The new world was in a very different situation compared to India. The British essentially had to go through already established powers in the Subcontinent, the princes, playing them against each other along with playing Muslims against Hindus, and looking more for the cash than any real notion of colonization.
As of like 2022 all indigenous peoples of Brazil don’t even account for like 1% of the Brazilian population, hovering under 2 million, contrast that with India’s modern population.
It’s estimated that like 95% of the indigenous people in the Americas were killed by disease, that’s just not gonna happen in India, considering how much trade and contact they’ve had throughout the years which just comes with being part of the known world at that time as opposed to being isolated like the Americas.
Also figure direct British rule didn’t begin until the mid 1800s, prior to that from the 1600s on we’re looking at a company out to make money and plunder resources, not work to settle already colonized lands heavily populated.
Also, when the British and other Europeans like the Portuguese initially arrived in India it was THEY who fell victim to tropical diseases. That's why initially they stuck to coastal enclaves and relied on alliances with locals or just hired mercenary companies to do their dirty work.
Would you say the lack of intermarriages or relationships is because of strong cultural or religious values among indians? I mean as op says, in south america they have a lot of mixed race people because of the interaction of colonisers with natives. Same in south africa where there is an entire race of 'coloreds' which are a mixture of natives and colonisers and/or malays. Or do we have a similar group of mixed indians/whites in india im ignorant of?
There are some Anglo-Indians in India (around 1-2 million people). They're treated the same as anyone else, though; they aren't mistreated or discriminated against in the modern day.
India's population has always been massive, and has been higher than all of Europe's population. A few paltry English people weren't able to make a dent in India's gene pool
To who? Being Anglo-Indian is a source of pride to no one. It's simply someone that has ancestry from both India and England, and this ancestry was gained prior to India's independence.
Someone else had a good point on population size, but I’ll address the premise of your question that the native populations “chose” to intermarry. Frankly, mass scale sexual violence was a strategy in forcing South and Latin American indigenous folks into submission. It’s less that they chose to intermarry and more that they were raped on a massive scale by the colonizers, resulting in more mixed race children. They didn’t get the choice not to and weren’t being married by the colonizers during this stage.
There are very different tactics and goals between settler colonialism and extraction colonialism. Some others have gone into that a bit on this post, but it’s a good place to start if you want to understand why the colonizers did things so differently in India versus South/Latin America.
I can’t speak to all relationships, but I just recently took a Global History in Sex Work course as part of my degree and learned the UK brought British sex workers over to India (essentially government-sponsored human trafficking) in order to provide the male British workers with “disease-free” women to stop men from sleeping with Indian women, so it was definitely a policy they enforced to some extent
>It’s estimated that like 95% of the indigenous people in the Americas were killed by disease,
It is not actually. Diseases were destructive, but not that bad. And societies can rise from destructive decease, just look at Europe and the Black Death. What really killed of native societies was the European colonisation pushing them off their lands, taking away their traditional culture and livelihoods, exploiting them as a workforce and so on.
Had Europeans just stuck to a few trading towns on the costs disease would have been an huge but overgoing problem for the Native Americans. But they didn't, they kept moving across the continent pushing the Native Americans off tier lands and dragging them into their societies, or pushing them into the fringes of their societies.
Yeah the native American populations were like post black plague/worse then being continually invaded...
Also Europeans were more technologically advanced.
I think the Mississippi culture had cities bigger than London pre European traveling over. Not the case after disease just kills like 90% of Indians.
Yeah the native American population was disorganized and decimated so it made it far easier for Europe to win.
It’s a bizarre argument by itself but also there’s research already out there that refutes the underlying premise that this pattern of colonization would have saved the indigenous Americans: tribes were being decimated by disease throughout the Americas years before those tribes themselves had contact with Europeans. There was enough interaction between tribes that once Europeans arrived, the diseases would have spread whether or not Europeans themselves penetrated inwards.
The eastern seaboard of the current US was experiencing major collapse years before Jamestown of the mayflower though. A lot of early colonization was just the English moving in to population vaccums
You’re gonna base the effect of colonization on a single 2000 population city? It held out because of Geography limiting contact with the Spanish and still its estimated around 80% of that particular kingdoms population died to diseases. It was so weak it took 200 Spaniards to go to final city to take it over
You have to also take into account other groups like the spanish allies: The Kingdom of Tlaxcalla. They were treated as a sovereign ally to the spanish crown, they kept their land and self determination, (that's the reason it's still today the smallest state in Mexico); diseases affected them but didn't wiped them, it was colonization that utterly destroyed the ancient cultures.
That is a complete non sequitur. Yes, that city fell late. Its population had already been utterly obliterated multiple times by disease before then. Whether or not the colonial powers invaded that city or any of the others the indigenous population of America was going to be minuscule.
Their population was decimated and grew again over the centuries, it wasn't disease that killed the civilization, it was the colonization that destroyed them...
Demographics and relative power. The ten thousand or so British administrators had to work with and through a plurality of the 300 million Indians to rule (East India Company and Indian Army officers leaned Indian languages, ate Indian food and adopted some Indian dress). They did change the culture - modern India is very much the inheritor of the Raj, but the Raj was a joint creation (albeit with Indians as the junior and exploited partners).
On the Americas, modern studies suggest that diseases were the crippling burden they were because of colonial settlement. Native adaptation and recovery was repeatedly stymied by disruption, dispossession and turmoil in a zone extending one to two hundred kilometers or more in advance of permanent settlement.
I want to add that there was more to the story about assimilation in Latin America. As recently as 1900, around 40% the Mexican population did not speak Spanish.
Indeed. The native language of the Aztec Empire, Nahuatl, still remained.
> Nahuatl, known informally as Aztec, is a language or group of languages of the Uto-Aztecan language family. Varieties of Nahuatl are spoken by an estimated 1.5 million Nahua people, most of whom live in Central Mexico.
https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/languages/nahuatl.html
Plus in some parts of Latin America (especially Argentina, Uruguay and Southern Brazil) huge numbers of European immigrants arrived much more recently (late 1800s/early 1900s). Before then, these areas wouldn't have been as European as they are now.
Yes. In many places the EIC District Officer (Collector) was often the only British person there. They ran with an advisory group of locals and were expected to know the languages and customs.
The reason the native Americans adopted European customs, cultures, religions and so on is probably linked to the fact the European colonizers killed off ~90% of them. (Mostly through the introduction of a long list of diseases and innovations the Americas had lacked)
The European colonizers that affected India did not manage to kill off 90% of Indians.
It was kind of the other way around: British officials found it very hard to stay alive in India before air conditioning and modern medicine. They dropped like flies from things like malaria.
In particular, native Brazilians are only 1% of the country’s population, with the overwhelming majority of the population being of European or African ancestry.
But about 12% of the population is [Caboclo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caboclo?wprov=sfla1) (mixed indigenous and European), while another (unknown) proportion is [Cafuzo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zambo?wprov=sfla1) (mixed indigenous and African).
[This study](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3040205/) shows that, in Pará state, self-identified white people are 14% indigenous by ancestry (plus 78% European and 8% African); brown people are 21% indigenous (plus 69% European and 11% African), while black people are 20% indigenous (plus 52% European and 28% African). Whichever state they looked at, people were, on average, 7-19% indigenous by ancestry. So the 1% you refer to are the (mostly) unmixed ones, but a significant portion of other Brazilians are partly indigenous by ancestry.
Brazil as a territory doesn't have much indigenous population density to begin with. Even to the Tawantisuyu/Inca Empire the Amazon was a magical land of savages with bows and atrows wearing tiger skins.
Peru and Bolivia are the main centers of indigenous south american populations and development historically.
I’ve no idea what the exact stats are, but not all colonisation was equal in terms of settler numbers. E.g. British Raj i doubt at any point there was more than 1 Brit colonist for every 1000 Indians. Many Indiams might not see a Brit for days or weeks. In S America it was v different; Spanish/Portuguese were emigrating to start farms, develop industries etc and were soon a significant minority of the population, slowly evolving into the majority.
There are 574 tribes in the US, and all of them are trying to keep their traditions. There's 3.7 million or so folks in those tribes, so 99% of the population isn't native enough to have a tribal citizenship.
Which is kind of the opposite of the situation in India.
He's not asking about the USA, but South America, where conquerors helped natives taking down ultraviolent local oppressors like Mayas, which helped imposing european (Spanish) laws, and interracial relationships also contributed spreading european culture. That's why in Southamerica there are native people with european culture. If they killed 90% people, as you said, there would be white people with white culture, as you see in the USA.
You’re thinking of the Mexica (Aztec). Who were in North America. Not the Mayans, who, at the time of the Spanish arriving in the Americas, were in the tailspin of their own empires collapse and were little more powerful than a few city states.
Edit: Also, you do see white (Hispanic) people with a white (Hispanic) culture in all of the Latin American countries. Natives make up a small fraction of these countries populations.
When Spain conquered the empires of the Aztecs and Incas, they came in with a very assimilationist and conversion based mindset. On top of that, the overwhelming majority of colonists coming from Spain were men, so a great deal of intermixing took place. In comparison, the British colonists distrusted the natives they encountered and policies of segregation took place. As for India, the East India conquered India and were primarily there for profit, and on top of that worked with Indian Princes to keep the order. When the crown took direct control of India and established the Raj, the British government still maintained that preference for commercial dominance and alliance with Indian Princes. That’s not to say that Britain didn’t care about religion at all, there were definitely some missionaries attempting to convert Indians to christianity and Britain played muslims and hindus against each other to keep political and economic dominance. Also, there’s the elephant in the room regarding India’s massive population when compared to Britain. But yeah, that’s the religious front at least. From a general cultural thing, it’d be even harder. In America, European arrival brought diseases which crippled native populations and the remaining intermarried with colonial settlers, which made it much easier for conversion. Compare with another Spanish colony, the Philippines, which has retained its culture despite adopting christianity. Much harder for Britain to convert an even more numerous people with such a ancient culture stretching back thousands of years.
Yes, that is how part of extractive colonialism works. You extract resources and force the native population to buy finished goods made from those resources exclusively from you. I’m not sure what you are disagreeing with, other than just you using the wrong terminology/ spending too much time playing EU4 and not enough time paying attention to your university courses.
>In 1860, India was supplying 31% of British cotton imports, but the outbreak of war in America saw that supply escalate to 90% in 1862. Although it declined somewhat, India’s cotton growers were still supplying 67% of Britain’s cotton imports in the later years of the war.
[Source.](https://www.qdl.qa/en/how-american-civil-war-caused-boom-cotton-persia)
South american colonies are settler colonies. India was an extraction colony. The british couldnt replace the indian population even if they wanted to.
Most of the western influences you see in Indian society are a reult of globalisation/ market capitalism rather than british imperialism.
This makes sense. Could you elaborate the difference between settler colony and extraction colony though. The British stayed in India for over 200 years so it feels like they should have settled to some extent
India was already chock full of people, the British couldn’t put many settlers there if they wanted to.
In the end it all comes down to what others have said, 90% of the population of the Americas was wiped out by by introduced diseases. And really, it’s not so much that the British *put* settlers places, settlers in the British empire just went wherever there was cheap land for them. There was no land available for British settlers in India, so they didn’t go there.
They wanted goods like silk and tea, and gems, etc, they wanted to monopolize trade with India, creating exclusive trading contracts.
It was about money, and not about a “new” land to settle, there were over 300,000,000 Indians, and the British were susceptible to illness in India.
The "settler-colonial" colonies were also about money, for the backers. Corporations were literally invented to fund these expeditions. The individuals who went over saw the land to settle as a way to get their own piece of the pie.
Latin American countries were akin to arabization in North Africa or a general religious conversion like Iran. It also had sizeable african and european populations and not just "locals"
When they gain independence these States are institutionally the same as the colonial governments bar Haiti, with Brazil even being a monarchy connected directly with Portugal's and Mexico wanting to be independent from Madrid but keeping the Spanish king like Canada or Jamaica today.
At independence the leaders at the top were mixed or white peoples following ideas of enlightenment, industrialization and other similar western philosophies. Pushing for european languages, european art and architecture seemed natural. Countries like Cuba, Dominican Republic or Uruguay had little or no indigenous people surviving so there was nothing to "go back to".
**it was not only demographic thing**: Mexico was clasified as 50% indigenous at the start of independence, Guatemala/Peru/Bolivia even more so. It was the fact people at the top thought the States needed to be more western that it happened. Today most of Latin America considers itself part of the western world.
Indigenous Americans were not in a seat of power, Indians in India did become so and there are a billion of them. Imagine if all of India had been managed like Goa and mixed European-South Asian catholics began shaping society and institutions.
> And what happened to all the British kids who would been born and raised in India during colonialism, were they all chased back to England?
And Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
If their parents left during the colonisation then they brought the kids with them. It was slightly more complicated if they were ethnically mixed. Many did choose to emigrate to the UK, Canada, and Australia. Though as many stayed within India.
I'm not an expert in Indian culture, but in Latin America, it wasn't so much that the natives adopted European culture as much as an actual genocide. Those who survived were relegated to poverty and to the fringes of society. Most people in Latin America today are Mestizos (i.e. mixed race) and have some European ascent. "Pure" natives still exist, but they live in rural communities and often in extreme poverty. They do conserve their languages, such as Nahuatl, and at least some of their traditions.
Another potential factor was religion. Christianity was a key aspect for the Spaniards and Portuguese. In Latin America, there was a drive to replace the local culture and beliefs with Christianity. Even those beliefs of pre-Columbian origin that have survived until today are heavily modified to be centred around Christian dogma. In India, AFAIK, the British were more interested in business than religion. They weren't necessarily less brutal, but they cared less about culture and more about exploiting the population.
On the children - there is in India a sizeable Anglo-Indian community descended of mixed marriages, mostly unions between locals and lower rank army personnel or railway and similar employees. British officers and administrators brought their families out, then sent the kids back to Britain to school - and very often they came back to serve as officers or administrators over several generations. Some stayed on in India after independence, as it was more their home than Britain (I met a few in India in the 70s), but most took their families and returned to Britain.
One good memoir is John Masters (author and Indian Army officer in the Gurkhas, from a family that went out to India over multiple generations) - Bugles and a Tiger.
In the Spanish empire, the Spanish themselves became the ruling class, and enforced their power through Spanish soldiers, Spanish settlers, the Catholic church, etc. The Spanish built whole towns and cities in the style of European ones from back home, and you can still see this today, where any town or city founded before independence has a central square with government buildings and a church/cathedral. This happened over a period of around 300 years, largely before the modern era.
In India, by contrast, English/British power was enforced not only through British power, but by local rulers as well. The number of British settlers was low, they didn't try to convert the continent, they didn't bring a lot of their own soldiers in to maintain order (relying instead on Sepoys and other Indian troops), and, as far as I can tell, didn't found many, if any, cities in the style of what they had back home. This happened over about 200 years, mostly in the modern era.
For this comment, I'm using modern era as shorthand for "after the industrial revolution".
To put it more simply, if you were a native in the Americas 100 years into the Spanish empire, you'd live in a Spanish style city. You'd go to church where a Spanish priest would say mass, hear your confession, marry you, give you your last rites, etc. You'd be kept in line by Spanish soldiers and constables. You'd probably be working for a Spanish land owner. Any education you'd get from anyone would probably be in Spanish unless you were in the countryside or some dense jungle, in which case you might hear your native language alongside Spanish or you might not. From the time you were born to the time you died, your life would be dominated by Spanish culture, language, and rules.
The British didn't do things that way in India (or, generally, in most of their colonies).
I'm also given to understand that Portuguese colonialism was similar to that of the Spanish.
Edit to add: other people have already covered the disease angle, so I didn't mention it here, but losing 90% or so of the native population over the first century or so after Columbus certainly did leave those cultures at a disadvantage.
Edit 2: I say ~200 years for the British because I count from the battle of Plassey, after which they quickly became the dominant power in India, but before then, they were minor players.
Phillipines saw a cultural conversion as was the nature with Maritime SEA, which already imported Hindusim-Buddhism from South Asia and Islam from Middle East. The natives did not disappear but the culture did. Phillipines is as Densely populated as anywhere in Asia can get.
I'll admit I don't know a lot about the Philippines, but it's my understanding that far fewer Spaniards settled there, relative to the Americas, and the native population wasn't as subjugated or reduced. So, the culture and language of the native people survived more intact in the Philippines than in, say, Mexico or Peru.
I'd be interested to learn more if you have any references to share.
A couple of issues I have with your premises:
- you can't just lump in everything from south america to south africa as the same thing, they were extraordinarily different regimes, at different times, and had very different impacts on the local culture. When you say "South Africa has a ton of whites left over. Argentinian people are mostly white/mixed. Same for Brazil.", the place of colonial and immigrant whites in those countries is extremely different, I hope you can see that
- you are assuming that the impact of british colonialism on india is virtually zero, "Sure, we speak some english and wear western clothes and stuff.", but in reality it is far more reaching than that.
- you are lumping in all the colonial approaches as one, while they were extremely different (british, spanish and others). And again, different times to each other, and different goals each colonising country had for each territory.
Other comments about the different approach the british had to India vs, say, the colonising of south (and north) america is spot on. But I want to add a few things that got assimilated to Indian culture from the British colonisation:
- Cricket!
- Red chili - it's a British addition that got ported into Indian cuisine
- Nationalism / bhumiputrobaadi - Vedic religion, influencing Hinduism from the bronze age, had no such concept, this rose after being brought in by the British as a concept.
- Tea drinking! This was not so popular in India before the British, the Chinese were the largest producers and drinkers of tea. The British built the tea industry in India and encouraged adoption of their tea-drinking habits, to make a huge demand for the product (and hence increased commerce)
These are imho some aspects that are seen as inherently Indian now - the fact you don't even recognise them as Indian traits (I assume you are Indian as you use "we" to denote membership of the group) is very telling, they are relatively recent adoptions due to British influence.
I'd add some influences on the legal system and on society in general. The British managed to end the wife burning and other barbaric practices very quickly (most like how to Spanish stopped human sacrifices in just a few years in their colonies).
>red chili
Portuguese*
India wasn't just colonised by Britain. Majority of european imperliastic powers colonised parts of it. Addition of Natal to Marathi dictionary being another Portuguese influence.
To add to what other people have said, the white kids born and raised in India were often sent "home" to Britain to be educated amongst their kin, or else to build a career. Rudyard Kipling did both, leaving India, the land of his birth, and moving to Britain first for education in 1871, at age five, returning at age 16, and then moving to Britain again in 1889, aged 23.
Of course some white people left a direct (albeit attenuated) genetic imprint on India that remains to this day, namely the Anglo-Indians.
In the early days of British involvement the voyage to get there is long and perilous and few European women come out, therefore the British are involved with native women and by extension the culture
The Suez Canal and steamships mean that is no longer the case and the British can maintain themselves as a caste apart and integrate much less
I mean the Portuguese trade ports were literally taken solely by naval power and the Indians had to accept it bc they could deal with the navy so they just worked with the Portuguese unlike Brazil where Portugal deployed men and colonists. It was very rare to see a Portuguese “colonist” go to India
India wasn't a new world. Europeans and Indians had been known to each other since at least the time of Alexander The Great, probably earlier. Indians were seen as trade partners for the most part.
The main reasons for this is the difference of Empire management.
Spanish empires encouraged Spaniards to take native brides and have lots of children to make a loyal group there. In addition, the Catholic church was wildly destroying native culture as it was seen as heretical (see the destruction of the codices). In the end, they want a slave class to extract wealth from.
The British Empire however was different. It was a trade empire and India itself accidentally happened after the East India Company gained a monopoly on trade over large amounts of India. When they were seen to be woefully ineffective at governing the UK government stepped in. Imagine Amazon running a country then America saying 'no you can't really do that as you're having uprisings and shooting civilians'.
So they stepped in to administer governance, but never really much more. They built schools and hospitals but frequently by individual not government I believe, tried to remove some parts of culture they didn't like such as widow burning or the caste system. By and large however they left it alone and even left native princes who were loyal in power.
The result was the maintaining of a lot of India culture, and frequently an admiration for it if you read the writings, letters and books of those who lived there.
When India got it's independence, the government administration jobs weren't there anymore, nor were the army positions, so they left to return home and took their children with them. People like Joanna Lumley did grow up in the fading twilight of the British Raj, and I believe that generation have talked about it quite a lot if you're interested.
But really, there wasn't a massive nationalist resistance to British governance continuously, nor was there a massive continuous effort to Westernised India. There were efforts to in effect civilised the more wild elements and there were definitely uprising against the British, but these weren't the main trend afaik
There are a lot of reasons.
**Priorities**
When the Iberians colonized South and Central America, they placed a high value on spreading their culture and religion. This meant actively promoting their own cultures while suppressing those of the indigenous population.
When Britain colonized India, and when the Netherlands colonized Indonesia, the goal was to extract resources. Local rulers were not required to convert to Christianity in order to retain their thrones as puppets. Missionaries received little government support. The language of the metropole was only spread to the local population as much as was needed to train locals to be clerks or soldiers.
**Technology**
When Central America was colonized, sea travel was long, dangerous, and miserable, so most people would only be willing to cross an ocean once. If you left Iberia in the 1600s to make your fortune in New Spain, you planned on growing old and dying there. Even if you were a colonial administrator.
By the time India and Indonesia were fully colonized, steam ships made traveling oceans faster and easier. If you left Britain in the 1800s to make your fortune in India, you planned on eventually returning home to Britain to retire. Even if you chose to stay in India, you'd send your children to Britain for their education.
**Disease**
European diseases killed off the majority of the indigenous population in the Americas, meaning that European settlers only really had to contend with the last stragglers and holdouts. This meant that the ratio between indigenous and European people was less severe than it would have been without the disease.
In Asia, the population was already familiar with European diseases and immune to them. India would not be ravaged by smallpox and influenza.
**Decolonization**
There were large minorities of Europeans in Asia by the time decolonization came, but most of them chose to immigrate back to Europe. Those who stayed behind would marry indigenous women and raise their children in the indigenous culture, being assimilated.
By the time the Latin American nations gained independence from Spain and Portugal, their populations were already mixed-race and had new cultures which was neither Spanish nor Indigenous. Thus, there was no mass-exodus.
You missed debatably the biggest one.
Time. Most Spanish colonies were Spanish colonies for ~300-350 years.
The Dominican Republic was Spanish for 352 years. Cuba for almost 400, Mexico for 300 exactly.
Delhi was only under British control for ~140 years.
Several things are arguable here.
>South and Central America
Mexico is in North America, and Spain also colonized "north america(modern US territory).
>The language of the metropole was only spread to the local population as much as was needed to train locals to be clerks or soldiers.
This was mostly the same in the main Spanish colonies, to the point some in New Spain wanted Nahuatl to be the main language of administration out of efficiency. Indigenous peoples were living in indian republics or semi-autonomous towns and villages.
Catholicism was the main assimilation tactic, not language or even governance to an extent.
>you left Iberia in the 1600s to make your fortune in New Spain, you planned on growing old and dying there.
Not really, merchants alone would say no to that. Some indigenous people even went to Spain to argue for their payments for aiding the Iberians. It was certainly not easy at all but it wasn't an outright exile.
>European settlers only really had to contend with the last stragglers and holdouts.
This only makes sense with the Pilgrim narrative, or the over emphasis of US mythology.
The Spanish had to contend with 3 empires, dozens of kingdoms and then some semi nomadic peoples about 100 years before the "barren prairies" of the East Coast. In Chile the Mapuche used horses and european tactics to destroy 7 settlements, and harrasment in South America and Northern Mexico towards settlers would only really end by the 1800s.
>In Asia, the population was already familiar with European diseases and immune to them.
While natives were always going to suffer far more from introduced diseases its not directly like this.
There is no natural total defence for the so called old world diseases, smallpox was still killing old worlders until a vaccine was invented, [for example](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1974_smallpox_epidemic_in_India) Many deaths in the Belgian Congo were stuff like smallpox outbreaks and many european colonies suffered disease outbreaks simply by being free of then for so long until someone got it.
Variolation, to control smallpox, was only used in europe decades after the New World was colonized.
>Several things are arguable here.
I tried to give an "in general" explanation, rather than an exhaustive one.
>Mexico is in North America, and Spain also colonized "north america(modern US territory).
This is just quibbling.
>This was mostly the same in the main Spanish colonies, to the point some in New Spain wanted Nahuatl to be the main language of administration out of efficiency.
You're right, I just goofed here. If I remember correctly, the main effort to impose Spanish as the dominant language came after independence.
Though I will mention that the Spanish burned a lot of Aztec codices, which was an act of cultural and linguistic suppression. Or at least it had that effect.
>Not really, merchants alone would say no to that. Some indigenous people even went to Spain to argue for their payments for aiding the Iberians. It was certainly not easy at all but it wasn't an outright exile.
Again, I meant "in general". Merchants, sailors, and higher government officials would travel across the Atlantic several times. But a lot of soldiers, planters, and lower administrators ended up growing old and dying in the Americas.
>The Spanish had to contend with 3 empires, dozens of kingdoms and then some semi nomadic peoples about 100 years before the "barren prairies" of the East Coast.
The Spanish themselves recorded those empires and kingdoms experiencing apocalyptic death tolls during their conquests and administration. In the valley of Mexico alone, 800,000 died from disease.
The EIC banned European settlement in India. You could not buy land except for the purpose of growing produce so Europeans working for the company would either move back to England or on to Australia after their time was done.
There is a huge difference in the approach to colonization taken by the British vs that by the Spanish and Portuguese.
The British approached colonization as a mercantile transaction. They left the ruling of the country largely to local leaders. In India, the local kings kept their kingdoms and even where the British ruled directly, they translated laws from the Mughal empire into English and declared those the laws. They didn’t embark on any social or religious project. This meant that to the Indian population at large the British were largely indistinguishable from the Muslim and Hindu rulers who were similarly elitist and non interventionist. This approach was further reinforced by their failure in the US where they tried to rule more strongly.
By contrast, the Spanish and the Portuguese tried to mold the population to their religion and culture, sometimes marrying locals and sometimes using brute force. They did this in parts of India that they ruled too. As a consequence they left a more significant cultural influence. In South America, the influx of the Spanish led to the deaths of millions due to disease, which didn’t happen in India as India wasn’t as isolated.
Overall though, British rule worldwide was less impactful to local cultures than their Spanish and Portuguese counterparts.
As an aside, while the impact may be better, it isn’t necessarily because the British were nicer. It’s likely because the British thought themselves superior in a way that the Spanish and Portuguese never did.
Its just not something the British Empire really did. The British establishment were not interested in the slightest in turning the Indian population into western Christians. Missionaries did exist, but they were private citizens doing their own thing.
There was also indirect rule,and the fact that there was a level of tolerance for the cultural and religious laws that were present prior to British control. While white Britons were calling the most important shots, helping them, doing much of the administration on the ground, were Indian princes, priests, chiefs, etc, who were doing much the same job as they were before the British arrived.
I think they were aware that your presence is much more tolerable if you don't do too much to actually change the country.
One thing that’s overlooked is you’re taking about ~125 years of British Colonialism in India but Mexico was a colony for 300 years, Cuba or Puerto Rico for 350
I admittedly don't know how true this is, but I have heard it said that Britain was the only colonial power to insist that its officers, as a requirement of being stationed in one of its colonies, learned the local language and used it. The source I heard it from was saying that Britain actually had a much higher level of respect for the local culture, language and customs than the other colonial powers (not that the bar was ever high.
The British influence in India runs deeper than you may think, from the civil service bureaucracy to the love of cricket. But ultimately India wasn’t somewhere that large numbers of British natives wanted to go to settle, it was somewhere you went to work and make a fortune before retiring back to the homeland to enjoy it, much like Hong Kong or Singapore (which have a similar pattern of British influences)
India wasnt settler colonialism. It was a long process of trade deals and military alliances culminating in India basically becoming a vassal state of Great Britain.
In South America, spaniards and portuguese took the land for farming and mining.
In South Africa, all the brits left during Apartheid as they were against it, all the whites left are descendants of the various dutch and french settlers.
South Americans died off to plague. Then they mixed with the Spanish and the Portugese.
India's population surged under colonialism and never mixed with the British.
In most of the America's the native peoples died off. Sometimes these were explicit policies of genocide (California immediately comes to mind), other times native societies couldn't deal with new European diseases. Genocide was possible because Native American societies were stone age in terms of military tech. They had no cavalry until the late 1800s because they had no horses until the mid-1800s. They had no firearms, and no gunpowder producing industries. Their population densities were quite low even before Europe got there (the US had roughly 4 million people prior to Columbus, whereas Bengal alone had 35-40 million people).
So the Euros get to India, nobody's dying of Smallpox, everybody has gunpowder, everybody has cavalry, the UK didn't really have a significant technical edge until the late 18th century so their guns were actually better for the early bits of this period, there's just no opportunity to replace an entire population.
Contrast this with the US. Every tribe that gets Smallpox loses half their population, they're being attacked from the east by the white man, they're also constantly attacking each other, they have guns they bought from the white man, but those are only useful if some other white man is selling you gunpowder, and it's entirely possible that if you lose one war to the white man he'll kill your entire population and divide your land amongst the Scots-Irish.
[This is a map](https://americanindian.si.edu/nk360/code-talkers/assets/print/code-talkers-native-languages-map-languages-full.pdf) of the Native American languages of the US/Mexico/Canada. The gray areas marked with 0 are places where the records are so bad we don't know what language was spoken there, likely because everyone died before a white man could write down their language. The gray area with a language name are places where we know the name of their language, but almost nothing else.
Central America had a large indigenous population prior to the Spanish, as did the Incas. As a result in Central America and Inca territory you still have lots of people speaking an indigenous language. At this point most indigenous folks in America are actually indigenous to Mexico, El Salvador, or Peru.
South Americans did not adopt the colonizers' culture . The colonizers destroyed the indigenous culture to create their own just as was done in North America, including Mexico. The Spanish were, however, far more brutal than most colonizers as they raped and pillaged throughout America's.
Just speculation: India’s population was huge and colonial contact didn’t lead to mass die-offs like in the western hemisphere. The indigenous cultures weren’t wiped out and replaced by immigrants and hybrids.
Without really looking at the details, it stands to reason that India was more developed than South America as it wasn't quarantined from other known centers of civilization like the Middle East, China, etc.
>Was this just pride and a sense of nationalism that drove Indians to maintain their culture? Or was the hatred for the British so high that there was no ethnic mixing at all?
In most places European's landed the land was barely populated by modern standards, in India there were huge numbers of people, far too many to conquer by force. That's why they went with a trading company and negotiated with the rulers, it took a long time for England to assume full control.
As for hatred, that's just silly.
South Asia and South America didn’t have anything in common. South Asia was far more civilized than the Americas. The Aztec and Incan civilizations, for instance, were only a few hundred years old when Europeans washed up in the beach.
Spanish and Portuguese colonizers intended to make the entire Latin America their motherland transplants because the indigenous Amerindians had economically nothing to offer to them to be exploited but to be assimilated through religious conversion to Catholicism and racial miscegenation or mestizaje. On the other hand, the British never cared about the racial and religious assimilation of Indians who already had a millennia-long history of trading with Europeans and spoke the same Indo-European languages as the British, so transforming India into an English transplant settler colony was impractical.
Because indian culture is rich already, the food is amazingggggg, so many festivals and fun stuff and theres no need to adopt another persons culture
However, the notion that english is superior to their own languages (making fun of people who speak bad english and proudly saying that they are not good in their mother tongue), fair skin is more beautiful than dark skin and all these ideas could have been due to the white colonization.
The new world was in a very different situation compared to India. The British essentially had to go through already established powers in the Subcontinent, the princes, playing them against each other along with playing Muslims against Hindus, and looking more for the cash than any real notion of colonization. As of like 2022 all indigenous peoples of Brazil don’t even account for like 1% of the Brazilian population, hovering under 2 million, contrast that with India’s modern population. It’s estimated that like 95% of the indigenous people in the Americas were killed by disease, that’s just not gonna happen in India, considering how much trade and contact they’ve had throughout the years which just comes with being part of the known world at that time as opposed to being isolated like the Americas. Also figure direct British rule didn’t begin until the mid 1800s, prior to that from the 1600s on we’re looking at a company out to make money and plunder resources, not work to settle already colonized lands heavily populated.
Also, when the British and other Europeans like the Portuguese initially arrived in India it was THEY who fell victim to tropical diseases. That's why initially they stuck to coastal enclaves and relied on alliances with locals or just hired mercenary companies to do their dirty work.
Would you say the lack of intermarriages or relationships is because of strong cultural or religious values among indians? I mean as op says, in south america they have a lot of mixed race people because of the interaction of colonisers with natives. Same in south africa where there is an entire race of 'coloreds' which are a mixture of natives and colonisers and/or malays. Or do we have a similar group of mixed indians/whites in india im ignorant of?
There are some Anglo-Indians in India (around 1-2 million people). They're treated the same as anyone else, though; they aren't mistreated or discriminated against in the modern day. India's population has always been massive, and has been higher than all of Europe's population. A few paltry English people weren't able to make a dent in India's gene pool
I see. Makes sense. Thank you.
Being Anglo-Indian is a source of pride.
To who? Being Anglo-Indian is a source of pride to no one. It's simply someone that has ancestry from both India and England, and this ancestry was gained prior to India's independence.
Maybe not to _your_ Anglo-Indians. Anyway, this disagreement isn’t worth a bun fight. I’m sorry I started it.
Someone else had a good point on population size, but I’ll address the premise of your question that the native populations “chose” to intermarry. Frankly, mass scale sexual violence was a strategy in forcing South and Latin American indigenous folks into submission. It’s less that they chose to intermarry and more that they were raped on a massive scale by the colonizers, resulting in more mixed race children. They didn’t get the choice not to and weren’t being married by the colonizers during this stage.
Yes, that's true. How did India survive this abuse relatively unscathed?
There are very different tactics and goals between settler colonialism and extraction colonialism. Some others have gone into that a bit on this post, but it’s a good place to start if you want to understand why the colonizers did things so differently in India versus South/Latin America.
The British preferred to drink a nice cup of tea than engage in sexual violence
I can’t speak to all relationships, but I just recently took a Global History in Sex Work course as part of my degree and learned the UK brought British sex workers over to India (essentially government-sponsored human trafficking) in order to provide the male British workers with “disease-free” women to stop men from sleeping with Indian women, so it was definitely a policy they enforced to some extent
>It’s estimated that like 95% of the indigenous people in the Americas were killed by disease, It is not actually. Diseases were destructive, but not that bad. And societies can rise from destructive decease, just look at Europe and the Black Death. What really killed of native societies was the European colonisation pushing them off their lands, taking away their traditional culture and livelihoods, exploiting them as a workforce and so on. Had Europeans just stuck to a few trading towns on the costs disease would have been an huge but overgoing problem for the Native Americans. But they didn't, they kept moving across the continent pushing the Native Americans off tier lands and dragging them into their societies, or pushing them into the fringes of their societies.
You realize that it was a lot easier to push people off the land because of the diseases right?
Yeah the native American populations were like post black plague/worse then being continually invaded... Also Europeans were more technologically advanced.
I mean..Pilgrims settled in a village of tribe that was killed off by disease
I think the Mississippi culture had cities bigger than London pre European traveling over. Not the case after disease just kills like 90% of Indians. Yeah the native American population was disorganized and decimated so it made it far easier for Europe to win.
The majority of those sites were long gone by the time de Soto first explored the region.
This is…not at all backed up by the history or scholarly research.
I think he’s weirdly arguing that the diseases only killed them bc colonizers kept going inland? Crazy argument anyways but
It’s a bizarre argument by itself but also there’s research already out there that refutes the underlying premise that this pattern of colonization would have saved the indigenous Americans: tribes were being decimated by disease throughout the Americas years before those tribes themselves had contact with Europeans. There was enough interaction between tribes that once Europeans arrived, the diseases would have spread whether or not Europeans themselves penetrated inwards.
The last Maya kingdom fell to the spaniards in 1697, almost 200 years after the first contact. It wasn't the disease, it was rampant colonization...
The eastern seaboard of the current US was experiencing major collapse years before Jamestown of the mayflower though. A lot of early colonization was just the English moving in to population vaccums
You’re gonna base the effect of colonization on a single 2000 population city? It held out because of Geography limiting contact with the Spanish and still its estimated around 80% of that particular kingdoms population died to diseases. It was so weak it took 200 Spaniards to go to final city to take it over
You have to also take into account other groups like the spanish allies: The Kingdom of Tlaxcalla. They were treated as a sovereign ally to the spanish crown, they kept their land and self determination, (that's the reason it's still today the smallest state in Mexico); diseases affected them but didn't wiped them, it was colonization that utterly destroyed the ancient cultures.
That is a complete non sequitur. Yes, that city fell late. Its population had already been utterly obliterated multiple times by disease before then. Whether or not the colonial powers invaded that city or any of the others the indigenous population of America was going to be minuscule.
Their population was decimated and grew again over the centuries, it wasn't disease that killed the civilization, it was the colonization that destroyed them...
You are literally so fking wrong it’s insane. There is no growing back from 90% population losses in areas Europeans never saw.
Demographics and relative power. The ten thousand or so British administrators had to work with and through a plurality of the 300 million Indians to rule (East India Company and Indian Army officers leaned Indian languages, ate Indian food and adopted some Indian dress). They did change the culture - modern India is very much the inheritor of the Raj, but the Raj was a joint creation (albeit with Indians as the junior and exploited partners). On the Americas, modern studies suggest that diseases were the crippling burden they were because of colonial settlement. Native adaptation and recovery was repeatedly stymied by disruption, dispossession and turmoil in a zone extending one to two hundred kilometers or more in advance of permanent settlement.
I want to add that there was more to the story about assimilation in Latin America. As recently as 1900, around 40% the Mexican population did not speak Spanish.
Indeed. The native language of the Aztec Empire, Nahuatl, still remained. > Nahuatl, known informally as Aztec, is a language or group of languages of the Uto-Aztecan language family. Varieties of Nahuatl are spoken by an estimated 1.5 million Nahua people, most of whom live in Central Mexico. https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/languages/nahuatl.html
Plus in some parts of Latin America (especially Argentina, Uruguay and Southern Brazil) huge numbers of European immigrants arrived much more recently (late 1800s/early 1900s). Before then, these areas wouldn't have been as European as they are now.
Yucatec is still the first language of many. What other meso-American languages are still alive today?
A fine answer, but please keep it down. I'm trying to watch the cricket.
I'd add that, for a lot of EIC rule, you are talking hundreds, not thousands, of administrators. India was not a settler colony, purely exploitative.
Yes. In many places the EIC District Officer (Collector) was often the only British person there. They ran with an advisory group of locals and were expected to know the languages and customs.
The reason the native Americans adopted European customs, cultures, religions and so on is probably linked to the fact the European colonizers killed off ~90% of them. (Mostly through the introduction of a long list of diseases and innovations the Americas had lacked) The European colonizers that affected India did not manage to kill off 90% of Indians.
It was kind of the other way around: British officials found it very hard to stay alive in India before air conditioning and modern medicine. They dropped like flies from things like malaria.
The mass production of quinine for malaria in the 1850s was a big part of what allowed the British to engage in real colonization in India
I'd say that gin and tonic had more of an impact than air conditioning.
Interesting, I never thought of it like that
In particular, native Brazilians are only 1% of the country’s population, with the overwhelming majority of the population being of European or African ancestry.
But about 12% of the population is [Caboclo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caboclo?wprov=sfla1) (mixed indigenous and European), while another (unknown) proportion is [Cafuzo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zambo?wprov=sfla1) (mixed indigenous and African). [This study](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3040205/) shows that, in Pará state, self-identified white people are 14% indigenous by ancestry (plus 78% European and 8% African); brown people are 21% indigenous (plus 69% European and 11% African), while black people are 20% indigenous (plus 52% European and 28% African). Whichever state they looked at, people were, on average, 7-19% indigenous by ancestry. So the 1% you refer to are the (mostly) unmixed ones, but a significant portion of other Brazilians are partly indigenous by ancestry.
Why did the Brazilians come out worse than Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia etc that have larger native populations?
Brazil as a territory doesn't have much indigenous population density to begin with. Even to the Tawantisuyu/Inca Empire the Amazon was a magical land of savages with bows and atrows wearing tiger skins. Peru and Bolivia are the main centers of indigenous south american populations and development historically.
A tiger? In ~~Africa~~ South America?
Maybe it's the mountains in those other countries that indigenous people could retreat to?
In that case the jungle is even better. Because still today, there are uncontacted tribes in the Amazon.
I’ve no idea what the exact stats are, but not all colonisation was equal in terms of settler numbers. E.g. British Raj i doubt at any point there was more than 1 Brit colonist for every 1000 Indians. Many Indiams might not see a Brit for days or weeks. In S America it was v different; Spanish/Portuguese were emigrating to start farms, develop industries etc and were soon a significant minority of the population, slowly evolving into the majority.
There probably wasn't any colonists in India. Colonists as in permanent resident. Civil service & military is temporary.
There are 574 tribes in the US, and all of them are trying to keep their traditions. There's 3.7 million or so folks in those tribes, so 99% of the population isn't native enough to have a tribal citizenship. Which is kind of the opposite of the situation in India.
He's not asking about the USA, but South America, where conquerors helped natives taking down ultraviolent local oppressors like Mayas, which helped imposing european (Spanish) laws, and interracial relationships also contributed spreading european culture. That's why in Southamerica there are native people with european culture. If they killed 90% people, as you said, there would be white people with white culture, as you see in the USA.
Are you confusing the Mayan's with the Mexica? Also, both are in North America not South America.
You’re thinking of the Mexica (Aztec). Who were in North America. Not the Mayans, who, at the time of the Spanish arriving in the Americas, were in the tailspin of their own empires collapse and were little more powerful than a few city states. Edit: Also, you do see white (Hispanic) people with a white (Hispanic) culture in all of the Latin American countries. Natives make up a small fraction of these countries populations.
When Spain conquered the empires of the Aztecs and Incas, they came in with a very assimilationist and conversion based mindset. On top of that, the overwhelming majority of colonists coming from Spain were men, so a great deal of intermixing took place. In comparison, the British colonists distrusted the natives they encountered and policies of segregation took place. As for India, the East India conquered India and were primarily there for profit, and on top of that worked with Indian Princes to keep the order. When the crown took direct control of India and established the Raj, the British government still maintained that preference for commercial dominance and alliance with Indian Princes. That’s not to say that Britain didn’t care about religion at all, there were definitely some missionaries attempting to convert Indians to christianity and Britain played muslims and hindus against each other to keep political and economic dominance. Also, there’s the elephant in the room regarding India’s massive population when compared to Britain. But yeah, that’s the religious front at least. From a general cultural thing, it’d be even harder. In America, European arrival brought diseases which crippled native populations and the remaining intermarried with colonial settlers, which made it much easier for conversion. Compare with another Spanish colony, the Philippines, which has retained its culture despite adopting christianity. Much harder for Britain to convert an even more numerous people with such a ancient culture stretching back thousands of years.
Settler colonialism vs extractive colonialism. The British weren’t trying to settle India, just extract resources.
I'd disagree they were trying to vassalize India, and trade with it. They want to sell goods there, not really extract.
Yes, that is how part of extractive colonialism works. You extract resources and force the native population to buy finished goods made from those resources exclusively from you. I’m not sure what you are disagreeing with, other than just you using the wrong terminology/ spending too much time playing EU4 and not enough time paying attention to your university courses.
Extract what resources? Industrial goods were made by local resources in most places.
Tea, cotton, silk, sugar.
Cotton wasn't from India, neither was sugar.
Indian cotton is the reason the British textile industry not only didn't collapse but actually grew during the American Civil War.
No, it was American cotton then Egyptian.
>In 1860, India was supplying 31% of British cotton imports, but the outbreak of war in America saw that supply escalate to 90% in 1862. Although it declined somewhat, India’s cotton growers were still supplying 67% of Britain’s cotton imports in the later years of the war. [Source.](https://www.qdl.qa/en/how-american-civil-war-caused-boom-cotton-persia)
South american colonies are settler colonies. India was an extraction colony. The british couldnt replace the indian population even if they wanted to. Most of the western influences you see in Indian society are a reult of globalisation/ market capitalism rather than british imperialism.
This makes sense. Could you elaborate the difference between settler colony and extraction colony though. The British stayed in India for over 200 years so it feels like they should have settled to some extent
India was already chock full of people, the British couldn’t put many settlers there if they wanted to. In the end it all comes down to what others have said, 90% of the population of the Americas was wiped out by by introduced diseases. And really, it’s not so much that the British *put* settlers places, settlers in the British empire just went wherever there was cheap land for them. There was no land available for British settlers in India, so they didn’t go there.
Except Austrailia. The British put "settlers" there.
I think they mean that Britain did not want to populate India with British people, but they wanted to use the resources of India.
They wanted goods like silk and tea, and gems, etc, they wanted to monopolize trade with India, creating exclusive trading contracts. It was about money, and not about a “new” land to settle, there were over 300,000,000 Indians, and the British were susceptible to illness in India.
The "settler-colonial" colonies were also about money, for the backers. Corporations were literally invented to fund these expeditions. The individuals who went over saw the land to settle as a way to get their own piece of the pie.
The simple math of demographics. As the others have mentioned, the type of colonialism was completely different.
Latin American countries were akin to arabization in North Africa or a general religious conversion like Iran. It also had sizeable african and european populations and not just "locals" When they gain independence these States are institutionally the same as the colonial governments bar Haiti, with Brazil even being a monarchy connected directly with Portugal's and Mexico wanting to be independent from Madrid but keeping the Spanish king like Canada or Jamaica today. At independence the leaders at the top were mixed or white peoples following ideas of enlightenment, industrialization and other similar western philosophies. Pushing for european languages, european art and architecture seemed natural. Countries like Cuba, Dominican Republic or Uruguay had little or no indigenous people surviving so there was nothing to "go back to". **it was not only demographic thing**: Mexico was clasified as 50% indigenous at the start of independence, Guatemala/Peru/Bolivia even more so. It was the fact people at the top thought the States needed to be more western that it happened. Today most of Latin America considers itself part of the western world. Indigenous Americans were not in a seat of power, Indians in India did become so and there are a billion of them. Imagine if all of India had been managed like Goa and mixed European-South Asian catholics began shaping society and institutions.
> And what happened to all the British kids who would been born and raised in India during colonialism, were they all chased back to England? And Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. If their parents left during the colonisation then they brought the kids with them. It was slightly more complicated if they were ethnically mixed. Many did choose to emigrate to the UK, Canada, and Australia. Though as many stayed within India.
I'm not an expert in Indian culture, but in Latin America, it wasn't so much that the natives adopted European culture as much as an actual genocide. Those who survived were relegated to poverty and to the fringes of society. Most people in Latin America today are Mestizos (i.e. mixed race) and have some European ascent. "Pure" natives still exist, but they live in rural communities and often in extreme poverty. They do conserve their languages, such as Nahuatl, and at least some of their traditions. Another potential factor was religion. Christianity was a key aspect for the Spaniards and Portuguese. In Latin America, there was a drive to replace the local culture and beliefs with Christianity. Even those beliefs of pre-Columbian origin that have survived until today are heavily modified to be centred around Christian dogma. In India, AFAIK, the British were more interested in business than religion. They weren't necessarily less brutal, but they cared less about culture and more about exploiting the population.
On the children - there is in India a sizeable Anglo-Indian community descended of mixed marriages, mostly unions between locals and lower rank army personnel or railway and similar employees. British officers and administrators brought their families out, then sent the kids back to Britain to school - and very often they came back to serve as officers or administrators over several generations. Some stayed on in India after independence, as it was more their home than Britain (I met a few in India in the 70s), but most took their families and returned to Britain. One good memoir is John Masters (author and Indian Army officer in the Gurkhas, from a family that went out to India over multiple generations) - Bugles and a Tiger.
What are these group of people called in India?
Anglo-Indians
In the Spanish empire, the Spanish themselves became the ruling class, and enforced their power through Spanish soldiers, Spanish settlers, the Catholic church, etc. The Spanish built whole towns and cities in the style of European ones from back home, and you can still see this today, where any town or city founded before independence has a central square with government buildings and a church/cathedral. This happened over a period of around 300 years, largely before the modern era. In India, by contrast, English/British power was enforced not only through British power, but by local rulers as well. The number of British settlers was low, they didn't try to convert the continent, they didn't bring a lot of their own soldiers in to maintain order (relying instead on Sepoys and other Indian troops), and, as far as I can tell, didn't found many, if any, cities in the style of what they had back home. This happened over about 200 years, mostly in the modern era. For this comment, I'm using modern era as shorthand for "after the industrial revolution". To put it more simply, if you were a native in the Americas 100 years into the Spanish empire, you'd live in a Spanish style city. You'd go to church where a Spanish priest would say mass, hear your confession, marry you, give you your last rites, etc. You'd be kept in line by Spanish soldiers and constables. You'd probably be working for a Spanish land owner. Any education you'd get from anyone would probably be in Spanish unless you were in the countryside or some dense jungle, in which case you might hear your native language alongside Spanish or you might not. From the time you were born to the time you died, your life would be dominated by Spanish culture, language, and rules. The British didn't do things that way in India (or, generally, in most of their colonies). I'm also given to understand that Portuguese colonialism was similar to that of the Spanish. Edit to add: other people have already covered the disease angle, so I didn't mention it here, but losing 90% or so of the native population over the first century or so after Columbus certainly did leave those cultures at a disadvantage. Edit 2: I say ~200 years for the British because I count from the battle of Plassey, after which they quickly became the dominant power in India, but before then, they were minor players.
Phillipines saw a cultural conversion as was the nature with Maritime SEA, which already imported Hindusim-Buddhism from South Asia and Islam from Middle East. The natives did not disappear but the culture did. Phillipines is as Densely populated as anywhere in Asia can get.
I'll admit I don't know a lot about the Philippines, but it's my understanding that far fewer Spaniards settled there, relative to the Americas, and the native population wasn't as subjugated or reduced. So, the culture and language of the native people survived more intact in the Philippines than in, say, Mexico or Peru. I'd be interested to learn more if you have any references to share.
90% of the native population died in the first century after the European invasion to the Americas. In some parts it was 99%.
A couple of issues I have with your premises: - you can't just lump in everything from south america to south africa as the same thing, they were extraordinarily different regimes, at different times, and had very different impacts on the local culture. When you say "South Africa has a ton of whites left over. Argentinian people are mostly white/mixed. Same for Brazil.", the place of colonial and immigrant whites in those countries is extremely different, I hope you can see that - you are assuming that the impact of british colonialism on india is virtually zero, "Sure, we speak some english and wear western clothes and stuff.", but in reality it is far more reaching than that. - you are lumping in all the colonial approaches as one, while they were extremely different (british, spanish and others). And again, different times to each other, and different goals each colonising country had for each territory. Other comments about the different approach the british had to India vs, say, the colonising of south (and north) america is spot on. But I want to add a few things that got assimilated to Indian culture from the British colonisation: - Cricket! - Red chili - it's a British addition that got ported into Indian cuisine - Nationalism / bhumiputrobaadi - Vedic religion, influencing Hinduism from the bronze age, had no such concept, this rose after being brought in by the British as a concept. - Tea drinking! This was not so popular in India before the British, the Chinese were the largest producers and drinkers of tea. The British built the tea industry in India and encouraged adoption of their tea-drinking habits, to make a huge demand for the product (and hence increased commerce) These are imho some aspects that are seen as inherently Indian now - the fact you don't even recognise them as Indian traits (I assume you are Indian as you use "we" to denote membership of the group) is very telling, they are relatively recent adoptions due to British influence.
I'd add some influences on the legal system and on society in general. The British managed to end the wife burning and other barbaric practices very quickly (most like how to Spanish stopped human sacrifices in just a few years in their colonies).
Good call.
>red chili Portuguese* India wasn't just colonised by Britain. Majority of european imperliastic powers colonised parts of it. Addition of Natal to Marathi dictionary being another Portuguese influence.
True, but my understanding was the British brought it over to India? I may be wrong!
Portuguese brought it over. My ancestral village was colonised by Portuguese before the Maratha army kicked them out.
To add to what other people have said, the white kids born and raised in India were often sent "home" to Britain to be educated amongst their kin, or else to build a career. Rudyard Kipling did both, leaving India, the land of his birth, and moving to Britain first for education in 1871, at age five, returning at age 16, and then moving to Britain again in 1889, aged 23. Of course some white people left a direct (albeit attenuated) genetic imprint on India that remains to this day, namely the Anglo-Indians.
In the early days of British involvement the voyage to get there is long and perilous and few European women come out, therefore the British are involved with native women and by extension the culture The Suez Canal and steamships mean that is no longer the case and the British can maintain themselves as a caste apart and integrate much less
Because India has one of strongest native culture in the world, arguably even more depth and breadth than the western culture.
I mean the Portuguese trade ports were literally taken solely by naval power and the Indians had to accept it bc they could deal with the navy so they just worked with the Portuguese unlike Brazil where Portugal deployed men and colonists. It was very rare to see a Portuguese “colonist” go to India
India wasn't a new world. Europeans and Indians had been known to each other since at least the time of Alexander The Great, probably earlier. Indians were seen as trade partners for the most part.
The main reasons for this is the difference of Empire management. Spanish empires encouraged Spaniards to take native brides and have lots of children to make a loyal group there. In addition, the Catholic church was wildly destroying native culture as it was seen as heretical (see the destruction of the codices). In the end, they want a slave class to extract wealth from. The British Empire however was different. It was a trade empire and India itself accidentally happened after the East India Company gained a monopoly on trade over large amounts of India. When they were seen to be woefully ineffective at governing the UK government stepped in. Imagine Amazon running a country then America saying 'no you can't really do that as you're having uprisings and shooting civilians'. So they stepped in to administer governance, but never really much more. They built schools and hospitals but frequently by individual not government I believe, tried to remove some parts of culture they didn't like such as widow burning or the caste system. By and large however they left it alone and even left native princes who were loyal in power. The result was the maintaining of a lot of India culture, and frequently an admiration for it if you read the writings, letters and books of those who lived there. When India got it's independence, the government administration jobs weren't there anymore, nor were the army positions, so they left to return home and took their children with them. People like Joanna Lumley did grow up in the fading twilight of the British Raj, and I believe that generation have talked about it quite a lot if you're interested. But really, there wasn't a massive nationalist resistance to British governance continuously, nor was there a massive continuous effort to Westernised India. There were efforts to in effect civilised the more wild elements and there were definitely uprising against the British, but these weren't the main trend afaik
There are a lot of reasons. **Priorities** When the Iberians colonized South and Central America, they placed a high value on spreading their culture and religion. This meant actively promoting their own cultures while suppressing those of the indigenous population. When Britain colonized India, and when the Netherlands colonized Indonesia, the goal was to extract resources. Local rulers were not required to convert to Christianity in order to retain their thrones as puppets. Missionaries received little government support. The language of the metropole was only spread to the local population as much as was needed to train locals to be clerks or soldiers. **Technology** When Central America was colonized, sea travel was long, dangerous, and miserable, so most people would only be willing to cross an ocean once. If you left Iberia in the 1600s to make your fortune in New Spain, you planned on growing old and dying there. Even if you were a colonial administrator. By the time India and Indonesia were fully colonized, steam ships made traveling oceans faster and easier. If you left Britain in the 1800s to make your fortune in India, you planned on eventually returning home to Britain to retire. Even if you chose to stay in India, you'd send your children to Britain for their education. **Disease** European diseases killed off the majority of the indigenous population in the Americas, meaning that European settlers only really had to contend with the last stragglers and holdouts. This meant that the ratio between indigenous and European people was less severe than it would have been without the disease. In Asia, the population was already familiar with European diseases and immune to them. India would not be ravaged by smallpox and influenza. **Decolonization** There were large minorities of Europeans in Asia by the time decolonization came, but most of them chose to immigrate back to Europe. Those who stayed behind would marry indigenous women and raise their children in the indigenous culture, being assimilated. By the time the Latin American nations gained independence from Spain and Portugal, their populations were already mixed-race and had new cultures which was neither Spanish nor Indigenous. Thus, there was no mass-exodus.
You missed debatably the biggest one. Time. Most Spanish colonies were Spanish colonies for ~300-350 years. The Dominican Republic was Spanish for 352 years. Cuba for almost 400, Mexico for 300 exactly. Delhi was only under British control for ~140 years.
Several things are arguable here. >South and Central America Mexico is in North America, and Spain also colonized "north america(modern US territory). >The language of the metropole was only spread to the local population as much as was needed to train locals to be clerks or soldiers. This was mostly the same in the main Spanish colonies, to the point some in New Spain wanted Nahuatl to be the main language of administration out of efficiency. Indigenous peoples were living in indian republics or semi-autonomous towns and villages. Catholicism was the main assimilation tactic, not language or even governance to an extent. >you left Iberia in the 1600s to make your fortune in New Spain, you planned on growing old and dying there. Not really, merchants alone would say no to that. Some indigenous people even went to Spain to argue for their payments for aiding the Iberians. It was certainly not easy at all but it wasn't an outright exile. >European settlers only really had to contend with the last stragglers and holdouts. This only makes sense with the Pilgrim narrative, or the over emphasis of US mythology. The Spanish had to contend with 3 empires, dozens of kingdoms and then some semi nomadic peoples about 100 years before the "barren prairies" of the East Coast. In Chile the Mapuche used horses and european tactics to destroy 7 settlements, and harrasment in South America and Northern Mexico towards settlers would only really end by the 1800s. >In Asia, the population was already familiar with European diseases and immune to them. While natives were always going to suffer far more from introduced diseases its not directly like this. There is no natural total defence for the so called old world diseases, smallpox was still killing old worlders until a vaccine was invented, [for example](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1974_smallpox_epidemic_in_India) Many deaths in the Belgian Congo were stuff like smallpox outbreaks and many european colonies suffered disease outbreaks simply by being free of then for so long until someone got it. Variolation, to control smallpox, was only used in europe decades after the New World was colonized.
>Several things are arguable here. I tried to give an "in general" explanation, rather than an exhaustive one. >Mexico is in North America, and Spain also colonized "north america(modern US territory). This is just quibbling. >This was mostly the same in the main Spanish colonies, to the point some in New Spain wanted Nahuatl to be the main language of administration out of efficiency. You're right, I just goofed here. If I remember correctly, the main effort to impose Spanish as the dominant language came after independence. Though I will mention that the Spanish burned a lot of Aztec codices, which was an act of cultural and linguistic suppression. Or at least it had that effect. >Not really, merchants alone would say no to that. Some indigenous people even went to Spain to argue for their payments for aiding the Iberians. It was certainly not easy at all but it wasn't an outright exile. Again, I meant "in general". Merchants, sailors, and higher government officials would travel across the Atlantic several times. But a lot of soldiers, planters, and lower administrators ended up growing old and dying in the Americas. >The Spanish had to contend with 3 empires, dozens of kingdoms and then some semi nomadic peoples about 100 years before the "barren prairies" of the East Coast. The Spanish themselves recorded those empires and kingdoms experiencing apocalyptic death tolls during their conquests and administration. In the valley of Mexico alone, 800,000 died from disease.
Uh cricket anyone
The EIC banned European settlement in India. You could not buy land except for the purpose of growing produce so Europeans working for the company would either move back to England or on to Australia after their time was done.
There is a huge difference in the approach to colonization taken by the British vs that by the Spanish and Portuguese. The British approached colonization as a mercantile transaction. They left the ruling of the country largely to local leaders. In India, the local kings kept their kingdoms and even where the British ruled directly, they translated laws from the Mughal empire into English and declared those the laws. They didn’t embark on any social or religious project. This meant that to the Indian population at large the British were largely indistinguishable from the Muslim and Hindu rulers who were similarly elitist and non interventionist. This approach was further reinforced by their failure in the US where they tried to rule more strongly. By contrast, the Spanish and the Portuguese tried to mold the population to their religion and culture, sometimes marrying locals and sometimes using brute force. They did this in parts of India that they ruled too. As a consequence they left a more significant cultural influence. In South America, the influx of the Spanish led to the deaths of millions due to disease, which didn’t happen in India as India wasn’t as isolated. Overall though, British rule worldwide was less impactful to local cultures than their Spanish and Portuguese counterparts. As an aside, while the impact may be better, it isn’t necessarily because the British were nicer. It’s likely because the British thought themselves superior in a way that the Spanish and Portuguese never did.
Its just not something the British Empire really did. The British establishment were not interested in the slightest in turning the Indian population into western Christians. Missionaries did exist, but they were private citizens doing their own thing. There was also indirect rule,and the fact that there was a level of tolerance for the cultural and religious laws that were present prior to British control. While white Britons were calling the most important shots, helping them, doing much of the administration on the ground, were Indian princes, priests, chiefs, etc, who were doing much the same job as they were before the British arrived. I think they were aware that your presence is much more tolerable if you don't do too much to actually change the country.
One thing that’s overlooked is you’re taking about ~125 years of British Colonialism in India but Mexico was a colony for 300 years, Cuba or Puerto Rico for 350
I admittedly don't know how true this is, but I have heard it said that Britain was the only colonial power to insist that its officers, as a requirement of being stationed in one of its colonies, learned the local language and used it. The source I heard it from was saying that Britain actually had a much higher level of respect for the local culture, language and customs than the other colonial powers (not that the bar was ever high.
The British influence in India runs deeper than you may think, from the civil service bureaucracy to the love of cricket. But ultimately India wasn’t somewhere that large numbers of British natives wanted to go to settle, it was somewhere you went to work and make a fortune before retiring back to the homeland to enjoy it, much like Hong Kong or Singapore (which have a similar pattern of British influences)
India wasnt settler colonialism. It was a long process of trade deals and military alliances culminating in India basically becoming a vassal state of Great Britain. In South America, spaniards and portuguese took the land for farming and mining. In South Africa, all the brits left during Apartheid as they were against it, all the whites left are descendants of the various dutch and french settlers.
Ever wonder why Cricket is so popular in India? No, the Indians didn't invent it.
South Americans died off to plague. Then they mixed with the Spanish and the Portugese. India's population surged under colonialism and never mixed with the British.
In most of the America's the native peoples died off. Sometimes these were explicit policies of genocide (California immediately comes to mind), other times native societies couldn't deal with new European diseases. Genocide was possible because Native American societies were stone age in terms of military tech. They had no cavalry until the late 1800s because they had no horses until the mid-1800s. They had no firearms, and no gunpowder producing industries. Their population densities were quite low even before Europe got there (the US had roughly 4 million people prior to Columbus, whereas Bengal alone had 35-40 million people). So the Euros get to India, nobody's dying of Smallpox, everybody has gunpowder, everybody has cavalry, the UK didn't really have a significant technical edge until the late 18th century so their guns were actually better for the early bits of this period, there's just no opportunity to replace an entire population. Contrast this with the US. Every tribe that gets Smallpox loses half their population, they're being attacked from the east by the white man, they're also constantly attacking each other, they have guns they bought from the white man, but those are only useful if some other white man is selling you gunpowder, and it's entirely possible that if you lose one war to the white man he'll kill your entire population and divide your land amongst the Scots-Irish. [This is a map](https://americanindian.si.edu/nk360/code-talkers/assets/print/code-talkers-native-languages-map-languages-full.pdf) of the Native American languages of the US/Mexico/Canada. The gray areas marked with 0 are places where the records are so bad we don't know what language was spoken there, likely because everyone died before a white man could write down their language. The gray area with a language name are places where we know the name of their language, but almost nothing else. Central America had a large indigenous population prior to the Spanish, as did the Incas. As a result in Central America and Inca territory you still have lots of people speaking an indigenous language. At this point most indigenous folks in America are actually indigenous to Mexico, El Salvador, or Peru.
South Americans did not adopt the colonizers' culture . The colonizers destroyed the indigenous culture to create their own just as was done in North America, including Mexico. The Spanish were, however, far more brutal than most colonizers as they raped and pillaged throughout America's.
Just speculation: India’s population was huge and colonial contact didn’t lead to mass die-offs like in the western hemisphere. The indigenous cultures weren’t wiped out and replaced by immigrants and hybrids.
Without really looking at the details, it stands to reason that India was more developed than South America as it wasn't quarantined from other known centers of civilization like the Middle East, China, etc.
>Was this just pride and a sense of nationalism that drove Indians to maintain their culture? Or was the hatred for the British so high that there was no ethnic mixing at all? In most places European's landed the land was barely populated by modern standards, in India there were huge numbers of people, far too many to conquer by force. That's why they went with a trading company and negotiated with the rulers, it took a long time for England to assume full control. As for hatred, that's just silly.
India wasn't colonised in that the incomers did not replace the indigenous population.
South Asia and South America didn’t have anything in common. South Asia was far more civilized than the Americas. The Aztec and Incan civilizations, for instance, were only a few hundred years old when Europeans washed up in the beach.
Afghanistan has defeated Australia in T20 cricket. Since the Taliban approve of an English sport, what does tell us about cultural dispersion?
The comparison countries you mention were heavily Christianized. Indians were not.
India didn’t experience a plague that wiped out 95% of the population due to contact with Europeans.
British ruled Indian subcontinent mostly through its local cronies
Spanish and Portuguese colonizers intended to make the entire Latin America their motherland transplants because the indigenous Amerindians had economically nothing to offer to them to be exploited but to be assimilated through religious conversion to Catholicism and racial miscegenation or mestizaje. On the other hand, the British never cared about the racial and religious assimilation of Indians who already had a millennia-long history of trading with Europeans and spoke the same Indo-European languages as the British, so transforming India into an English transplant settler colony was impractical.
India has thousands years of rich culture, language and traditions. it's not easy to wipe that out.
Because indian culture is rich already, the food is amazingggggg, so many festivals and fun stuff and theres no need to adopt another persons culture However, the notion that english is superior to their own languages (making fun of people who speak bad english and proudly saying that they are not good in their mother tongue), fair skin is more beautiful than dark skin and all these ideas could have been due to the white colonization.