European Expansion Into The Americas Analysis

The European expansion into the Americas is easily one of the most important events of the last 1000 years. The enormous amounts of wealth generated from the New World helped shape European politics for centuries after the discovery by Columbus. Should we celebrate this this influx of wealth and land to the colonial powers? Of course not. The colonisation of America was an incredibly violent and destructive process, resulting in the death and hardship of millions. This is apparent from the first meeting of Columbus and the natives in what he named Hispaniola in 1492. In an extract of Columbus’ journal compiled by Bartolomé de las Casas in the 1530s he describes that the inhabitants of the island: “would make good, intelligent servants, for

The cruelty which the Spaniards would make these people endure was horrific. Bartolomé de Las Casas recounts how the Spaniards used to slice the hands of the natives and send them to their chiefs, or play games which consisted of them betting on whether they could behead the natives with one blow from their

From just these two examples we can find intolerable atrocities committed, and many more followed. Any argument proposing that the intentions of the Europeans was to educate or civilise the people of the New World is fallacious. Multiple, well-functioning societies existed in the Americas including multiple wide-spanning civilisations with population dense cities. The natives of Hispaniola even had longer life expectancies than much of Europe. Some may say that the wonderful cultural scene of South America, with many immigrants coming from wildly different backgrounds helped to shape an interesting environment for music and literature is a positive of the expansion. This argument however completely disregards the possibility of an equally or more interesting modern culture that would have developed from the indigenous