Native Americans and Europeans

From the eighteenth century, much of North and South America, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand was settled by European immigrants, and later by migrants from Asia. The native peoples were pushed out and are now small minorities. Yet their names survive in places like Ohio, Mississippi and Seattle (USA), Saskatchewan (Canada) and Parramatta (Australia).

Until the mid-twentieth century, history books spoke of Europeans 'discovering' these lands and hardly mentioned the natives except as hostile. Anthropologists began studying them in America from the 1840s, and from the 1960s native peoples were encouraged to write or dictate their own histories (oral history). Today the National Museum of the American Indian in the USA is curated by American Indians themselves.

Different kinds of colonies. In South Asia, trading companies such as the East India Company became political powers, kept the existing administration and collected taxes. In Africa, Europeans long stayed on the coast and divided the interior among themselves only in the late nineteenth century. The word 'settler' is used for the Dutch in South Africa, the British in Ireland, New Zealand and Australia, and Europeans in America.

The native peoples of North America. The first inhabitants came from Asia over 30,000 years ago, across a land-bridge at the Bering Straits; the oldest artefact found, an arrow-point, is 11,000 years old. They spoke more than a hundred languages.

• They lived in bands in river-valley villages, ate fish and meat, and grew vegetables and maize. They hunted bison (wild buffalo), riding horses bought from the Spanish from the seventeenth century, but killed only as many as they needed.
• They did not farm on a large scale or produce surpluses, so they did not build kingdoms and empires like those of Central and South America.
• They felt no need to own land; they were content with what the land gave.
• They valued formal alliances, friendships and the exchange of gifts. After a treaty, tribes exchanged wampum belts made of coloured shells.
• Their languages were not written, but each tribe passed down accounts of its origins; they believed time moved in cycles. They were skilled weavers, and could 'read' the land and climate as a literate person reads a book.

Encounters. European traders who reached the northern coast in the seventeenth century found the natives friendly. Unlike the Spanish further south, who came for gold, they came for fish and furs, with the natives' expert help. In exchange, Europeans gave blankets, iron vessels, guns and alcohol. Alcohol was new to the natives; many became addicted, which let Europeans dictate the terms of trade. (Europeans, in turn, picked up the habit of tobacco.)

Seeing each other. Eighteenth-century Europeans judged a people 'civilised' by literacy, organised religion and towns, so they saw the natives as uncivilised.

• The French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau admired them as untouched by the corruptions of civilisation: the 'noble savage'.
• The English poet Wordsworth, who never met a native American, imagined them as having little imagination or emotion.
• Washington Irving, who did meet them, wrote that they were quiet around distrustful white men but lively mimics among themselves, and that whites often treated them badly.
• To the natives, goods exchanged were gifts of friendship; to the Europeans, furs and fish were commodities to be sold for profit. The natives were also saddened by European greed, such as the mass killing of beavers for their fur.

Settlers and the forest. After traders came settlers, many fleeing religious persecution in Europe. They cut down forests with iron tools to make farms. Where natives saw tracks and life in a forest, Europeans saw future cornfields. Thomas Jefferson, third President of the USA, dreamed of a country of European small farmers; natives who grew crops only for their own needs and thought it wrong to own land seemed to him 'uncivilised'.