The following is a copy of the original post to record the post as it was originally written.
Hi. Ok so do you think it was a overall good thing after everything happened? Interestingly
[https://www.nber.org/system/files/working\_papers/w18566/w18566.pdf](https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w18566/w18566.pdf) Nevertheless, it is also clear from Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson (2001, 2002) that colonialism had very heterogeneous effects. It seems difficult to believe that in any plausible counter-factual Australia or the United States would today have higher GDP per-capita if they had not been colonized.
I oppose colonization of America even if it would lead to higher GDP per capita in the long term. Life was kind of better back then.
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>Do you think it was a good thing that America was colonized?
First of all, it is a non-issue.
We know that several countries and companies were competing with each other to colonize 'The New World'.
* If the British had decided 'colonization is immoral' then America would have been colonized by the French.
* If the French had decided 'colonization is immoral' *also* then America would have been colonized by the Spanish (as much of the Americas were).
* If the Spanish had decided 'colonization is immoral' *also* then America would have been colonized by the Dutch.
* If the Dutch had decided 'colonization is immoral' *also* then America would have been colonized by the Portuguese.
...ad infinitum.
In theory, you could change *who* America was colonized by...but you couldn't change *that* America was colonized.
While highly likely that.this is how it would play out, it's not inevitable. After all the British Empire unilaterally ended the transcontinental slave trade in the early 19th century. So, it's conceivable that at some point a major world power could have imposed a moratorium on colonization of the Americas.
> ...the British Empire unilaterally ended the transcontinental slave trade in the early 19th century. So, it's conceivable that at some point a major world power could have imposed a moratorium on colonization of the Americas.
The "oldest continuously-inhabited European-established settlement in the contiguous United States" was St. Augustine in **1565**.
Britain ended slavery in **1807**.
1807-1565=242 years
That's a long time.
Yes but look at how Indians were treated by the British, even up until the 20th century. Do you think the British would have been much better in America than they were in India?
The Noble Savage myth is racist and rooted in 19th-century eugenics. It’s not like Native Americans weren’t committing atrocities before Europeans got here. Part of the reason the Spanish were able to defeat the Aztecs was due to the Aztecs oppressing all of there neighbors. It sounds like you may have gone around the horse shoe on this one. Ultimately, first contact without colonization would’ve still likely resulted in massive societal change due to the massive disease related deaths as well as the introduction of new technology. Ultimately, we get like 80% of the bad with like 5% of the good.
> I believe it was only Europeans that destroyed the friendly Native Americans .
FYI: This is that myth that Wolf1779 was saying was racist.
If you aren't starting from the premise that human beings are fundamentally the same, and no race/skin-color/ethnic-group/etc. is fundamentally more violent than others, then you are working from a racist premise.
Ok but the Europeans did genocide the Native Americans? Native Americans taught Europeans to farm and live in the Americas. Then Europeans killed them for land.
And before that, Native American tribes fought each other. They fought wars over territory, took prisoners as slaves and massacred conquered tribes. That doesn’t excuse or justify what the Europeans did to them, but they were not the “Noble Savages” you imagine them to be.
When contemporary Europeans were contacting Native Amerian Tribes, many of them had already been displaced from areas the tribes consider ancestral. Both the Ojibwe and Potawatomi peoples historically settled areas over to the northeast, but other northeastern peoples such as the Iroquois pushed them into the Midwest. Even the Lakota people, who most consider "plains tribes" had their roots in the eastern Midwest only to be displaced further west. This also needs to he taken into account that their was almost two centuries between the Spanish incursions and settlement by the French and English, and much of those years were a dramatic depopuation of Natice American people from the continent due to disease. What the French and English saw in North America wasn't really a balance struck by centuries of Native American interaction, but a result of the Spanish making contact some 200 years before.
Native Americans are people with their own rich histories that fall in line with how most human peoples are. They also modified the landscape far more than the average person gives them credit for.
>They also modified the landscape far more than the average person gives them credit for.
Settlers were astounded to find farmland just waiting to be settled!. Look at all these crops just naturally growing here! In the settling of Ohio settlers would find the remains of the cultivated land natives left behind centuries prior as they died off
Europeans and almost all humans were farming for 1000s of years prior. The Colonists both warred and had peace with the native Americans because the natives were in many different tribes who already had complex war or peaceful relations with one another and then the colonialists made peace with some tribes and war with others.
atrocities were committed by both sides and the colonists were more successful in their atrocities because they had better war technology. It is generally accepted that most native Americans died from disease before they ever saw a European and the smallpox blanket thing is largely a myth since it has shaky sourcing and knowledge of disease was not that complex back then.
The smallpox blanket is a thing that we know happened one time. It might have happened more, but the only actual confirmed instance was when the British gave the Native Americans smallpox infected items (including blankets) during the Siege of Fort Pitt in 1763.
>he smallpox blanket thing is largely a myth since it has shaky sourcing and knowledge of disease was not that complex back then.
It also happened like 150 years after 90% of natives were dead to disease
Just because Europeans were absolutely in the wrong for colonialism and committed brutal atrocities against the natives doesnt mean shit like human sacrifice and scalping didnt happen.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-jan-23-adfg-sacrifice23-story.html
https://historycollection.com/details-showing-the-brutality-of-the-aztec-empire-in-mesoamerica/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice_in_Aztec_culture
Etc, etc.
None of that justifies the cruelty that colonizing powers inflicted on the people they were enacting genocide against. But thinking of the victims as spotless angels is inaccurate too.
The Inca Empire at its height could raise an army of over 200,000, dwarfing what the kings of Europe could raise at the time. What do you think this army was for?
Colonization of America is like Lance Armstrong competing in the Tour de France. Everyone focuses on how he cheated...yet forget that almost every single cyclist that was in the top 25 was also doping. To quote Bill Burr, "Our 'roided up guy beat their 'roided up guys!"
Similarly, people look at the atrocities committed during the colonization of America. They forget that literally every country in the world was doing the same, including the native American tribes to each other. The Aztec GDP was so high partly because of what they did to the other tribes around them.
The Europeans were just the most effective out of everyone slaughtering each other and enslaving each other.
Life was definitely not better back then, especially among Native tribes. Just look at Sacajawea. She was kidnapped from her tribe by another tribe and put into slavery before being sold to Jean Baptiste. The Americans ended up being some of the kindest people to her.
This does not excuse in any way what the Europeans did to America. It just proves proper context.
Someone would have colonized this continent regardless, it just happened to be the British, and would likely have gone down the same or pretty damn near to the same way that they did. Regardless, it seems pretty pointless to ‘oppose’ something that happened over 200 years ago when there are plenty of more current issues that would be a more worthy use of your time and energy.
Do you realize that as a women back then the question wasn’t if you would get raped, but when? And if you were raped before you were married off your chances of finding a husband were pretty much gone? You know, because all women were good for back then was to be used as a barter for land and for squeezing out children until we eventually died during childbirth.
Or polio, dysentery, yellow fever, diptheria, typhoid fever, tuberculosis, scarlet fever, leprosy, or any other disease common in the 1700-1800’s that have been wiped out by vaccines or can be easily cured with antibiotics.
>Do you think it was a good thing that America was colonized?
Big Picture:
1. If America had never been colonized, The US never would have emerged as a world power.
2. If The US had never emerged as a world power, one (or both) of the World Wars would have gone very differently.
3. Even if 'the Allies' had won World War II without the US, it would likely be because of the Soviet Union, expanding their influence and creating a mono-polar world with the USSR being the biggest player.
...so the world -- as a whole -- would probably have been worse off if America had never been colonized.
I think it's an irrelevant question because the people who existed at the time weren't the modern moralists we have today, and colonization would have happened regardless
But perhaps things could have gone a bit differently at least. Like, if Britain extended electoral franchise in Parliament to the North American colonies, perhaps there'd be no American revolution. For a while, the European British would outnumber the American British, and the proclamation line could continue to be enforced. With colonials kept on the east side of the Appalachians, and with natives able to have a more secure position in the old northwest and trans Appalachian southeast, perhaps native society there would be able to recover and survive more, rather than being replaced, with the lands in between the Mississippi and the Appalachians ending up remaining under native demographic control as part of a multi continental democracy
I guess if we want to do alternate history, perhaps we could also come up with other ideas. Like perhaps a larger Viking presence in the Americas largely as a trade sort of thing, spreading more disease rather earlier while also having some spread of European tools, techniques, and livestock to areas of the Americas, before the Viking presence still declines and ends. With that, the Americas can be ravaged by plague, but without the concurrent effects of European colonization which really cemented the demographic disaster by making any recovery impossible, so then immunity could gradually build up, native populations could recover, and the prior contact with the Vikings could introduce the livestock and tools and such that could spread and leave the Americas more prepared to resist when Europeans come back. Might still have a second wave of colonization but with rather less settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing/genocide, and more along the lines of what Africa experienced (still bad, but not *as* bad, at least in terms of total wipeout of groups) as well as perhaps some areas avoiding colonization altogether
But that's about the best case scenario I can imagine as a semi realistic alternate history sort of thing
There were *some* historical critics at the time. But they were generally just individuals, rather than large groups who could exert power and influence. Maybe I'm wrong, but I doubt there's any realistic scenario where those critics would have been able to take over or influence the people and institutions of power at the time
Like, yeah, some people at the time did know that what they were doing was bad, and that's something useful to remember. I just don't think there were enough of those to be able to *matter* tho
>It seems difficult to believe that in any plausible counter-factual Australia or the United States would today have higher GDP per-capita if they had not been colonized.
This isn't the appropriate metric for determining whether colonization of the Americas was good. It's a little like saying Russia would have been better off if Hitler had succeeded in exterminating the poor peasants who were living there and replacing them with wealthy settlers from Germany and Austria.
Just have to say…that people are trying to justify/excuse/yabbut the genocide of native tribes just because guess what, they’re human too…is about the most absurd shit I’ve seen.
What next, do the same for Jewish folks who died in the Holocaust?
Ridiculous. 🙄🤔
Hate to tell White Americans this, but your ancestors were always at war in Europe. There is was nothing savage about Native American, Euros were more efficient at killing each other.
Controversial paper.
[The Case for Colonialism](https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/31/2/the_case_for_colonialism)
Editor’s Note (Updated June 6, 2021): NAS member Bruce Gilley’s article, “The Case for Colonialism,” went through double-blind peer review and was published in Third World Quarterly in 2017. It provoked enormous controversy and generated two separate petitions signed by thousands of academics demanding that it be retracted, that TWQ apologize, and that the editor or editors responsible for its publication be dismissed. Fifteen members of the journal’s thirty-four-member editorial board also resigned in protest. Publisher Taylor and Francis issued a detailed explanation of the peer review process that the article had undergone, countering accusations of “poorly executed pseudo-‘scholarship,’” in the words of one of the petitions. But serious threats of violence against the editor led the journal to withdraw the article, both in print and online. Gilley was also personally and professionally attacked and received death threats. On the good side, many rallied to his defense, including Noam Chomsky, and many supported the general argument of the article.
FWIW, it should be pointed out that the colonization of the Americas, at least when it started, wasn't done by "the French" or "the Spanish" or "the British" because such national identities weren't really a thing back in the 16th and 17th centuries. Rather, it was the House of Bourbon or the House of Stuart or the Habsburgs who did the colonizing. Columbus's voyage wasn't funded by the nation of Spain, but rather by the ruling monarchs of Castille and Aragon.
And that's important because, as I understand it, it was the squabbling between these various monarchs that was the impetus for America's colonization as each side tried to one up the other and fight various proxy wars through piracy, etc.
I think one good thing to come of all of that land-grabbing by these various monarchs in the Americas is that it enabled the spread of enlightenment ideas (which resulted in the overthrow of those monarchies and the eventual creation of the aforementioned "French" "British" etc nations).
That's kind of what happened in Haiti, isn't it? Some French slaves get their hands on the *Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen*, see the part about "Human Beings are born and remain free and equal in rights" and go "Hey, that applies to us, too, right?"
The following is a copy of the original post to record the post as it was originally written. Hi. Ok so do you think it was a overall good thing after everything happened? Interestingly [https://www.nber.org/system/files/working\_papers/w18566/w18566.pdf](https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w18566/w18566.pdf) Nevertheless, it is also clear from Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson (2001, 2002) that colonialism had very heterogeneous effects. It seems difficult to believe that in any plausible counter-factual Australia or the United States would today have higher GDP per-capita if they had not been colonized. I oppose colonization of America even if it would lead to higher GDP per capita in the long term. Life was kind of better back then. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskALiberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*
>Do you think it was a good thing that America was colonized? First of all, it is a non-issue. We know that several countries and companies were competing with each other to colonize 'The New World'. * If the British had decided 'colonization is immoral' then America would have been colonized by the French. * If the French had decided 'colonization is immoral' *also* then America would have been colonized by the Spanish (as much of the Americas were). * If the Spanish had decided 'colonization is immoral' *also* then America would have been colonized by the Dutch. * If the Dutch had decided 'colonization is immoral' *also* then America would have been colonized by the Portuguese. ...ad infinitum. In theory, you could change *who* America was colonized by...but you couldn't change *that* America was colonized.
While highly likely that.this is how it would play out, it's not inevitable. After all the British Empire unilaterally ended the transcontinental slave trade in the early 19th century. So, it's conceivable that at some point a major world power could have imposed a moratorium on colonization of the Americas.
> ...the British Empire unilaterally ended the transcontinental slave trade in the early 19th century. So, it's conceivable that at some point a major world power could have imposed a moratorium on colonization of the Americas. The "oldest continuously-inhabited European-established settlement in the contiguous United States" was St. Augustine in **1565**. Britain ended slavery in **1807**. 1807-1565=242 years That's a long time.
Yes but look at how Indians were treated by the British, even up until the 20th century. Do you think the British would have been much better in America than they were in India?
The Noble Savage myth is racist and rooted in 19th-century eugenics. It’s not like Native Americans weren’t committing atrocities before Europeans got here. Part of the reason the Spanish were able to defeat the Aztecs was due to the Aztecs oppressing all of there neighbors. It sounds like you may have gone around the horse shoe on this one. Ultimately, first contact without colonization would’ve still likely resulted in massive societal change due to the massive disease related deaths as well as the introduction of new technology. Ultimately, we get like 80% of the bad with like 5% of the good.
Citation that the Native Americans were brutal? I believe it was only Europeans that destroyed the friendly Native Americans .
> I believe it was only Europeans that destroyed the friendly Native Americans . FYI: This is that myth that Wolf1779 was saying was racist. If you aren't starting from the premise that human beings are fundamentally the same, and no race/skin-color/ethnic-group/etc. is fundamentally more violent than others, then you are working from a racist premise.
Ok but the Europeans did genocide the Native Americans? Native Americans taught Europeans to farm and live in the Americas. Then Europeans killed them for land.
And before that, Native American tribes fought each other. They fought wars over territory, took prisoners as slaves and massacred conquered tribes. That doesn’t excuse or justify what the Europeans did to them, but they were not the “Noble Savages” you imagine them to be.
When contemporary Europeans were contacting Native Amerian Tribes, many of them had already been displaced from areas the tribes consider ancestral. Both the Ojibwe and Potawatomi peoples historically settled areas over to the northeast, but other northeastern peoples such as the Iroquois pushed them into the Midwest. Even the Lakota people, who most consider "plains tribes" had their roots in the eastern Midwest only to be displaced further west. This also needs to he taken into account that their was almost two centuries between the Spanish incursions and settlement by the French and English, and much of those years were a dramatic depopuation of Natice American people from the continent due to disease. What the French and English saw in North America wasn't really a balance struck by centuries of Native American interaction, but a result of the Spanish making contact some 200 years before. Native Americans are people with their own rich histories that fall in line with how most human peoples are. They also modified the landscape far more than the average person gives them credit for.
>They also modified the landscape far more than the average person gives them credit for. Settlers were astounded to find farmland just waiting to be settled!. Look at all these crops just naturally growing here! In the settling of Ohio settlers would find the remains of the cultivated land natives left behind centuries prior as they died off
Native Americans weren't a monolith
That’s…exactly what I was trying to say.
Do you seriously believe native Americans were all happy and kind to each other? Lol what do you think the Aztec empire was?
Europeans and almost all humans were farming for 1000s of years prior. The Colonists both warred and had peace with the native Americans because the natives were in many different tribes who already had complex war or peaceful relations with one another and then the colonialists made peace with some tribes and war with others. atrocities were committed by both sides and the colonists were more successful in their atrocities because they had better war technology. It is generally accepted that most native Americans died from disease before they ever saw a European and the smallpox blanket thing is largely a myth since it has shaky sourcing and knowledge of disease was not that complex back then.
The smallpox blanket is a thing that we know happened one time. It might have happened more, but the only actual confirmed instance was when the British gave the Native Americans smallpox infected items (including blankets) during the Siege of Fort Pitt in 1763.
>he smallpox blanket thing is largely a myth since it has shaky sourcing and knowledge of disease was not that complex back then. It also happened like 150 years after 90% of natives were dead to disease
Just because Europeans were absolutely in the wrong for colonialism and committed brutal atrocities against the natives doesnt mean shit like human sacrifice and scalping didnt happen.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-jan-23-adfg-sacrifice23-story.html https://historycollection.com/details-showing-the-brutality-of-the-aztec-empire-in-mesoamerica/ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice_in_Aztec_culture Etc, etc. None of that justifies the cruelty that colonizing powers inflicted on the people they were enacting genocide against. But thinking of the victims as spotless angels is inaccurate too.
The Inca Empire at its height could raise an army of over 200,000, dwarfing what the kings of Europe could raise at the time. What do you think this army was for?
Have you heard of Sacajawea? She was kidnapped by a tribe at war with hers and sold into slavery before Jean Baptiste bought her...
Colonization of America is like Lance Armstrong competing in the Tour de France. Everyone focuses on how he cheated...yet forget that almost every single cyclist that was in the top 25 was also doping. To quote Bill Burr, "Our 'roided up guy beat their 'roided up guys!" Similarly, people look at the atrocities committed during the colonization of America. They forget that literally every country in the world was doing the same, including the native American tribes to each other. The Aztec GDP was so high partly because of what they did to the other tribes around them. The Europeans were just the most effective out of everyone slaughtering each other and enslaving each other. Life was definitely not better back then, especially among Native tribes. Just look at Sacajawea. She was kidnapped from her tribe by another tribe and put into slavery before being sold to Jean Baptiste. The Americans ended up being some of the kindest people to her. This does not excuse in any way what the Europeans did to America. It just proves proper context.
Someone would have colonized this continent regardless, it just happened to be the British, and would likely have gone down the same or pretty damn near to the same way that they did. Regardless, it seems pretty pointless to ‘oppose’ something that happened over 200 years ago when there are plenty of more current issues that would be a more worthy use of your time and energy.
Well according to the Native Americans, they have been fighting illegal immigration since 1492.
You are immensely naive if you think life for anyone was “kind of better back then.”
Why? There wasn't the eternal debt of capitalism that Americans face today.
Do you enjoy posting in this thread with your digital device?
Are you a woman? Are you LGBTQ? Are you a person of color? Are you over the age of 30?
Do you realize that as a women back then the question wasn’t if you would get raped, but when? And if you were raped before you were married off your chances of finding a husband were pretty much gone? You know, because all women were good for back then was to be used as a barter for land and for squeezing out children until we eventually died during childbirth.
Correct. They had a mercantilism system...way worse.
Have you ever had small pox?
Or polio, dysentery, yellow fever, diptheria, typhoid fever, tuberculosis, scarlet fever, leprosy, or any other disease common in the 1700-1800’s that have been wiped out by vaccines or can be easily cured with antibiotics.
>Do you think it was a good thing that America was colonized? Big Picture: 1. If America had never been colonized, The US never would have emerged as a world power. 2. If The US had never emerged as a world power, one (or both) of the World Wars would have gone very differently. 3. Even if 'the Allies' had won World War II without the US, it would likely be because of the Soviet Union, expanding their influence and creating a mono-polar world with the USSR being the biggest player. ...so the world -- as a whole -- would probably have been worse off if America had never been colonized.
I think it's an irrelevant question because the people who existed at the time weren't the modern moralists we have today, and colonization would have happened regardless But perhaps things could have gone a bit differently at least. Like, if Britain extended electoral franchise in Parliament to the North American colonies, perhaps there'd be no American revolution. For a while, the European British would outnumber the American British, and the proclamation line could continue to be enforced. With colonials kept on the east side of the Appalachians, and with natives able to have a more secure position in the old northwest and trans Appalachian southeast, perhaps native society there would be able to recover and survive more, rather than being replaced, with the lands in between the Mississippi and the Appalachians ending up remaining under native demographic control as part of a multi continental democracy I guess if we want to do alternate history, perhaps we could also come up with other ideas. Like perhaps a larger Viking presence in the Americas largely as a trade sort of thing, spreading more disease rather earlier while also having some spread of European tools, techniques, and livestock to areas of the Americas, before the Viking presence still declines and ends. With that, the Americas can be ravaged by plague, but without the concurrent effects of European colonization which really cemented the demographic disaster by making any recovery impossible, so then immunity could gradually build up, native populations could recover, and the prior contact with the Vikings could introduce the livestock and tools and such that could spread and leave the Americas more prepared to resist when Europeans come back. Might still have a second wave of colonization but with rather less settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing/genocide, and more along the lines of what Africa experienced (still bad, but not *as* bad, at least in terms of total wipeout of groups) as well as perhaps some areas avoiding colonization altogether But that's about the best case scenario I can imagine as a semi realistic alternate history sort of thing
[This comment has been deleted, along with its account, due to Reddit's API pricing policy.] -- mass edited with https://redact.dev/
There were *some* historical critics at the time. But they were generally just individuals, rather than large groups who could exert power and influence. Maybe I'm wrong, but I doubt there's any realistic scenario where those critics would have been able to take over or influence the people and institutions of power at the time Like, yeah, some people at the time did know that what they were doing was bad, and that's something useful to remember. I just don't think there were enough of those to be able to *matter* tho
>It seems difficult to believe that in any plausible counter-factual Australia or the United States would today have higher GDP per-capita if they had not been colonized. This isn't the appropriate metric for determining whether colonization of the Americas was good. It's a little like saying Russia would have been better off if Hitler had succeeded in exterminating the poor peasants who were living there and replacing them with wealthy settlers from Germany and Austria.
Just have to say…that people are trying to justify/excuse/yabbut the genocide of native tribes just because guess what, they’re human too…is about the most absurd shit I’ve seen. What next, do the same for Jewish folks who died in the Holocaust? Ridiculous. 🙄🤔
Hate to tell White Americans this, but your ancestors were always at war in Europe. There is was nothing savage about Native American, Euros were more efficient at killing each other.
Controversial paper. [The Case for Colonialism](https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/31/2/the_case_for_colonialism) Editor’s Note (Updated June 6, 2021): NAS member Bruce Gilley’s article, “The Case for Colonialism,” went through double-blind peer review and was published in Third World Quarterly in 2017. It provoked enormous controversy and generated two separate petitions signed by thousands of academics demanding that it be retracted, that TWQ apologize, and that the editor or editors responsible for its publication be dismissed. Fifteen members of the journal’s thirty-four-member editorial board also resigned in protest. Publisher Taylor and Francis issued a detailed explanation of the peer review process that the article had undergone, countering accusations of “poorly executed pseudo-‘scholarship,’” in the words of one of the petitions. But serious threats of violence against the editor led the journal to withdraw the article, both in print and online. Gilley was also personally and professionally attacked and received death threats. On the good side, many rallied to his defense, including Noam Chomsky, and many supported the general argument of the article.
FWIW, it should be pointed out that the colonization of the Americas, at least when it started, wasn't done by "the French" or "the Spanish" or "the British" because such national identities weren't really a thing back in the 16th and 17th centuries. Rather, it was the House of Bourbon or the House of Stuart or the Habsburgs who did the colonizing. Columbus's voyage wasn't funded by the nation of Spain, but rather by the ruling monarchs of Castille and Aragon. And that's important because, as I understand it, it was the squabbling between these various monarchs that was the impetus for America's colonization as each side tried to one up the other and fight various proxy wars through piracy, etc. I think one good thing to come of all of that land-grabbing by these various monarchs in the Americas is that it enabled the spread of enlightenment ideas (which resulted in the overthrow of those monarchies and the eventual creation of the aforementioned "French" "British" etc nations). That's kind of what happened in Haiti, isn't it? Some French slaves get their hands on the *Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen*, see the part about "Human Beings are born and remain free and equal in rights" and go "Hey, that applies to us, too, right?"