Out of character thread XVI

[Zim]

1.) Your assuming that indigenous societies would just "naturally" find their way into becoming a nation-state. Nations were not inevitable but created and then supported by a mythology that made them seem inevitable..

Actually, I was talking about the Aztecs and Maya, and while the modern idea of a nation with a fixed ethnic makeup (something that applies to very few states in the world) might not have been inevitable, they certainly had the idea of states, and boundaries, and wars over said boundaries.

2.) Having done no small amount of reading about the Spanish Empire, I can tell you there is overwhelming historical evidence that many of those stories are true. But France and Britain were by no means innocent...

I can't argue with that, I just learned that many of the stories were false from one of my professors, who is considered one of the country's leading experts on Latin America. Well, that and things I learned and read while living in South America. That doesn't mean I"m right, since people, even profesors, can pick ideas from all sorts of questionable sources, and even the good sources disagree at times.

3.) Disease came about partly because some European settlers deliberately gave blankets from their smallpox wards to native tribes as "gifts". But even though some of it was by accident, it still happened because people from one area of the world, sailed to another area of the world and insisted on conquering and converting people that were doing quite fine on their own.

Interesting, I was also taught in university that that was also quite possibly a myth, and at the very least much less common than supposed. Never mind that the common cold and several other diseases than small pox caused most of the deaths, and that the diseases spread quite quickly in areas where Europeans had little contact, without the need for a primitive, mostly ineffective form of biological warfare...

So, in your hypothetical world state, would travel be so restricted that none of the people from the other three inhabitants of the world would ever have made it to the Americas? Or, in a more modern example, no travel from Africa to better contain Aids and most of the world's current cases of smallpox, no travel from Asia if there's any risk of bird flu spreading?

I'd say with a common world government and a common economy diseases will spread not only much quicker than they had managed to back then, but probably even somewhat quicker than today. Either that, or freedom would be much more restricted for our own "good".

Edit: Kotr Thread: The new place for political discussion!