12 - Conclusion

Summary

Interlink'd food-yielding lands!

Land of coal and iron! land of gold! land of cotton, sugar, rice!

Land of wheat, beef, pork! land of wood and hemp! land of the apple and the grape!

Land of the pastoral plains, the grass-fields of the world! land of those sweet-air'd interminable plateaus!

Land of the herd, the garden, the healthy house of adobie!

–Walt Whitman, “Starting from Paumanok”

In the last chapter I made use of a metaphor to describe the roles of the first arrivals in the Americas and Australasia, the indigenes, and of the second to arrive, the Europeans and Africans. I suggested that the Amerindians, Aborigines, and Maori were shock troops – marines – seizing beachheads and clearing the way for the second wave. They chiefly came on foot: the Amerindians entirely so, in all probability; the Aborigines on foot, with a few spells of paddling between Indonesian islands; the Maori only by seacraft. It might be helpful to elaborate on the metaphor (metaphor, please, not theorem), dividing the second wave into a pair of successive waves. We might think of the earlier of the pair to arrive in the Neo-Europes (consisting of those who came chiefly in the age of sail) as the army, landing with its heavy equipment, extensive support units, and greater numbers to take over from the marines. The members of this army came with weapons, fought many battles, and spent much or all of their lives under stern discipline. It is well known that the first Afro-Americans were slaves, but it is not so widely realized that half to two-thirds of the whites to migrate to North America before the American Revolution were indentured servants who had contracted away their freedom for up to seven years in return for passage to the New World. Until 1830, the majority of migrants to Australia were convicts, which leaves New Zealand alone to be founded by free laborers.

The next great batch of Old World peoples, almost all of them Europeans, to come to the Neo-Europes crossed the oceans chiefly by steamship. I think of them collectively as the civilian wave, because they harvested the benefits of the prior invasions, rather than launching invasions themselves. They came without weapons and without much in the way of institutional organization above the kinship level. They came, with very few exceptions, as free and independent individuals.