GO rD hIll 500 Years of Indigenous resistance
were to enter into a relationship of forced dependence to land-owners and
manufacturers, leading to periods of intense class struggle, particularly as
the Industrial Revolution (fueled by the expropriation of materials from the
Americas and Afrika) loomed ever larger.
Indeed, the majority of Europeans who emigrated to the Americas
in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries were impoverished merchants, pe-
tit-bourgeois traders, mercenaries, and Christian missionaries all hoping
to build their fortunes in the ‘New World’ and escape the deepening class
stratification that was quickly developing. However, the first permanent
settlements were limited, their main purpose being to facilitate and main-
tain areas of exploitation. During the entire 16th century, only an estimated
100,000 Europeans were permanent emigrants to the Americas.
Their effects, however, were overwhelming; in the same 100-year peri-
od, the populations of the Indigenous peoples declined from 70–100 million
to around 12 million. The Aztec nation alone had been reduced from around
30 million to 3 million in one 50-year period. The only term which describes
this depopulation is that of Genocide; an American Indian holocaust.
Apologists for the Genocide attribute the majority of deaths to the
introduction of disease epidemics such as smallpox and measles by
unknowing Europeans.
While attempting to diminish the scale and intensity of the Geno-
cide (other forms of this diminishment are claiming the population of the
Americas was a much smaller portion than generally accepted demograph-
ic numbers), such a perspective disregards the conditions in which these
diseases were introduced. Conditions such as wars, massacres, slavery,
scorched earth policies and the subsequent destruction of subsistence ag-
riculture and food-stocks, and the accompanying starvation, malnutrition,
and dismemberment of communally-based cultures.
These conditions were not introduced by “unknowing” Europeans;
they were parts of a calculated campaign based on exploitation in which
the extermination of Indigenous peoples was a crucial factor.
European diseases introduced into these conditions came as an after-
effect of the initial attacks. And their effects were disastrous. Once the ef-
fects of the epidemics were realized however, the use of biological warfare
was also planned in the form of infected blankets and other textiles sup-
plied to Indigenous peoples.^9- Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant
of Conquest, University of North Carolina Press, 1975. Jennings documents
the activities of these first colonies, frequently relying on period manuscripts.