The Unfinished Nation Brinkley
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CHAPTER SUMMARY

Before European explorers arrived in the Americas, Native Americans had developed many forms of social organization. No two tribes were exactly alike and often were unaware of each other's existence. And no two had attained exactly the same level of development. Little of this mattered to the Europeans. Knowing very little of its people, Europeans were almost exclusively interested in exploiting the resources of the New World, both natural and human. They regarded all natives as inferior. Therefore, they set out to redefine or destroy native societies and replace them with a variant of European culture. The unintended but highly lethal biological disaster brought on by smallpox and other diseases made it easier for the Europeans to conquer the native tribes and their civilizations and impose a variety of colonial systems on them. Over time the Europeans also began to import African slaves to replace the labor of Native Americans lost through epidemics and wars. Competition for those slaves was a part of a larger complex international rivalry. In short, many conflicts and competing interests in the Old World spilled over into the New as many different nations entered the race for land, colonies, slaves, and profits. By the end of the sixteenth century, the age of discovery was all but over, and the age of colonization, especially English colonization, was about to begin.

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