The US was an APEX power and had been for a long time. Nobody could conquer it. To claim the US was a nobody is a laughable.
> It was still undergoing the post-Civil War recovery
After the civil war, the US fielded the greatest army in the world and it's economy was growing because it was shifting to westward expansion. We took over territory bigger than western europe. Not only that, the US was the largest producer of oil BY FAR at that time.
> the Industrial Revolution JUST arrived on the continent.
It just arrived in european mainland as well relatively speaking...
> No European nation was interested in conquering the largely agrarian society.
No european nation could. Let's stop pretending any european country had any hope.
A european country conquering the US in the 1800s is like costa rica conquering the US today. It's laughable.
During the civil war, the US developed much of the military technology that was used in the first world war a few decades later.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted for this because it's true.
In addition, to your points, after the civil war, the U.S. had the largest number of guns in civilian hands of any country by far. The populace was so well armed that an invasion would have been ridiculous.
The U.S. also had the largest economy in the world at the time, a population about the same size as Germany, and had the Atlantic Ocean situated between itself and an invading army.
By the 1870s the U.S. had a large iron and steel industry and in less than 20 years later (by 1889) the U.S. was producing more steel than Great Britain.
Furthermore, the U.S. had the second largest navy in the world at the end of the Civil War--a navy that was very modern since it was largely composed of new ships built during the war. The U.S. Navy was also the most experienced by far with modern naval combat since they were the first country to use ironclads in battle. Granted the Navy rapidly declined in size after this time period, but given that the buildup happened in only 4 years in the first place, new ships could have been rapidly brought online if a war broke out.
The U.S. was also covered in railroads and telegraph lines by this time that they could use to coordinate movements and rapidly deploy troops--this was a huge advantage not available to an invading army.
The idea of a European power invading the U.S. after the civil war is definitely laughable.
But 95% of natives didn't die of disease. Unless you are saying white men are a disease. We had to cull the indians like we culled the bison, deer, wolves, bears, etc. It was the most successful genocidal campaign in human history. It was also one of the most successful clearing the land of all life period.
Settlers were paid for each indian scalp they got. Indian men, women and children were hunted and slaughtered wholesale.
Idiots like Jared Diamond might try to absolve our sins by lying about how the indians died. But the truth of how the west was won is no so convenient. It was brutal and rapacious.
I mean, we didn't even push the natives past the appalachian mountains until the 1760s and that idiot jared diamond wants us to believe the natives essentially died off in the 1500s.
Do you have any sources for that. The hypothesis that disease was primarily responsible for wiping out Native Americans is far older than Jared Diamond's book.
It wouldn't have been possible for white colonists to completely destroy Native American civilization if smallpox hadn't devastated them first--there were just too many of them.
Just look at the population of white settlers at the time. The number of Native American murders committed per settler you're proposing are simply too high to be plausible.
Yes, it called history and biology. Disease doesn't work that way and history proves it didn't work that way.
> The hypothesis that disease was primarily responsible for wiping out Native Americans is far older than Jared Diamond's book.
Sure, but jared diamond's silly book is what made it mainstream. No serious historian takes that theory serious because science and history says that didn't happen.
> It wouldn't have been possible for white colonists to completely destroy Native American civilization if smallpox hadn't devastated them first--there were just too many of them.
North American civilization didn't get completely destroyed until well after the civil war when mass european migration and the invention of machine guns, the expansion of railroads, etc gave american settlers a huge advantage.
> Just look at the population of white settlers at the time. The number of Native American murders committed per settler you're proposing are simply too high to be plausible.
And like I said, the border that the colonists and the indians drew in 1763 was the appalachian mountains. The colonists were confined to a tiny sliver of land on the eastern seaboard. If disease wiped out the natives, why would the colonists take so little land? Why would the border between "america" and indian lands be divided in such a manner.
But let's not romanticize Native American culture either. The Comanche formed a barrier between the Spanish and the French/British Americans through most of the 1800s, and they did this by subjugating the other tribes around them and by maintaining a war-like stance at all times. There was simply no way that they could co-exist with a European culture. It's very easy to sit here with our 21st century morality and say what we did was wrong, but we have no idea the kind of hardship that people on both sides were living through and trying to make a life for themselves. We simply don't have the context to judge them. It was what it was.
You can also look north the the Thule (Inuit) and Dorset cultures. The Thule expanded to Canada and Greenland in the middle ages, and in a very short time they completely wiped out the dominant Dorset culture that had existed for thousands of years.
The modern day Inuit are descendants of conquerors in exactly the same way that descendants of European settlers are.
> The modern day Inuit are descendants of conquerors in exactly the same way that descendants of European settlers are.
Highly doubtful. The Dorset culture probably died off due to change in climate and their failure to adapt rather than inuits traveling hundreds or thousands of miles to kill the dorset.
Not to mention that these dorset was a tiny population already in significant decline.
There is a world of difference between the inuits and dorsets. Hell the norse and europeans were in contact with dorset long before the inuit. Perhaps it was european "disease" or raids that wipe them out...
Nobody really knows. But what we know is that they were a dying peoples long before the inuits came around.
The Dorset culture was spread all across Northern Canada and parts of Greenland. It was found in widely divergent latitudes, with different climates.
It's simply not plausible that such a widely dispersed culture would disappear in such a short time due to climate change.
Disease transmitted from Norse settlers/traders being the cause is also not plausible, as the Dorset disappeared first in the Western stretch of Northern N. America, where the Thule were expanding from, rather than the East, where they would
have first had contact with the Norse. Competition from an invasive culture, the Thule, is the likely cause.
> But let's not romanticize Native American culture either.
Absolutely. But lets also not pretend that the natives were racially motivated genocidal maniacs either.
> The Comanche formed a barrier between the Spanish and the French/British Americans through most of the 1800s, and they did this by subjugating the other tribes around them and by maintaining a war-like stance at all times.
Sure. But they need to do so in order to survive. And lets not forget that we hunted the comanche like animals and wiped them out. Settlers were encouraged to hunt indians and bring their scalps in exchange of money.
> There was simply no way that they could co-exist with a European culture.
Even if they were the most peaceful buddhists, they would have been wiped out. We wanted their land and they simply had no choice. It's pretty idiotic to blame the comanches for fighting back.
> It's very easy to sit here with our 21st century morality and say what we did was wrong, but we have no idea the kind of hardship that people on both sides were living through and trying to make a life for themselves.
It was wrong no matter what century you are in.
> We simply don't have the context to judge them.
If you think hunting indian men, women and children and killing them and selling their scalps for money gives you no context for judgment, then there is something wrong with you.
What happened to the natives was the greatest extermination campaign in history. The holocaust was a joke compared to what happened to the natives.
To emphasize this point, there are more jews in the US than there are natives...
> If you think hunting indian men, women and children and killing them and selling their scalps for money gives you no context for judgment, then there is something wrong with you.
All the rest are good points, but this is an emotional non-sequitur. The reason we don't have context to judge is because we live lives of comfort today, we have no idea what it was like to move into the Wild West and the danger and hardship that entailed.
Of course I agree genocide is bad, that doesn't make me equipped to judge people who lived 200 years ago based on hazy historical generalities.
Okay, let's just sit here and impotently judge and condemn them to satisfy our own sense of moral superiority. I'm sure there will be no shortage of moral condemnation of our current worldview in another 200 years.
> I mean very productive land, lots of mineral resources...
It wasn't productive like the US territory was. It was mostly inhospitable tundra. The bolsheviks weren't an economic superpower for the same reason the canadians aren't.
> Still to this day, Russia underdelivers, given its vast resources --natural and human/intellectual.
Japan, SKorea, Taiwan and the UK have the benefit of living in pax americana and being an ally of america. It has access to all the resources they need...
Russia's problem is that their vast territory is also their achilles heel. They stole land from japan and skorea and every other nation on its border. China, germany, turkey, ukraine, iran, mongolia, etc...
Their land is a blessing AND a curse. Russia can't fully trade with china or japan because of territorial issues. So they didn't fully capitalize on japan's economic miracle. And now they aren't fully capitalizing on china's economic miracle.
Politics and power are an unforgiving discipline. If russia keeps missing out on opportunities and keeps falling behind, the russian empire is going to collapse. Doesn't matter how many nukes they have or now powerful they think they are.
What separates the US and russia is this. After ww2, russia stole a bunch of islands from japan and annexed it. That's why japan and russia still haven't signed a peace treaty. The US returned okinawa. We didn't steal it so we can have normal relations with japan.
I don't know. Some of those countries have minimal natural resources and small fractions of the pop of Russia yet, they enjoy relatively disproportionate economic success.
Maybe you have a point, but it's not the whole point. I think they wear a heavy shackle of ancient culture. One which has acclimatized them over centuries to a serf-state mindset they have not broken out of. It's very patriarchal (or statist). The state is their master in more ways than one. It'll take a cultural shift in the newer generations to shake it and allow them to achieve their potential.
The US was an APEX power and had been for a long time. Nobody could conquer it. To claim the US was a nobody is a laughable.
> It was still undergoing the post-Civil War recovery
After the civil war, the US fielded the greatest army in the world and it's economy was growing because it was shifting to westward expansion. We took over territory bigger than western europe. Not only that, the US was the largest producer of oil BY FAR at that time.
> the Industrial Revolution JUST arrived on the continent.
It just arrived in european mainland as well relatively speaking...
> No European nation was interested in conquering the largely agrarian society.
No european nation could. Let's stop pretending any european country had any hope.
A european country conquering the US in the 1800s is like costa rica conquering the US today. It's laughable.
During the civil war, the US developed much of the military technology that was used in the first world war a few decades later.