Alaska and British Columbia), but extremely winding.

In January 1841, Fort Ross was sold to Mexican citizen John Sutter. And in 1867, the United States bought Alaska for $7,200,000.

Spanish colonies

The Spanish colonization of the New World dates back to the discovery of America by the Spanish navigator Columbus in 1492, which Columbus himself recognized as the eastern part of Asia, the eastern coast of China, or Japan, or India, which is why the name West Indies was assigned to these lands. The search for a new route to India was dictated by the development of society, industry and trade, and the need to find large reserves of gold, for which demand had risen sharply. Then it was believed that there should be a lot of it in the “land of spices”. The geopolitical situation in the world changed and the old eastern routes to India for Europeans, which now passed through the lands occupied by the Ottoman Empire, became more dangerous and difficult to pass, meanwhile there was a growing need for the implementation of other trade with this rich region. At that time, some already had ideas that the earth was round and that India could be reached from the other side of the Earth - by sailing west from the then known world. Columbus made 4 expeditions to the region: the first - 1492-1493. - discovery of the Sargasso Sea, the Bahamas, Haiti, Cuba, Tortuga, the founding of the first village in which he left 39 of his sailors. He declared all the lands to be the possessions of Spain; the second (1493-1496) - the complete conquest of Haiti, the discovery of the Lesser Antilles, Guadeloupe, the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico and Jamaica. Founding of Santo Domingo; third (1498-1499) - discovery of the island of Trinidad, the Spaniards set foot on the shores of South America.

In preparing the material, articles from Wikipedia- free encyclopedia.

Almost half of the viceroyalty of New Spain they founded was located where the states of Texas, California, New Mexico, etc. are located today. The name of the state of Florida is also of Spanish origin - this is how the Spaniards called the lands known to them in the southeast North America. The colony of New Netherland arose in the Hudson River valley; further south, in the Delaware River Valley, is New Sweden. Louisiana, which occupied vast territories in the basin of the largest river on the continent, the Mississippi, was the possession of France. In the 18th century Russian industrialists began to develop the northwestern part of the continent, modern Alaska. But the most impressive successes in the colonization of North America were achieved by the British.

For immigrants from the British Isles and other European countries overseas, wide material opportunities opened up; they were attracted here by the hope of free labor and personal enrichment. America also attracted people with its religious freedom. Many Englishmen moved to America during the period of revolutionary upheavals in the mid-17th century. Religious sectarians, ruined peasants, and urban poor left for the colonies. All kinds of adventurers and adventure seekers also rushed overseas; criminals referred. The Irish and Scots fled here when life in their homeland became completely unbearable.

The south of North America is washed by waters Gulf of Mexico. Sailing along it, the Spaniards discovered the peninsula Florida, covered with dense forests and swamps. Nowadays it is a famous resort and a launch site for American spacecraft. The Spanish reached the mouth of the largest river in North America - Mississippi, flowing into Gulf of Mexico. In Indian, Mississippi means “big river”, “father of waters”. Its waters were muddy, and uprooted trees floated along the river. To the west of Missi-sipi, wetlands gradually gave way to drier steppes - prairies, through which herds of bison roamed, looking like bulls. The prairies extended all the way to the foot Rocky Mountains, stretching from north to south throughout the North American continent. The Rocky Mountains are part of a huge mountainous country of Cor-diller. The Cordillera opens to the Pacific Ocean.

On the Pacific coast the Spaniards discovered California Peninsula And Gulf of California. It flows into Colorado River- “red”. The depth of its valley in the Cordillera amazed the Spaniards. Under their feet there was a cliff 1800 m deep, at the bottom of which a river flowed as a barely noticeable silver snake. For three days people walked along the edge of the valley Grand Canyon, we looked for a way down and couldn’t find it.

The northern half of North America was developed by the British and French. In the middle of the 16th century, the French pirate Cartier discovered bay And Saint Lawrence River in Canada. The Indian word "Canada" - settlement - became the name of a huge country. Moving up the St. Lawrence River, the French came to Great Lakes. Among them is the world's largest freshwater lake - Upper. On the Niagara River, flowing between the Great Lakes, a very powerful and beautiful Niagara Falls.

Immigrants from the Netherlands founded the city of New Amsterdam. Nowadays it is called New York and is the largest city United States of America.

At the beginning of the 17th century, the first English colonies appeared on the Atlantic coast of North America - settlements whose inhabitants grew tobacco in the south and grain and vegetables in the north.

Thirteen (13) colonies

Systematic colonization of North America began after the establishment of the Stuart dynasty on the English throne. The first British colony, Jamestown, was founded in 1607 Virginia.Then, as a result of the mass migration of English Puritans overseas, the development of New England.The first Puritan colony in the modern state Massachusetts appeared in 1620. In subsequent years, settlers from Massachusetts, dissatisfied with the religious intolerance that reigned there, founded colonies Connecticut And Rhode Island. After the Glorious Revolution, a colony separated from Massachusetts New Hampshire.

On the lands north of Virginia, granted by Charles I to Lord Baltimore, a colony was founded in 1632 Maryland Dutch and Swedish colonists were the first to appear in the lands located between Virginia and New England, but in 1664 they were captured by the British. New Netherland was renamed a colony New York, and to the south of it a colony arose New Jersey. In 1681, W. Penn received a royal charter for lands north of Maryland. In honor of his father, the famous admiral, the new colony was named Pennsylvania. Throughout the 18th century. isolated himself from her Delaware. In 1663, settlement of the territory south of Virginia began, where colonies later appeared North Carolina And South Carolina. In 1732, King George II allowed the development of lands between South Carolina and Spanish Florida, which were named in his honor Georgia.

Five more British colonies were founded on the territory of modern Canada.

All colonies had various forms of representative government, but the majority of the population was deprived of the right to vote.

Colonial economy

The colonies varied greatly in the types of economic activity. In the north, where small-scale farming predominated, household crafts associated with it developed, and foreign trade, shipping and maritime trades were widely developed. The south was dominated by large agricultural plantations, where tobacco, cotton, and rice were grown.

Slavery in the colonies

Growing production required workers. The presence of undeveloped territories to the west of the colonial borders doomed any attempt to turn poor whites into a hired labor force, since it was always possible for them to leave for free lands. It was impossible to force the Indians to work for white masters. Those of them who tried to make slaves quickly died in captivity, and the merciless war waged by the settlers against the Indians led to the mass extermination of the red-skinned natives of America. The labor problem was solved by the massive import of slaves from Africa, who were called blacks in America. The slave trade became the most important factor in the development of the colonies, especially the southern ones. Already by the end of the 17th century. blacks became the predominant labor force and, in fact, the basis of the plantation economy in the south. Material from the site

Europeans were looking for a passage from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific. At the beginning of the 17th century, the Englishman Henry Hudson tried to sail along the northern American coast between the mainland and the islands lying to the north. Canadian Arctic Archipelago. The attempt failed, but Hudson discovered a huge Hudson Bay- a real “bag of ice” on which ice floes float even in the summer.

In the spruce and pine forests of Canada, the French and British hunted fur-bearing animals and traded their skins with the Indians. In the middle of the 17th century, the English Hudson's Bay Company arose, purchasing furs. The company's agents penetrated deep into the continent, bringing information about new rivers, mountains, and lakes. At the end of the 18th century, Alexander Mackenzie and his companions took a trip along the rivers and lakes of northern Canada in boats made of birch bark. They hoped that the cold river, later named after Mackenzie, will lead to the Pacific Ocean. The traveler himself called it a “river of disappointment,” realizing that it flows into the Arctic Ocean. Mackenzie went home to Scotland, a country in the north of the British Isles, to study geography. Returning, he climbed up the river valleys and crossed the Rocky Mountains. After passing through the mountain passes of the Cordillera, Mackenzie began to descend along rivers flowing to the west, and in 1793 he was the first to reach the Pacific coast.

America was first a land and then a country that was born in the imagination before in reality, wrote Susan Mary Grant. Born from the cruelty of conquerors and the hopes of ordinary workers, they became one of the most powerful states in the world. The history of America is the formation of a chain of paradoxes.

The country, created in the name of freedom, was built by the labor of slaves; a country struggling to establish moral superiority, military security and economic stability does so in the face of financial crises and global conflicts, not least of which it itself causes.

It all started with colonial America, created by the first Europeans who arrived there, who were attracted by the opportunity to get rich or freely practice their religion. As a result, entire indigenous peoples were forced out of their native lands, became impoverished, and some were completely exterminated.

America is a significant part of the modern world, its economy, politics, culture, and its history is an integral element of world history. America is not only Hollywood, the White House and Silicon Valley. This is a country where customs, habits, traditions and characteristics of different peoples combined to form a new nation. This constant process created in an astonishingly short time the amazing historical phenomenon of a superstate.

How did it develop and what does it represent today? What is its impact on the modern world? We will talk about this now.

America before Columbus

Is it possible to get to America on foot? In general, it’s possible. Just think, less than a hundred kilometers, more precisely ninety-six.

When the Bering Strait freezes, Eskimos and Chukchi cross it in both directions even in bad weather. Otherwise, where would a Soviet reindeer herder get a brand new hard drive?.. Blizzard? Freezing? Just like a long time ago, a man dressed in reindeer fur buries himself in the snow, stuffs his mouth with pemmican and dozes until the storm subsides...

Ask the average American when American history begins. Ninety-eight answers out of a hundred in 1776. Americans have an extremely vague idea of ​​the times before European colonization, although the Indian period is as integral a part of the country’s history as the Mayflower. And still there is a line beyond which one story ends tragically, and the second develops dramatically...

Europeans landed on the American continent off the East Coast. The future Native Americans came from the northwest. 30 thousand years ago, the north of the continent was covered in mighty ice and deep snow all the way to the Great Lakes and beyond.

Still, most of the first Americans arrived through Alaska, then leaving south of the Yukon. Most likely, there were two main groups of settlers: the first came from Siberia, with their own language and customs; the second several centuries later, when the land isthmus from Siberia to Alaska went under the water of a melted glacier.

They had straight black hair, smooth dark skin, a wide nose with a low bridge, slanted brown eyes with a characteristic fold at the eyelids. More recently, in the underwater cave system of Sac Actun (Mexico), underwater speleologists discovered the incomplete skeleton of a 16-year-old girl. She was given the name Naya - water nymph. Radiocarbon and uranium-thorium analyzes showed that the bones had lain at the bottom of the flooded cave for 12-13 thousand years. Naya's skull is elongated, distinctly closer to the ancient inhabitants of Siberia than to the rounded skulls of modern Indians.

In the tissue of Naya's molar tooth, geneticists also discovered intact mitochondrial DNA. Passing from mother to daughter, she retains the haplotype of the full set of genes of her parents. In Naya, it corresponds to the P1 haplotype, common among modern Indians. The hypothesis that Native Americans were descended from early Paleo-Americans who migrated across the Bering Land Bridge from eastern Siberia has the strongest possible evidence. The Institute of Cytology and Genetics of the Russian Academy of Sciences believes that the settlers belonged to the Altai tribes.

The first inhabitants of America

Beyond the icy mountains, to the south, lay a magical land with a warm and humid climate. It covers almost the entire territory of what is now the United States. Forests, meadows, diverse fauna. During the last glaciation, several breeds of wild horses crossed Beringia, later either exterminated or extinct. In addition to meat, ancient animals supplied humans with technologically necessary materials: fur, bone, skins, and tendons.

An ice-free strip of tundra stretched from the coast of Asia to Alaska, a kind of bridge across the present-day Bering Strait. But in Alaska, only during short periods of warming did the passages thaw, opening the way to the south. Ice pressed those going to the Mackenzie River, to the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains, but soon they reached the dense forests of what is now the state of Montana. Some went there, others went west, to the Pacific coast. The rest generally went south through Wyoming and Colorado to New Mexico and Arizona.

The bravest made their way even further south, through Mexico and Central America to the southern American continent; they will reach Chile and Argentina only centuries later.

It is possible that the ancestors of the Native Americans reached the continent through the Aleutian Islands, although this is a difficult and dangerous route. It can be assumed that the Polynesians, excellent sailors, sailed to South America.

In Marms Cave (Washington State), the remains of three human skulls dating from the 11th to 8th millennia BC were discovered, and nearby - a spear tip and a bone tool, which suggested the discovery of a unique ancient culture of the indigenous people of America. This means that even then there were people living on these lands who were capable of creating smooth, sharp, comfortable and beautiful products. But it was there that the US Army Corps of Engineers needed to build a dam, and now the unique exhibits lie under twelve meters of water.

Speculation has been made about who visited this part of the world before Columbus. There definitely were Vikings.

The son of the Viking leader Erik the Red, Leif Eriksson, setting out to sea from the Norwegian colony in Greenland, sailed through Helluland (“the country of boulders,” now Baffin Island), Markland (the forest country, the Labrador Peninsula), Vinland (“the grape country,” most likely New England). After spending the winter in Vinland, the Viking ships returned to Greenland.

Leif's brother, Thorvald Eriksson, built a fortification with housing in America two years later. But the Algonquins killed Thorvald, and his companions sailed back. The next two attempts were a little more successful: Eric the Red's daughter-in-law Gudrid settled in America, initially established profitable trade with the Skra-lings, but then returned to Greenland. The daughter of Eric the Red, Freydis, was also not lucky enough to attract the Indians to long-term cooperation. Then, in a fight, she hacked to death her companions, and after the strife, the Normans left Vinland, where they lived for quite a long time.

The hypothesis about the discovery of America by the Normans was confirmed only in 1960. The remains of a well-equipped Viking settlement were found in Newfoundland (Canada). In 2010, a burial was found in Iceland with the remains of an Indian woman with the same Paleo-American genes. It came to Iceland around 1000 AD. and stayed there to live...

There is also an exotic hypothesis about Zhang He, a Chinese military leader, who with a huge fleet sailed to America, supposedly seventy years before Columbus. However, it does not have reliable evidence. The infamous book by the American Africanist Ivan Van Sertin spoke about the huge fleet of the Sultan of Mali, which reached America and determined its entire culture, religion, etc. And here there was not enough evidence. So external influences were kept to a minimum. But in the New World itself, many tribes arose that existed quite separately and spoke different languages. Those of them3 who were united by similarity of beliefs and blood ties formed numerous communities.

They themselves built houses and settlements of high engineering complexity, which have survived to this day, processed metal, created excellent ceramics, learned to provide themselves with food and grow cultivated plants, play ball and domesticate wild animals.

This is approximately what the New World was like at the time of the fateful meeting with Europeans - Spanish sailors under the command of a Genoese captain. According to the poet Henry Longfellow, the great Gaia-Wata, the cultural hero of all North American tribes, dreamed of her as an inevitable fate.

The discovery of America should be dated back to 1492, when Christopher Columbus reached the shores of a new continent, which in the future was named America, in honor of the traveler from Florence - Amerigo Vespucci.

Columbus himself did not even suspect that he had discovered a new continent, but only believed that he had found a sea route to rich Asia. In total, Columbus organized four expeditions to the open lands, each of which was sponsored by the Spanish crown.

Already in 1507, the new lands received the status of a new continent and were called America or the New World.

Conquest of America.
As soon as the Europeans landed on the shores of the New World, they learned that the new lands were already inhabited by fairly advanced civilizations. Thus, on the territory of then-known America, the empire of the Aztecs, Mayans and Incas already existed.

Conquest of the Aztecs

Hernan Cortez became the man who conquered the Aztec civilization - it fell first. With a small army, Cortes entered the capital city of the empire, Tenochtitlan, which subsequently suffered from an outbreak of a smallpox epidemic. By deception, the Spaniards captured the ruler of the empire. After a short war, Cortes completely captured the capital in 1521, which led to the rapid fall of the Aztec state. In the future, the city of Mexico City will be built on the site of the Aztec capital.

Conquest of the Incas

Inspired by the successes of Cortez, another Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro with a small detachment of people moved to Peru - the state of the Incas.

Already in the twenties, the Incas began to suffer from diseases brought by Europeans - measles and smallpox, from which entire millions died. The weakened empire could not withstand the onslaught, although it fiercely resisted. Pizarro first executed the Inca ruler Atahualpa, and in 1536 he captured the capital, the city of Cusco. The Incas were finally conquered only in 1572.

Conquest of the Mayans

At the time of the arrival of Europeans, the Mayan civilization was already on the verge of collapse, mired in internal strife. In 1528, the Spaniards began the conquest of the Mayan civilization under the leadership of Francisco de Montejo. It took them a full 170 years to completely conquer the Yucatan Peninsula, where the Mayans lived.

The conquest of America was accompanied by bloody reprisals against the local population - the Europeans massacred everyone who opposed them, as well as the elderly, women and children.

As a result of the conquest of America by Europeans, three empires were destroyed: the Mayans, the Incas and the Aztecs, as well as tens of millions of local residents.