As I've been sharing the Columbian Exchange with students in my Modern World History course this fall, one thing that has come up again in student questions and responses to the text, lectures, and primary sources is the vehemence of Bartolomeo de Las Casas in accusing the Spanish in the Caribbean of inhumanity.
The Indigenous people now complain about "settlers" killing them off and usurping their land, when it was in fact diseases that did the majority of the killing.
There are some examples in North America of Englishmen like Lord Jeffrey Amherst deliberately advocating germ warfare on natives, and as I said, Europeans were very quick to take advantage of the opportunities provided by native social collapse. Some like Cotton Mather even claimed the depopulation was providential. And then later, there were a lot of "Indian Wars" in North America that DID involve white settlers killing off natives to get their land. Even King Philip's War in 1675 killed many more natives (like an order of magnitude) than whites.
The Indigenous people now complain about "settlers" killing them off and usurping their land, when it was in fact diseases that did the majority of the killing.
There are some examples in North America of Englishmen like Lord Jeffrey Amherst deliberately advocating germ warfare on natives, and as I said, Europeans were very quick to take advantage of the opportunities provided by native social collapse. Some like Cotton Mather even claimed the depopulation was providential. And then later, there were a lot of "Indian Wars" in North America that DID involve white settlers killing off natives to get their land. Even King Philip's War in 1675 killed many more natives (like an order of magnitude) than whites.
Field Marshall Amherst's advocacy of germ warfare hurt the native people of Canada particularly hard.