By Brian Britton French
The Clash of Civilizations; 58 Mayflower settlers vs. 4+ Million Native Americans
When the Mayflower settlers sat down with Native Americans for their Thanksgiving feast in 1621, the technological and organizational gap between the 57 surviving English settlers (24 children, 5 women and 28 men) and the 4+ million Native North Americans population seemed immaterial.
The dominant and more powerful society between the two was obvious, or was it?
The Europeans arrived with iron tools, firearms, ocean-going ships, alphabetic writing, a heritage of community development and 5,000 years of accumulated Euro / Asia knowledge. The power of which was to play out over the century to follow.
Most coastal Native American communities had stone tools, canoes, oral traditions, and villages of a few hundred people—many already reduced to ghost towns by the great epidemic of 1616–1619.That gap was not the result of innate human superiority or inferiority but of time, space and geography.
The Profound Consequence of Geography:
#1 The extreme abundance of land in North America (a negative)
#2 The total isolation from the European / Asian innovation learning cluster (a superpower)
Land Abundance: The Brake on Complexity
North of the Rio Grande in 1500 there were perhaps 4–7 million people on nearly 2 billion acres—roughly one Native American person per 300–500 acres. Compare that with late-medieval England (1 person per 20–25 acres), France (1 per 15–20 acres), or the richest parts of China and India (1 per 3–6 acres). Abundant land removed nearly every pressure that drives technological and human innovation:
- No need for intensive agriculture: why invent the plow or three-field rotation when fresh soil was a short move away?
- No reward for labor-saving machines: with land free and people scarce, the wheel, water mills, and draft animals offered little advantage.
- No durable large states: unhappy farmers could simply walk to the next valley, making taxation, standing armies, and monumental cities nearly impossible. Cahokia, the largest pre-contact city north of Mexico, collapsed within a century once its maize boom ended and people voted with their feet.
- Warfare remained small-scale and ritualized: with vast empty land, the goal was captives or revenge, not territorial conquest that would force military revolution.
Isolation from the Eurasian Information / Technology Exchange Network
From 12,000 BCE to 1492 CE the Native Americas were essentially cut off from the Old World. Eurasia is a wide east–west band at similar latitudes; crops, animals, and ideas traversed rapidly from China to Spain. The Americas run north–south; tropical crops stop at frost lines, deserts block passage, and ideas rarely jumped a thousand miles of mountain and jungle.
Consequences north of Mexico:
- No large domesticable animals → no plows, no cavalry, no epidemic disease immunity.
- Metallurgy stayed decorative; iron was unknown.
- The wheel existed only as a toy.
- Writing systems never spread beyond Mesoamerica.
While Europe and Asia spent five millennia in a brutal, connected arms race of war, trade, and invention, most of North America remained a continent of low-density villagers who never needed—or encountered—the innovations that scarcity and competition force upon societies.
The Decisive Gap in 1620
| Domain | Western Europe (1620) | New England Natives (1620) |
|---|---|---|
| Tools & Weapons | Iron, steel, firearms | Stone, wood, bone |
| Transport | Deep-water ships, wheeled vehicles | Canoes, foot/dog travel |
| Writing & Records | Alphabetic literacy, printing press | Oral tradition, wampum |
| Political Scale | Nation-states, taxation, standing armies | Chiefdoms, alliances of hundreds–thousands |
| Largest City | London ~300,000 | Villages of a few hundred (many abandoned) |
| Naval Power | Global ocean fleet | Coastal/river canoes only |
The Native population of coastal New England had already been reduced 75–95% by Old World diseases before a single Pilgrim stepped ashore. When English families began arriving in the thousands seeking land, the outcome was foreordained—not by malice, but by demography and technology.
Throughout history, from the Sumerians to the Han, Bantu, Romans, and Mongols, more densely populated, technologically advanced societies have displaced less advanced neighbors upon sustained contact. North America in 1620 was simply the latest example of a universal pattern.
The Pilgrims did not need or practice a policy of extermination; geography and history had already done the decisive work. Blaming the 58 surviving Mayflower settlers for the eventual loss of Native sovereignty is like blaming this small number of families for the 5,000 year advancement of human civilization, of collective learning and technology.
The Native American society and the European culture were always going to meet and compete as civilization have clashed since the creation of mankind. Which continues today…
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