THIS chapter recounts some aspects of the histories of the
native peoples of America and Australia. Theme 8 described
the history of the Spanish and Portuguese colonisation of
South America. From the eighteenth century, more areas
of South America, Central America, North America, South
Africa, Australia and New Zealand came to be settled by
immigrants from Europe. This led to many of the native
peoples being pushed out into other areas. The European
settlements were called ‘colonies’. When the European
inhabitants of the colonies became independent of the
European ‘mother-country’, these colonies became ‘states’
or countries.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, people from
Asian countries also migrated to some of these countries.
Today, these Europeans and Asians form the majority in
these countries, and the number of the native inhabitants
are very small. They are hardly seen in the towns, and
people have forgotten that they once occupied much of the
country, and that the names of many rivers, towns, etc.
are derived from ‘native’ names (e.g. Ohio, Mississippi and
Seattle in the USA, Saskatchewan in Canada, Wollongong
and Parramatta in Australia).
Till the middle of the twentieth century, American and
Australian history textbooks used to describe how
Europeans ‘discovered’ the Americas and Australia. They
hardly mentioned the native peoples except to suggest that
they were hostile to Europeans. These peoples were,
however, studied by anthropologists in America from the
1840s. Much later, from the 1960s, the native peoples were
encouraged to write their own histories or to dictate them
(this is called oral history).
Today, it is possible to read historical works and fiction
written by the native peoples, and visitors to museums in
these countries will see galleries of ‘native art’ and special
museums which show the aboriginal way of life. The new
National Museum of the American Indian in the USA has
been curated by American Indians themselves.

European Imperialism

The American empires of Spain and Portugal (see Theme 8) did not
expand after the seventeenth century. From that time other countries
– France, Holland and England – began to extend their trading
activities and to establish colonies – in America, Africa and Asia;
Ireland also was virtually a colony of England, as the landowners
there were mostly English settlers.
From the eighteenth century, it became obvious that while it was
the prospect of profit which drove people to establish colonies, there
were significant variations in the nature of the control established.
In South Asia, trading companies like the East India Company
made themselves into political powers, defeated local rulers and
annexed their territories. They retained the older well-developed
administrative system and collected taxes from landowners. Later
they built railways to make trade easier, excavated mines and
established big plantations.
In Africa, Europeans traded on the coast, except in South Africa,
and only in the late nineteenth century did they venture into the
interior. After this, some of the European countries reached an
agreement to divide up Africa as colonies for themselves.
The word ‘settler’ is used for the Dutch in South Africa, the British
in Ireland, New Zealand and Australia, and the Europeans in America.
The official language in these colonies was English (except in Canada,
where French is also an official language).

NORTH AMERICA

The continent of North America extends from the Arctic Circle to the
Tropic of Cancer, from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean. West of the
chain of the Rocky Mountains is the desert of Arizona and Nevada, still
further west the Sierra Nevada mountains, to the east the Great Plains,
the Great Lakes, the valleys of the Mississippi and the Ohio and the
Appalachian Mountains. To the south is Mexico. Forty per cent of
Canada is covered with forests. Oil, gas and mineral resources are
found in many areas, which explains the many big industries in the
USA and Canada. Today, wheat, corn and fruit are grown extensively
and fishing is a major industry in Canada.
Mining, industry and extensive agriculture have been developed only
in the last 200 years by immigrants from Europe, Africa and China. But
there were people who had been living in North America for thousands of
years before the Europeans learnt of its existence.

The Native Peoples

The earliest inhabitants of North America came from Asia over 30,000
years ago on a land-bridge across the Bering Straits, and during the
last Ice Age 10,000 years ago they moved further south. The oldest
artefact found in America – an arrow-point – is 11,000 years old. The
population started to increase about 5,000 years ago when the climate
became more stable.

These peoples lived in bands, in villages along river valleys. They ate
fish and meat, and cultivated vegetables and maize. They often went
on long journeys in search of meat, chiefly that of bison, the wild
buffalo that roamed the grasslands (this became easier from the
seventeenth century, when the natives started to ride horses, which
they bought from Spanish settlers). But they only killed as many
animals as they needed for food.

They did not attempt extensive agriculture and since they did not
produce a surplus, they did not develop kingdoms and empires as in
Central and South America. There were some instances of quarrels
between tribes over territory, but by and large control of land was not
an issue. They were content with the food
and shelter they got from the land
without feeling any need to ‘own’ it. An
important feature of their tradition was
that of making formal alliances and
friendships, and exchanging gifts. Goods were obtained not by buying
them, but as gifts.
Numerous languages were spoken in North America, though these
were not written down. They believed that time moved in cycles, and
each tribe had accounts about their origins and their earlier history
which were passed on from one generation to the next. They were
skilled craftspeople and wove beautiful textiles. They could read the
land – they could understand the climates and different landscapes in
the way literate people read written texts.

Encounters with Europeans

In the seventeenth century, the European traders who reached the
north coast of North America after a difficult two-month voyage were
relieved to find the native peoples friendly and welcoming. Unlike the
Spanish in South America, who were overcome by the abundance of
gold in the country, these adventurers came to trade in fish and furs, in
which they got the willing help of the natives who were expert at hunting.
Further south, along the Mississippi river, the French found that
the natives held regular gatherings to exchange handicrafts unique to
a tribe or food items not available in other regions. In exchange for
local products the Europeans gave the natives blankets, iron vessels
(which they used sometimes in place of their clay pots), guns, which
was a useful supplement for bows and arrows to kill animals, and
alcohol. This last item was something the natives had not known earlier,
and they became addicted to it, which suited the Europeans, because
it enabled them to dictate terms of trade. (The Europeans acquired
from the natives an addiction to tobacco.)

Mutual Perceptions

In the eighteenth century, western Europeans defined ‘civilised’ people
in terms of literacy, an organised religion and urbanism. To them, the
natives of America appeared ‘uncivilised’. To some, like the French
philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, such people were to be admired,
as they were untouched by the corruptions of ‘civilisation’. A popular
term was ‘the noble savage’. Some lines in a poem by the English poet
William Wordsworth indicate another perspective. Neither he nor
Rousseau had met a native American, but Wordsworth described them
as living ‘amid wilds/Where fancy hath small liberty to grace/The
affections, to exalt them or refine’, meaning that people living close to
nature had only limited powers of imagination and emotion!

To the natives, the goods they exchanged with the Europeans were
gifts, given in friendship. For the Europeans, dreaming of becoming rich,
the fish and furs were commodities, which they would sell for a profit in
Europe. The prices of the goods they sold varied from year to year,
depending on the supply. The natives could not understand this – they
had no sense of the ‘market’ in faraway Europe. They were puzzled by the
fact that the European traders sometimes gave them a lot of things in
exchange for their goods, sometimes very little. They were also saddened
by the greed of the Europeans*. In their impatience to get furs, they had
slaughtered hundreds of beavers, and the natives were very uneasy, fearing
that the animals would take revenge on them for this destruction.
Following the first Europeans, who were traders, were those who
came to ‘settle’ in America. From the seventeenth century, there
were groups of Europeans who were being persecuted because they
were of a different sect of Christianity (Protestants living in
predominantly Catholic countries, or Catholics in countries where
Protestantism was the official religion). Many of them left Europe
and went to America to begin a new life. As long as there was vacant

land, this was not a problem, but gradually the Europeans moved
further inland, near native villages. They used their iron tools to cut
down forests to lay out farms.
Natives and Europeans saw different things when they looked at
forests – natives identified tracks invisible to the Europeans. Europeans
imagined the forests cut down and replaced by cornfields. Jefferson’s
‘dream’ was a country populated by Europeans with small farms. The
natives, who grew crops for their own needs, not for sale and profit,
and thought it wrong to ‘own’ the land, could not understand this. In
Jefferson’s view, this made them ‘uncivilised’.

The countries that are known as Canada and the United States of
America came into existence at the end of the eighteenth century. At
that time they occupied only a fraction of the land they now cover.
Over the next hundred years they extended their control over more
territory, to reach their present size. Large areas were acquired by the
USA by purchase – they bought land in the south from France (the
‘Louisiana Purchase’) and from Russia (Alaska), and by war – much of
southern USA was won from Mexico. It did not occur to anyone that
the consent of natives living in these areas should have been asked.
The western ‘frontier’ of the USA was a shifting one, and as it moved,
the natives also were forced to move back

The landscapes of America changed drastically in the nineteenth
century. The Europeans treated the land differently from the natives.
Some of the migrants from Britain and France were younger sons who
would not inherit their fathers’ property and therefore were eager to own
land in America. Later, there were waves of immigrants from countries
like Germany, Sweden and Italy who had lost their lands to big farmers,
and wanted farms they could own. People from Poland were happy to
work in the prairie grasslands, which reminded them of the steppes of
their homes, and were excited at being able to buy huge properties at very
low prices. They cleared land and developed agriculture, introducing crops
(rice and cotton) which could not grow in Europe and therefore could be
sold there for profit. To protect their huge farms from wild animals –
wolves and mountain lions – these were hunted to extinction. They felt
totally secure only with the invention of barbed wire in 1873

The climate of the southern region was too hot for Europeans to
work outdoors, and the experience of South American colonies had

shown that the natives who had been enslaved had died in large
numbers. Plantation owners therefore bought slaves in Africa. Protests
by anti-slavery groups led to a ban on slave trade, but the Africans
who were in the USA remained slaves, as did their children.
The northern states of the USA, where the economy did not depend
on plantations (and therefore on slavery), argued for ending slavery
which they condemned as an inhuman practice. In 1861-65, there
was a war between the states that wanted to retain slavery and those
supporting abolition. The latter won. Slavery was abolished, though it
was only in the twentieth century that the African Americans were
able to win the battle for civil liberties, and segregation between ‘whites’
and ‘non-whites’ in schools and public transport was ended.
The Canadian government had a problem which was not to be solved
for a long time, and which seemed more urgent than the question of
the natives – in 1763 Canada had been won by the British after a war
with France. The French settlers repeatedly demanded autonomous
political status. It was only in 1867 that this problem was solved by
organising canada as a Confederation of autonomous states.

The Native Peoples Lose their Land

In the USA, as settlement expanded, the natives were induced or forced
to move, after signing treaties selling their land. The prices paid were
very low, and there were instances when the Americans (a term used

to mean the European people of the USA) cheated them by taking more
land or paying less than promised.
Even high officials saw nothing wrong in depriving the native peoples
of their land. This is seen by an episode in Georgia, a state in the USA.
Officials had argued that the Cherokee tribe was governed by state
laws, but could not enjoy the rights of citizens. (This was despite the
fact that, of all the native peoples, the Cherokees were the ones who
had made the most effort to learn English and to understand the
American way of life; even so they were not allowed the rights of citizens.)
In 1832, an important judgment was announced by the US Chief
Justice, John Marshall. He said that the Cherokees were
‘a distinct community, occupying its own territory in which the laws of
Georgia had no force’, and that they had sovereignty in certain matters.
US President Andrew Jackson had a reputation for fighting against
economic and political privilege, but when it came to the Indians, he
was a different person. He refused to honour the Chief Justice’s
judgment, and ordered the US army to evict the Cherokees from their
land and drive them to the Great American Desert. Of the 15,000
people thus forced to go, over a quarter died along the ‘Trail of Tears’.
Those who took the land occupied by the tribes justified it by saying
the natives did not deserve to occupy land which they did not use to
the maximum. They went on to criticise them for being lazy, since they
did not use their crafts skills to produce goods for the market, for not
being interested in learning English or dressing ‘correctly’ (which meant
like the Europeans). They deserved to ‘die out’, they argued. The prairies
were cleared for farmland, and wild bison killed off. ‘Primitive man will
disappear with the primitive animal’ wrote a visiting Frenchman

Meanwhile, the natives were pushed westward, given land elsewhere
(‘theirs in perpetuity’) but often moved again if any mineral – lead or
gold – or oil was found on their lands. Many tribes were forced to share
the land originally occupied by one tribe, thus leading to quarrels

between them. They were locked off in small areas called
‘reservations’, which often was land with which they had no
earlier connection. They did not give in without a fight. The
US army crushed a series of rebellions from 1865 to 1890,
and in Canada there were armed revolts by the Metis (people
of native European descent) between 1869 and 1885. But
after that they gave up.

The Gold Rush, and the Growth of Industries

There was always the hope that there was gold in North
America. In the 1840s, traces of gold were found in the USA,
in California. This led to the ‘Gold Rush’, when thousands of
eager Europeans hurried to America in the hope of making a
quick fortune. This led to the building of railway lines across
the continent, for which thousands of Chinese workers were
recruited. The USA’s railway was completed by 1870, that of

Canada by 1885. ‘The old nations
creep on at a snail’s pace’ said Andrew
Carnegie, a poor immigrant from
Scotland who became one of the first
millionaire industrialists in the USA,
‘the Republic thunders on at the speed
of an express’.
One reason why the Industrial
Revolution happened in England
when it did was because small
peasants were losing their land to
big farmers, and moving to jobs in
factories (see Theme 9). In North
America, industries developed for
very different reasons – to
manufacture railway equipment so
that rapid transport could link distant places, and to produce
machinery which would make large-scale farming easier. Industrial
towns grew and factories multiplied, both in the USA and Canada.
In 1860, the USA had been an undeveloped economy. In
1890, it was the leading industrial power in the world.
Large-scale agriculture also expanded. Vast
areas were cleared and divided up into farms.
By 1890, the bison had almost been
exterminated, thus ending the life of hunting
the natives had followed for centuries. In
1892, the USA’s continental expansion was
complete. The area between the Pacific and
Atlantic Oceans was divided up into states.
There no longer remained the ‘frontier’ that
had pulled European settlers west for many
decades. Within a few years the USA was
setting up its own colonies – in Hawaii and
the Philippines. It had become an imperial
power

Constitutional Rights

The ‘democratic spirit’ which had been the rallying cry of the settlers
in their fight for independence in the 1770s, came to define the identity
of the USA against the monarchies and aristocracies of the Old World.
Also important to them was that their constitution included the
individual’s ‘right to property’, which the state could not override.
But both democratic rights (the right to vote for representatives to
Congress and for the President) and the right to property were only for
white men. Daniel Paul, a Canadian native, pointed out in 2000 that
Thomas Paine, the champion of democracy at the time of the War for
American Independence and the French Revolution, ‘used the Indians
as models of how society might be organized’. He used this to argue
that ‘the Native Americans by their example sowed the seeds for the
long-drawn-out movement towards democracy by the people of Europe’
(We Were Not the Savages, p. 333)