Genocide in the Americas

Abstract

Although they often differ sharply on the numbers, scholars without exception now portray the European colonization of the Americas as a monumental, perhaps unprecedented, demographic catastrophe for the continents’ indigenous peoples. Rejecting earlier estimates that held that the New World was sparsely populated in 1492, demographers now provide projections that, in their highest estimates, sometimes exceed 112,000,000.1 There is general agreement that, whatever their precise pre-contact numbers, indigenous populations within a century after contact were reduced by 90% or more. There is agreement as well on the prime agent of that decimation: infectious diseases to which native peoples had no immunity. But it is also generally recognized that atrocities against native American peoples committed by the invader-colonizers also contributed to their population decline. Did those atrocities constitute genocide? On that question there has been disagreement and controversy.