"Guns, Germs & Steel" by Jared Diamond is a very readable, fascinating look at the question of why the Europeans conquered New Guinea, rather than the other way around. (The board game Risk has it all wrong.)
His thesis is that some people from Eurasia were bound to dominate because of the size of that continent and its east-west orientation. Continents like Africa and the Americas are at a disadvantage for raising conquerors because the weather patterns make it difficult for crops and domesticated animals to move north-south. He says a couple interesting things about domesticating animals. Very few are easily domesticated. Those who travel in herds with a strong leader are the best. Humans simply become the new leader. (Do human governmental systems work the same way?) Diamond argues that Eurasia furnished more species to domesticate than either Africa or the Americas.
Diamond spends some time also explaining the importance of disease and that's been covered well in the other posts. But it should be pointed out that one disease, malaria, kept Europeans from migrating to Africa in large numbers-- except to the one part of sub-Saharan Africa with a Mediterranean climate-- South Africa.
Quite a few years ago I read the account by Bernal Diaz del Castillo: "The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico." Diaz accompanied Cortez and, while I'd be hard-pressed to provide a citation, I remember his descriptions of the battles as being decidedly less lethal than today's battles. Thousands would fight, but only a handful would die. The Aztecs preferred to capture prisoners.
According to William O'Neil's "Plagues and People Through History", disease was far and away a bigger killer of soldiers than battle was-- up until very recently. David Trachsel's "1898" portrays the U.S. army's assault on Cuba in the Spanish-American War as a bureaucratic mess leading to riot, starvation, and disease-- in Tampa(!) before the soldiers even set foot in Cuba.
Some of the accounts of DeSoto's wanderings in the U.S. Southwest mention finding village after village recently lived in but deserted as DeSoto found them. The belief now is that European diseases actually wiped out the Native Americans in advance of the Spanish explorers.
Conquest, in these accounts, tends to look more like a series of deadly unintended consequences than anything else. The institutionalization of imperialism may be a different matter.
James in Philly
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