[PEN-L:3186] selling Manhatten and Very Long Waves

["Rosser Jr, John Barkley" <rosserjb@xxxxxxx>]

     Probably a final footnote on these threads...
     I think we all agree by now that the transactors in
those initial European/Indian contacts really did not know
what was coming, although some had very definite plans,
especially those on religious conversion missions such as
many of the Spanish.  It is worth keeping in mind that
although the "sale of Manhatten" eventually led to a place
containing both David Rockefeller and the HQ of the CPUSA,
lots of other such transactions (or attempted thefts) led
nowhere at all.  Thus, the Spanish attempted to settle
Virginia near Jamestown in the early 1780s, only to be
driven off by the local Indians (no Pocahontas around
then).  Walter Raleigh's Roanoke colony failed, possibly
ending up assimilating with the Lumbee tribe of North
Carolina (so the Lumbee claim, anyway).  The Russians in
northern California gave up and went "home" to Alaska in
the late 1830s after overharvesting the local sea otters
near the mouth of the Russian River.
     Of course Jamestown was successfully settled later,
barely, and led to Virginia, and a decade after the
Russians left, east coast Americans rushed for gold in
northern California without bothering to attempt to "deal
fairly" with the local tribes, leading to the Free Speech
movement, North Beach, Haight-Ashbury, and Castro Street....
     A larger problem that is not easily resolved is that
of mass migrations leading groups to "bump" each other
across landscapes, with many of those migrations being
triggered by outmovements from Central Asia going both east
and west, as detailed by such folks as Frank and Braudel.
These have even been tied to the Braudel "very long waves"
(duree) by some authors (Ricardo will correct me no doubt).
     In Europe we have seen wave after wave of "barbarians"
flooding in and conquering/dispacing earlier groups (e.g.
the Basques).  The eastern direction of this spilled over
into the Americas where we know that there were multiple
waves of migration across the Bering Strait with the later
arrivals bumping the earlier ones.  The Inuit, closely
related to the Asian Chukchi, bumped the Na-Dene (including
Athabaskans) whose language is related to Yeniseian in
central Siberia.  The Na-Dene bumped various tribes to their
south and east who bumped others.  In the 1200s the
Algonkians were bumped into invading the northeastern US,
thus pushing the Iroquois into their holdout areas in the
Finger Lakes region of upstate New York.  At about the same
time the Aztecs were bumped from the southwestern US to head
south and take over the central valley of Mexico, yes, from
the Toltecs as Charles B. noted.  And, lots of species would
be a lot better off if all the descendents of genus Homo
would go back to Africa where we all came from originally
(although the current Africans would probably not be too
pleased about that one).
     I agree with Jim Craven that what is needed is to deal
with ongoing wrongs and crimes and oppression where they
are going on, rather than attempting to undo history.
      Well, I am going to shut up on all this now as
various people I am sure have had quite enough.  Max S. is
probably breathing a sigh of relief that I did not babble
like this when I spoke at EPI last September.  If he were
still around to be disgusted, Jerry L. would applaud my
promise to stop spamming pen-l and would recommend that I
get a(nother) Ph.D. in economics to make myself more pen-l
relevant.  Brad DeL. is surely hoping that this complex
lunatic stays away from the jep.  And, Dough has decided
that if I can't come up with some wonkier stats (btw, oil
exporters are another group hurting in the late 90s), then
I should do something really useful like deconstructing
Judith Butler.  That's all for now, folks, :-).
Barkley Rosser

--
Rosser Jr, John Barkley
rosserjb@xxxxxxx