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forgive me for jumping in here when I totally agree with your larger points about Wrede, but ...	May 12th, 2009 - 01:51 am

Well ... it depends what you mean by "North America," right? Tenochtitlan - one of the biggest cities in the world, around 1500, and one of the biggest cities in the world right this minute, except that now we call it Mexico City - is right smack dab in the middle of the continent. It's just that the continent includes Mexico, you know? And nobody had to hide a damn thing. There were quite large cities in the Andes as well, and good-sized ones elsewhere. Not much north of the Rio Grande, though, was much larger than maybe 10,000 people. One of the several things that is driving me crazy about this latest episode of FAIL is that Wrede appears to have taken the bits of the Americas colonized by Brits as her unit of analysis. But we don't need to replicate that conceptual error.

Sami, your logic here is good and 1491 sounds almost Jared Diamond-esque in its dopiness. However, it is widely accepted among scholars of colonial and pre-colonial Latin American history (not my field - I'm a 20th-c specialist myself - but some of my best friends ...) that the Americas as a whole did indeed suffer what's delicately known as a "demographic collapse" after coming into sustained contact with Europeans, so, somewhere around 1500. This was mostly caused by diseases, though social chaos (from invasion, or more often as a consequence of the breakdown of complex systems of food production and distribution, etc., due to epidemic disease) played a part too. There were islands in the Caribbean that were entirely depopulated between the first and second trip Columbus made, perhaps because the breeding pairs of pigs Columbus left behind carried flu. Outside of islands, and very densely populated areas, the catastrophe was milder and happened more slowly. But yes, there certainly were large parts of the Americas which lost 95% of their populations.

I tell the undergraduates in Intro to Latin American History that the earliest dates of settlement in the Americas keep getting revised backward - I heard recently of settlements excavated in northern coastal Brazil that can be dated back 20,000 years - while estimates of the total population figure for the Americas before 1492 keep rising. So we can't say for sure how terrible the devastation over both continents was, between say 1500-1750. But 75-80% seems more or less plausible to me.

The best fast guide to most of this for English language users remains Alfred Crosby, The Colombian Exchange. It's quite outdated by now (I think he's been proved completely wrong about tuberculosis, for example) but nice and clear, anyway.