78 Before Agriculture
had cost some 2 million Indian lives – an outcome he deemed to be a necessary
part of progress.
5
The assertion that some humans are not human – or are not human enough to
have rights – is absurd as well as brutal.
The Spanish conquistadores destroyed communities with elaborate agricultural
and urban systems. They insisted that the Aztec were barbarous and undeserving
of compassion, for they practised human sacrifice and cannibalism. In reality, the
Spanish had arrived among people whose material wealth they wanted to plunder.
The idea that the victims of this plunder were ‘savages’ was belied by the very thing
the Spanish most wanted from them – the elaborate and magnificent creations of
Meso-American artists, including worked silver and fine jewellery.^3
In reality, explorers and adventurers arrived in the lands of societies that were
at least equal to their own. Hunter-gatherers did not display abundant material
goods or the technology of warfare, and they did not have the knowledge of math-
ematics, astronomy, engineering and textiles that was to be found in some indig-
enous societies of South America. But the Europeans who came ashore from those
ships of exploration – dirty, malnourished and ill clad – encountered hunters and
gatherers who showed all the signs of being well fed and healthy. The societies of
these people were more stable and more secure than those of the explorers; they
were also societies in which private and public well-being intertwined to ensure
much fairer distribution of resources and greater social justice than the newcomers
had ever experienced. But the representatives of ‘civilization’ did not hesitate to
condemn as ‘savages’ the people who provided the food that kept them alive.
These encounters between unhealthy newcomers and vigorous tribal commu-
nities began in the 1400s and continued until the beginning of the 20th century.
Another such paradox is to be seen in the history of European ideas. While describ-
ing the peoples they were discovering as inferior beings and claiming their lands
for themselves, European travellers and intellectuals also began to extol the moral
superiority of the peoples who were being conquered, enslaved and dispossessed.
Columbus’s description of the very first Carib hunter-gatherers he met includes
a recognition that they are ‘so generous with all that they possess, that no one
would believe it who has not seen it ... and [they] display as much love as if they
would give their hearts.’ Social philosophers made intellectual use of what they saw
as life that existed in pure nature. Hobbes’s famous reference to life as ‘nasty, brut-
ish, and short’ came from his imagining a society ‘with no place for Industry ... no
Culture of the Earth ... no Arts; no Letters; no Society.’^4 He wrote this in 1650, a
critique not so much of the hunter-gatherer world as of the early capitalism of the
England in which he lived. In subsequent centuries, philosophers as diverse as
Vico, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Hegel, Engels and Marx^5 made use of the idea of a