The history of European colonization of the Western hemisphere can be summed up in one word: greed.
I don’t think that’s a fair characterization. Realistically, conquest, pillaging and slave trade predated the US colonization by millenia, and were widespread on every continent. The true uniqueness of Europeans seems to have been universalism, which came from entrenched monotheism. The idea that the same rules (divine rules, and by analogy rules of Nature, social rules) apply everywhere, even where you’ve never set foot, was universally (ironically) unintuitive and absurd before. So, the Europeans had a knack for sailing seas and making colonies because everywhere was equivalent to them. If the locals did not uphold strict territory boundaries, they saw it as a license to seize land because then by default their (in their heads) universal law applied. I think we can still see this way of thinking in action nowadays specifically in Western geopolitics.
Yes I think it’s more accurate to say that Europeans were greedy but no greedier than any other culture at the time. And in fact they were the first group that decreased their greed and created the modern ethical understanding that taking can be wrong.
I don’t think that’s a fair characterization. Realistically, conquest, pillaging and slave trade predated the US colonization by millenia, and were widespread on every continent. The true uniqueness of Europeans seems to have been universalism, which came from entrenched monotheism. The idea that the same rules (divine rules, and by analogy rules of Nature, social rules) apply everywhere, even where you’ve never set foot, was universally (ironically) unintuitive and absurd before. So, the Europeans had a knack for sailing seas and making colonies because everywhere was equivalent to them. If the locals did not uphold strict territory boundaries, they saw it as a license to seize land because then by default their (in their heads) universal law applied. I think we can still see this way of thinking in action nowadays specifically in Western geopolitics.
Yes I think it’s more accurate to say that Europeans were greedy but no greedier than any other culture at the time. And in fact they were the first group that decreased their greed and created the modern ethical understanding that taking can be wrong.