What if Europeans had never colonized the Americas? Type of Indian civilization? (war, Mexico)
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Location: New Albany, Indiana (Greater Louisville)
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I wonder what type of civilization the Native Americans would have ended up developing?
Assuming Europeans would have continued producing technological innovations w/o colonizing overseas, who much of that technology would most tribes have adopted?
Many historians note that the North American tribes seemed to be at a low point in their civilization when Whites first came. Previously their ancestors had built cities with thousands of inhabitants near current cities like St Louis and Louisville. One fortress was built atop a mountain near contemporary Berea KY that rivaled any castle in Europe in size and durability. For some reason it seemed that they had abandoned urban life and simply hunted and gathered. Also note the cliff dwellers of Mesa Verde.
Would Indians have eventually regained their footing and stabilized their own great world empire?
Hard to say. Most of the Indian tribes didn't cooperate for "common defense", this makes sense as they could hardly "see what was coming at them" in terms of European settlers.
Assuming you assume some sort of European contact, just not the settlement that actually happened, say the French model of "voyageurs" had prevailed - the tribes would have got metal tools and firearms (and probably diseases they had little resistance to) just the same, but would have remained on their ancestral lands - hard to say how that would have played out eventually.
The coastal tribes, with access to European firearms and untensils, would have used them to to exploit and enslave the interior tribes. This would have resulted in the development of several large Indian empires which eventually would have clashed with one another for control of larger regions, and ultimately the winners of those intramurals would have had regional wars for control of immense sections of the continent.
In short, the scenario you are advancing would have most likely caused the natives to cease behaving like underambitious warriers, farmers and woodsmen, and start behaving like Europeans in feudal times.
With no contact they would have rolled on along, but things wouldn't be much different now than they were in 1492 technologywise. An empire in Mexico seems likely since there were multiple ones that we know of historically. Perhaps one in the Andes. They were just too early in their technological development even then for significant development to have occurred in 500 years.
The problem the Indians north of Mexico had is that while a big population center might crop up from time to time (and let's clarify that their "major centers" base don population would have been unremarkable in Europe, Asia and wouldn't have been top tier cities in the American and African empires) there was really no depth to the culture's population. You had one large city, and that was it. That made them extremely vulnerable to being dealt a fatal blow by a natural disaster or crop failure. When we look at the tribes the early Europeans encounted, they often did cover a large geographic area but they did so with relatively low and low density populations. On top of this the towns and cities within a cultural area were often at war with each other.
The Aztecs and Incas, and their descendent civilizations, might have ended up controlling the Americas. Perhaps the Native Americans of the Ohio Valley might have developed as well, but the technological edge of the Aztecs might have been too great. From a geopolitical standpoint, it seems logical that the two civilizations would have met somewhere in the Isthmus of Panama.
All that being said, I'm pretty certain that European or Asian civilizations would have eventually crossed the Atlanta or Pacific and prevailed anyway, even if they were delayed by another couple of centuries. Because of the intense competition between civilizations on the Eurasian landmass, technological innovation was essential for survival, whereas the Aztecs and Incas faced no such similar motivation. When you consider the fact that neither civilization had discovered the wheel, what do you think would have happened when the English, Chinese, or French had come ashore in the 1700s with flintlocks?
I'm trying to adhere closely to the conditions stated in the OP, namely that Europeans would continue their scientific and technological progress, but would not colonize the New World. However, not colonizing is not the same as not making contact, as others have implied. It is logical, indeed almost certain, that Europeans would have continued on their path of progress because they had the momentum in this, starting perhaps with Galileo who was pretty much the father of observation-based (empirical) science. Once something like that tradition gets started, it is impossible to stop it.
Once contact occurred, then certain advances would have been eagerly adopted, as stated in another post, thus profoundly changing the way of life of Native Americans. Just look at how certain things were quickly embraced world-wide: steam power, radio, television, air transportation. This all belongs to Western technology, but has not remained Western in its application.
Most of you have "heard" me say this before, but the OP rather assumes that American Indians were more-or-less a single, monolithic society with common thoughts, beliefs, social structures, religions, etc. Trust me on this, THEY WERE NOT. For that matter,we still aren't!
This is much like assuming that all Western Europeans form a single culture. As we all know, that isn't true either.
If no white people were here; maybe the Japanese and Chinese woulda taken over? Tho many Navajo DO look Japanese. American Indians are Asian background as it is.
Well if the Europeans wont then other powers at the time would such as the Ottoman empire or Chinese empire. They never had guns and due to that they would have no real match due to foreign invasions.
The Industrial Revolution would certainly have, eventually, brought industrialized societies to all parts of the globe, and quickly subdued and dominated the non-industrialized indigenous population.
A century after Columbus, nobody had gotten around to North America yet, but eventually, they did. And Africa a century after that, and Australia another century later, but sooner or later, nobody would be spared.
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