Paradigms in Conflict: A Comparison of the Economic Organization of Pre-Columbian America and Europe

Paradigms in Conflict:   A Comparison of the Economic Organization of Pre-Columbian America and Europe     Draft for Conference  Sergia C. Coffey

Table of Contents                               Page

Abstract                                              2

Introduction                                        3

Table 1                                                26

Table 2                                                27

Bibliography                                       30

Endnotes                                             33

Abstract

Around ten thousand years ago, two separate and independent Neolithic revolutions took place, one beginning in the Middle East and the other in the Mesoamerica.  These Neolithic revolutions changed the fundamental methods of production and economic organization.  Agriculture became the most important industry and the structures of the economy and politics evolved around the production of food.  In the Middle East, the economic and political structure was based on a pyramid of power, where all the factors of production were owned and governed by a small percentage of the population.  In the Americas an economic and political structure evolved based on personal freedom and communitas, egalitarian distributions of the products of labor created an economic structure which relied on a circle of cooperative interaction.  When these two different economic systems, based on wholly different paradigms met, they began to influence each other in numerous ways, including ideas of how an economy should be organized.

The aim of this paper is to examine the two pre-Columbian economic systems in Western Europe and the Americas, (especially North America), to better understand, contrast and define the two paradigms of economic organization. The paper will compare the two economic systems based on a number of economic criteria, including ownership of the factors of production (land, labor and capital goods), equality of income distribution, quality of life based on the health and wellbeing of the overall population, technological innovation, investment patterns and valuation of time preference.

Introduction

Between ten to twelve thousand years ago, two separate and independent Neolithic revolutions took place, one centered in the Middle East and the second in Mesoamerica.   There was a sudden transition from hunting and gathering to settled life.  Agriculture was the first major technological development of the last 10,000 years and “set in motion a massive acceleration of human social evolution” (Wells, 2002 p. 151) and changed the economic organization of human societies.  The form of the economic organization that developed was radically different in Eurasia and the Americas.

Around 8600 B.C. women began to domesticate and cultivate wild plants in seven locations around the world.  The agricultural centers were in the Middle East, the Tigris-Euphrates and Nile River systems, in Sub-Saharan Africa, in Asia, along the Yellow River in Northern China and the Yangtze River in Southern China.   In the Americas agriculture developed in three centers, the Valley of Mexico and Central America (Mesoamerica); the South-Central Andes in South America; and in eastern North America. (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014 p. 16)

In the Middle East, changing climatic conditions at the end of the last ice age created fields of grain.   First, these were gathered and stored, the population settled and grew.  When climatic conditions worsened around 9,000 years ago, these Neolithic populations adapted and planted grain seeds.   From this base in the Middle East, agriculture spread throughout the Mediterranean and then throughout the rest of Europe^[1]  In Asia, rice became the staple crop which traveled throughout Asia.  (Wells, 2002)    Wild plants were domesticated and agriculture was spread mainly by women. (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014, Wells, 2006, and Sykes, 2001)

In the Americas, with their unique ecology, a separate and independent Neolithic revolution occurred in Mesoamerica around the same time. (Mann 2005, Weatherford 1988) The main crop was maize (corn) and unlike the grains found in Eurasia, the development and planting of maize required human intervention.

The Eurasian Neolithic revolution began in the Middle East and the technology that grew around it was based on the crops and domesticatable animals which were available.  In the third millennium B.C. Sumer invented, farming, the wheel, metal tools, writing, and the first great Eurasian civilization, based on a class system, where land was owned by a King and labor at the bottom of the pyramid was enslaved (owned).  “Every European and Asian culture since, no matter how disparate in appearance, stands in Sumer’s shadow” (Mann 2005 p 19).  The growth of metallurgy and the technological advancements that it provided were a direct result in the economic investment in the production of weaponry by governments who were built on a class pyramid since the first civilizations.[2]   European communities were organized for sustained war, where whole countries were overrun by war. (Brandon, 1974)

The economic and political structure based on a pyramid of power spread throughout Eurasia, through the rise and fall of empires and the development of the feudal system, it was still the same basic economic structure that still existed in 1491 before the finding of the Americas.

In the Americas, around 1800 B.C., earlier than the European development of Somer, the Olmec civilization was the first to cultivate maize.   They created the “first technologically complex” culture in the Western hemisphere.  The Olmec lived in cities and towns centered on temple mounds. They invented a dozen different writing systems, established widespread trading networks, “tracked the orbits of the planets, created 365 day calendar, (more accurate than its contemporaries in Europe), recorded their histories in accordion—folded “books” of fig tree bark paper.”  They invented rubber, had ball courts and temples. They invented the mathematical concept of zero, perhaps “their greatest intellectual feat.” In Eurasia, the first use of the mathematical concept of zero didn’t occur until the first centuries A.D. in India.  The mathematical concept of zero did not reach Europe until the twelfth century, when it came with Arabic numerals, a result of cultural interchange due to the Crusades. (Mann 2005, p21)  “Olmec, Maya and other Mesoamerican societies were world pioneers in mathematics and astronomy – but they did not use the wheel” (Mann, 2005 p. 21)

Later civilizations in Mesoamerica came from the Olmec.[3]  There were “a half-dozen ‘sister cultures’” that arose after the development of maize agriculture.  “Mesoamerica was the home of a remarkable multisociety ferment of social, aesthetic and technical innovation” (Mann 2005, p232).  The influences of these early civilizations “powerfully shaped the Indigenous people of the north, in what is now the United States.” (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014 p. 18)

In 1491, widespread and intricate civilizations existed throughout American hemisphere.  The people “lived in some of the world’s biggest and most opulent cities”, in civilizations based on agriculture. (Mann 2005 p. 17) Extensive trade routes spanned the continents.[4]  The world’s oldest Federal System, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, was the most powerful nation in Northeastern North America. Throughout the Americas the type of economic and political organization was based on personal freedom and communitas. It was a repeated theme of observation of Europeans when they came to the Americas and a source of misunderstanding as Europeans tried to comprehend the American economies and societies through the prism of their own cultural experience.

In North America, war, as it was defined in Eurasia, seems to have been an unknown concept.  Indigenous American raids, called wars, involved only a fraction of the fighting men and were brief. “Defeated nations were assimilated rather than annihilated” The Indigenous Nations did not have a permanent military, like the Europeans.  Even the Aztecs, the Indigenous American state most organized for war, did not have a permanent military establishment.  (Bandon 1974, p. 17).   The concept of personal freedom, of labor owning itself, was the basis of economic organization.   Land was owned in stewardship and communally maintained.

The adoption of agriculture led to an increase in the population.   In 1491, the Indigenous American population was between 90 and 112 million people. (Mann, 2005 p 104)   More people lived in Americas than in Europe, before the European contact spread disease which resulted in widespread epidemics with death tolls as high as 90% of the population and the European “culture of conquest” further decimated the population (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014 p. 32).  The indigenous population did not disappear, despite death tolls greater than the Black Death in Europe.  (Nunn 2010)  From the first contact in 1492 the structure, technology, economic paradigms and social value systems of the indigenous people influenced Europeans, through transference of real wealth and advanced agricultural technology[5] and also through the transference of the indigenous value system, upon which their economic and political organization was based.[6]  Brandon (1986) examines how the introduction of the indigenous American duel concepts of personal freedom and communitas,[7] began to influence European ideas from Christopher Columbus’ first letter.  These ideas have led to political and economic revolutions.  The prosperous and egalitarian economies based on personal freedom, that Europeans[8] described were compared to the Europe’s Classical Greek and Roman ideals, a golden age.  The Native American idea of personal freedom differed from the Classical European idea.  In Europe’s Classical civilizations, personal freedom meant freedom from conquest, defeat in war meant “literal iron-clad enslavement” and the idea of freedom did not extend to the “vanquished people brought home as slaves” who were treated with derision.[9] (Brandon 1986, p. 28) Over time, the Indigenous American view of personal freedom has supplanted the Classical European view

From first contact between Europe and the Americas the two paradigms of economic organization in these completely foreign civilizations have been in conflict.  What Cohen (1952) calls the “Americanizing the White Man” has changed the value system which our modern economies are organized around.  A theory of an idealized economy based on personal freedom, was written by Adam Smith, in the Wealth of Nations, which is the theoretical basis of an economic system called capitalism.  The theory of an idealized economy based on communitas, influenced the writings of Engels and became the theoretical basis of the economic system, called communism.

The combination of these two theoretical economic systems, capitalism and communism, sometimes seen as in conflict with each other, have become the basis of social democracies in Western Europe.[10]   These economies are a melding of the two indigenous American concepts of personal freedom and communitas, which Native American economies were based on.  Filtered through interaction of the European philosophers and writers, these indigenous American ideas, have “Americanized” Europeans, as Cohen would say, at least somewhat.

The conflict between the feudal European economic paradigm and the indigenous American economic paradigm has been going on for over five hundred years.  It is still going on.  The European economic paradigm in 1492 was based on a pyramid of power, which required domination, enslavement and warfare to maintain.  The indigenous American economic paradigm, especially in North America, was based on a circle of cooperative interaction, which required consensus and relied on peace, equity, personal freedom and diplomacy.

The aim of this paper is to examine the two pre-Columbian economic systems in Western Europe and the Americas, (especially North America), to better understand, contrast and define the two paradigms of economic organization. The paper will compare the two economic systems based on a number of economic criteria, including ownership of the factors of production (land, labor and capital goods), equality of income distribution, quality of life based on the health and wellbeing of the overall population, technological innovation, investment patterns and valuation of time preference.

The Economic Organization in Pre-Columbian America

In the pre-industrial world, agriculture was the most important technological advancement and the main economic activity upon which all of the rest of the economy and society depended.  In the two separate agricultural revolutions, in Eurasia and the Americas, the types of technology that arose around the production of food and the economic and social organization that arose was influenced by the type of available crops and the decision on how to handle animal husbandry.[11]

New research in archeology and anthropology describe cultures in the Americas that were arguably the most advanced and the most populated in the world in 1491.

In the Middle East, the ancestors of the domesticated crops, wheat, rice and millet, look like the plants that grew wild.  In the Americas, Maize does not look like its closet genetic relative. It cannot reproduce itself, its kernels are wrapped in a husk and must be planted. In the creation of maize, the Indigenous Americans created an impressive feat of biological hybridization.  How they achieved this has baffled biologists and anthropologists.  “Modern maize was the bold act of conscious biological manipulation- “arguably man’s first, and perhaps his greatest, feat of genetic engineering” (Mann 2006 p. 218).   Genetic engineering was also obvious in other native agriculture products, including the potato. The farming technology in the Americas had resulted in horticultural advancements which modern scientists still cannot replicate.  Maize, unlike the Eurasian grains, also needed careful planting, it could not be broadcast, but needed to be removed from its husk and planted, adding perhaps to the process of thoughtful selection of the seed which was to be planted. Both corn and potatoes were developed from native plants which have little resemblance to them.  Many of the plants the Native Americans cultivated required selection of seeds for planting, which allowed the farmers to choose seeds from plants which had the characteristics they favored most (versus broadcasting of grains in Europe).  (Mann, 2006)

Maize (corn) was first cultivated, around 2700 B.C. in Mesoamerica.  In 1200 B.C. the Olmec civilization grew from ancient villages grouped along the Gulf of Mexico. Planting two crops a year, they created a surplus.  They also grew squash and beans, which along with corn provides complete protein.  The grew, processed and drank chocolate.   The surplus of maize and other agricultural products resulted in population growth.

The Olmec built pyramids on ceremonial sites, sacred monumental complexes, which were precisely aligned along a north-south axis.   These pyramids and the precise alignment would be copied by subsequent Mesoamerican civilizations. (Cartwright, 2013) They built massive stone sculpture.  They invented rubber, manufactured balls, from rubber trees and built ball courts where they played ball games.

The Olmec invented a dozen different writing systems, they codified and left a “record of their gods and religious practices using symbols”, which indicated a complex, organized religion.  The Olmec Gods represented maize, and the elements, rain, the earth and animals which existed in their environment, “such as jaguars, eagles, caimans, snakes and even sharks, identifying them with divine beings”. (Mann 2005)

The Olmec spread their culture through widespread trading networks, which extended as far south as current day Nicaragua.  Later civilizations in Mesoamerica came from the Olmec, their culture would be passed on to all the Mesoamerican cultures that followed, including the Mayan and Aztecs.   Their influence would travel north and influence the numerous cultures throughout North America.  Olmec is the name used by the Aztecs for this culture, it means “rubber people” (Cartwright, 2013).

“A half-dozen ‘sister cultures’” arose after the development of maize agriculture.  “Mesoamerica was the home of a remarkable multisociety ferment of social, aesthetic and technical innovation” (Mann 2005, p232) [12]  One such sister culture was the Maya.  “The Maya attained the highest civilization in ancient America, and one of the highest known any place in the ancient world” (Brandon, 1974 p45) The discovery of the concept of zero allowed the Mayans to work with extensive dating systems and work with numbers in the hundreds of millions.   They studied astronomy, tracked the orbits of the planets and created charts of the movements of the moon and planets, predicting eclipses and other astrological events, which modern astronomers marvel at. Their calendar more accurate than modern calendars.  The Mays created a “genuine written language”.  They built and adorned temples, they built roads, scabeob, which radiated out from their temples using rollers.  Next to their temple topped pyramids, they built “bridges, aqueducts, ‘palaces’, reviewing stands, vapor baths, monumental stairways, ceremonial plazas for public spectacles, and astronomical observatories.” “Their art, astronomy and mathematics is world renowned.”  Their literature has been lost, “except for a few mangled scraps” (Brandon, 1974 p. 47).  Their agricultural methodology though was primitive, comprised of hacking down trees to create a clearing, and then a few seasons later hacking down a new clearing in the jungle.  Houses around the temple centers were scattered around the countryside and did not reveal a pattern of urban density.   The Mayan villages were based on clan structures and communal social relations. (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014)

The ‘Classic Age’ of the Maya lasted longer than the Roman Empire and was “probably parallel in time”.  Their country covered an area as large as modern Italy, with 116 cathedral centers (or “cities”) (Brandon, 1974)

According to Brandon, (1974) the Mayan had priests, “conducting a complex religion” but there is no “clear evidence” of organized political government, centralized or local.  They did not have an “empire”.   “The 600 years of the Mayan Classic Age” was “marked by “a near absence of warfare”, an absence of repressive government, and an absence of discernible strong rulers” (Brandon 1974, p48)[13]

Mexico was the most densely populated area of the Americas.  Other nations and city-states arose in Mexico, the Toltec in the Valley of Mexico, had huge cities, universities and extensive libraries. (Dunbar-Ortiz 2014)  The Culhua built the city-state of Culhuacan on the southern shore of Lake Texcoco.  In 1325 the Aztecs migrated from northern Mexico.  In 1426 the Aztecs allied with the Texcoco and Tlacopan and overthrew the Tepanac.  The Aztecs became the most powerful of the alliance and brought all the people of Mexico under tributary authority.  The invading people assimilated and reproduced the cultures.   Many of these civilizations were organized in hierarchy ruled by priests.

The Aztec civilization was based on maize, beans, pumpkins, tomatoes, coca, avocados provided a balanced diet, more nutritious than its Middle Eastern or Asian equivalents. (Mann, 2005 p20) The Aztecs grew tobacco and cotton. Cotton was woven into cloth and used for clothing.  Weaving and metalwork flourished, providing useful commodities and works of art.  Enormous dams and canals were built.  Every city had elaborate markets.  (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014)

The civilizations of the Americas were as old as Sumer and as advanced and sophisticated as any that had existed elsewhere in the world.  When Cortes and his army visited Tenochtitlan, it was the largest city in the world at that time, with a population of about 250,000.  It was built on the Lake of the Moon, with extensive causeways connecting it to the mainland and outlying communities in present day central Mexico.  The Spanish marveled at the cleanliness of the people and the streets^[14] and the extensive markets for goods of all kinds.  (Stannard, 1992 page 3).  According to Sherburne F. Cook and Woodrow W. Borah,[15] in 1491 the central Mexican plateau alone had 25.2 million people.  It was the most densely populated place on earth, “with more than twice as many people per square mile as India or China”.  Spain and Portugal together had less than ten million people, by contrast. (Mann, 2005 p104) Before European contact “tens of millions of people” populated the Americas.  (Stannard, 1992 p. x).  The Native American population in 1491 was estimated to be between 90 and 112 million people. More people lived in Americas than in Europe. [16]

The civilizations of the Americas established widespread trade networks.  The extensive trading routes included thousands of miles of paved highways. (Weatherford, 1988). Trade was an important part of the Aztec economy, and important to other Native American nations.  It linked both continents and spanned North America from East to West, North to South.   Turquois was used as money.  Turquoise was mined by the Pueblos[17] and traded with the Aztec merchants.  Casa Grande (in present day Arizona) was an Aztec commercial center on the northern frontier.  Trade goods from across North America could be found there, salt, another highly valued product was mined in what is now the Southwest of the U.S., shells from the Gulf of California, Obsidian from Durango Mexico, tropical bird feathers from the Gulf of Mexico, flint from Texas, buffalo hide from the Great Plains.   The Wichita were merchant traders, who traded for turquoise and other goods, in present day Texas, Kansas, Nebraska and farther north and east.  The Cree traded for turquoise in present day Wisconsin and Ontario, Canada and throughout the Great Lakes region.  (Dunbar-Ortiz 2014)   Gold and silver were used for art and decoration and religious rituals, but not as money or a store of wealth, which is how Europeans viewed these metals.

Trade, which had been going on for millennium, not only linked, the continents, it spread culture and traditions and the cultivation of maize (corn).

The Aztec, Maya and Inca, “the most highly organized peoples in the hemisphere” with “superstratified societies”, have engendered a debate about how they were organized. (Brandon, 1986 p. 56) First seen through reports from European conquerors, who identified tribal chiefs as Kings or Emperors, fundamentally misunderstanding the economic, political and social structures that were the reality among the Indigenous American nations.[18]  The European idea of empire was also incorrectly applied to the Aztec and Maya civilizations.  In reality, the Aztec consisted of “communities sufficiently intimidated enough to pay tribute, but in no wise bound to Aztec governmental conventions” (Valliant in Brandon, 1986 p. 50).

In Native American societies, social organization was based on the group, a kin group or clan.  Among the Aztec, the kin group was known as calpolli, its size could range from several hundred to several thousand people, with smaller sub-groups known as tequitanos, which could have been clan groups or extended families.  Among the Aztec, the calpolli operated in the all embracing area of religion, as well as politics, education and economics.

Unlike Europe, where the social stratification was based on ownership of land and property relationships, the social stratification found among Native Americans was based on religious or kin groups.  The leaders were spokesmen for their social groups, rather than rulers. Clan or council rule, had “the political structure of a society rather than a state” (Brandon 1986 p. 48). Religion was the basis of Native American reality, it governed every relationship, with other people and the world that surrounded them.

Throughout Native America, land was usually owned by the group.  Among Aztecs land was most commonly ‘owned’ by the calpulli, who parceled it out among its members.  Land could also be controlled “by religious or political or military establishments” and some families who dated their ancestors back to the Toltec, who had ruled in the tenth and eleventh century, before the Aztecs, received “a favored position in distribution of communally owned land”.  Ownership was not in the European sense, with the right to sell such property.  (Brandon, 1986 p. 54)

The calpullec, controlled most of the sources of real wealth, they operated markets on their own, had their own plazas or “civic centers’ under their own local religious, political and military officials” (Brandon, 1986 p. 54)

In Mesoamerica, agricultural labor was man’s work. Labor was bound up with religious ritual (and not always recognized as work by Europeans).  Based on the ceremonial calendar, a man would labor 100 days a year, leaving time for participation in the rest of religious ceremonies.  Ceremonies which were often recorded as “play” by European observers, including dancing.  They lived a less stressful life than existed for labor in Europe.

There were slaves in Mesoamerica, usually these were war captives.  There is no record of “regular forced labor as an aboriginal condition anywhere”. (Brandon, 1986 p. 55)

Throughout Native America, a man usually owned his weapons and tools.  A woman, owned her household utensils.  Together, with relatives, they “might own a hunting territory or fishing place”.  Individuals might own non-material possessions, such as a song or ritual.  “Officials might possess accoutrements of office or sectarian treasures (perhaps of considerable intrinsic value” during their tenure in office.  (Brandon, 1986 p. 54).

The attitude toward material possessions and accumulation was completely foreign to the European attitude.  In the Mesoamerican literature, there was the repeated theme of the elusive nature of ownership.  The Aztec religious ritual human sacrifice was built around this theme[19]. “The theme was live! Live correctly, live for living …above all was no anxiety on possessions, no acquisition for the sake of acquisition” (Brandon, 1986 p. 53) This attitude toward property and possession allowed the ideas of equality and liberty to exist compatibly among Native Americans, and gave the “impression of classlessness”.

On the northern edge of the Aztec regime in present day northern Mexico and Arizona the Sonora Desert and the U.S. Southwest, rainfall is scarce, the land is alpine, arid and semiarid with rivers cutting through it.  Drought is endemic.  Agriculture communities arose around 2100 BC, by 1250 BC irrigation canals were built. The Huhugam people from 900 to 1450 AD, built a network of 800 miles of a canal system, lined with clay to make them leakproof.   One canal system carried enough water to irrigate an estimated ten thousand acres. They grew maize, beans, squash and cotton.  They built multistory buildings and ball courts.   “By the fourteenth century, the Hohokams had dispersed and lived in smaller communities”, their decedents are the Pima.     (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014 p. 22)

Th Anasazi people lived in Chaco Canyon between 850 to 1250 AD.[20] The Anasazi built four hundred miles of road, which radiated out of canyon and connected seventy five communities. The roads were an average of thirty feet wide and followed straight lines through difficult terrain.

In the thirteenth century, the Anasazi left Chaco Canyon and “built a hundred smaller agricultural city-states along the northern Rio Grande valley and its tributaries”.  Their decedents are the Pueblo.  The Taos Pueblo were an important trade center, the trade extended from the Pacific Ocean to the Great Plains and south to Central America.  Trade involved many goods, such as Buffalo products, copper and shells, tropical bird products, turquoise and salt.

The trade network, that spanned the Americas, included the island nations of the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean.  Water made trade easier. Economic, cultural and religious exchanges linked the islands to the peoples of present day Guyana, Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida.  (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014)

In North America, the most fertile agricultural land was from the Mississippi river to the Atlantic Ocean, south to the Gulf of Mexico.   The climate was temperate, numerous rivers provided water and numerous Indigenous agricultural nations lived in this area.

In the twelfth century, the Cahokia civilization was in the Mississippi valley region.  The city of Chokia had a population of tens of thousand people, it was larger than London of the same period.  Large pyramids and earthen structures were built. This nation had disappeared by the time the Europeans arrived in the area. (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014)

In 1491, the Mississippi Valley was filled with Indigenous Nations[21] of agricultural villages, corn was the main crop, along with beans and squash and a landscape which was managed by the population.

In the Northeastern North America, the Native Americans lived in a landscape which they had sculpted and formed through constant care and a unique form of husbandry.  Villages were surrounded by six square miles of corn,^[22] beans and squash gardens.  Orchards of mast (nuts) and fruit trees and berries surrounded the cultivated land.  Anthropogenic forests lay beyond the orchards and the forest floors were kept clear of undergrowth by controlled fires.  The fires allowed grass to grow in the Spring, which attracted game, buffalo, deer, turkeys and other game and birds lived in the forests and were killed by the Natives.  This unique form of husbandry avoided the contact with the zoological diseases which had plagued Eurasia.  Rather than a wilderness, the American landscape represented a managed ecological system which was sculpted and maintained by the native populations.^[23] (Mann, 2005)

Northeast America was thickly populated. An estimated 100,000 people lived along the coast of what would become New England in the sixteenth century (Mann, 2005, p. 46) The natives were taller than the Europeans, healthier, and wealthier in terms of goods and services available to them, the average diet was “about 2,500 calories a day, better than those usual in famine racked Europe” (Mann 2005 p. 45).  Income distribution was notably equitable.  They were cleaner and had a nutritionally balanced diet.  Upon meeting the natives of North Carolina White’s chronicler thought the Natives longevity was due to the use of tobacco and began the importation of tobacco to England.  (Unfortunately, he died of lung cancer but the spread of the use of tobacco had significant consequences for the development of world trade).  “Time and time again Europeans described the People of the First Light as strikingly healthy specimens.  Eating an incredibly nutritious diet, working hard but not broken by toil, the people of New England were taller and more robust than those who wanted to move in.”  Because famine and epidemic disease had been rare … its inhabitants had not of the pox scars or rickety limbs common on the other side of the Atlantic.” (Mann, 2005 p. 48) The Native Americans viewed the Europeans with disdain, as “physically weak, sexually untrustworthy, atrociously ugly and just plain smelly”. (Mann, 2006 p. 50)

The largest Native American political and economic polity in Northeastern America was the Haudenosaunee (or Iroquois) Confederacy, controlling an area from New England to the Mississippi River (Weatherford, 1988 p. 137).  It spanned from the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River to the Atlantic Ocean, south to the Carolina’s and inland to Pennsylvania.  The Haudenosaunee Confederacy, brought five (later six) unique nations together.   It consisted of thousands of agricultural villages and hunting grounds.

The Haudenosaunee confederacy was created between 1090 and 1150 AD^[24], and is the “second oldest^[25] continuously existing representative parliament on earth” (Mann, 2005 p. 373).  Around 1000 AD corn, beans and squash appeared in the Northeastern America and the people of the region formed into five groups.  Farms lined the hills and the population increased.  As a result of increasing population, warfare also increased and a spiral of violence existed.  According to Haudenosaunee oral history, Deganawidah, who was not a member of the five nations, came with a message of peace.  He, along with Ayenwatha persuaded the Seneca, Cayuga, Oneida, Mohawk and Onondaga to ally in peace, rather than constantly fighting.   The Haudenosaunee constitution or Great Law of Peace laid out the alliance’s rules.  (Mann, 2005 p. 371)  The Great Law of Peace’s 117 codicils were concerned with setting limits on the council’s power, as well as establishing the structure of the relations among nations.  According to Mann (2005) the “Haudenosaunee was a libertarian” and “a feminist dream” (p. 372).   “The league was predicated, …on the consent of the governed”.   The jurisdiction of the Great Law was limited to relations among nations and outside groups, internal affairs were governed by the individual nations.    Universal agreement was required before any action was taken and when the council of sachems decided upon “an especially important matter or a great emergency,” the sachems would submit the matter for a referendum by their people.  (Mann 2005, p. 372)

Oren Lyons, Faith Keeper of the Turtle Clan and a member of the Onondaga Council of Chiefs describes the principles of the Great Law of Peace as, “the first principle is peace, the second principle, equity, justice for the people.  And third, the power of good minds, of the collective powers to be of one mind: unity.  And health.  All of these were involved in the basic principles.  And the process of discussion, putting aside warfare as a method of reaching decisions, and now using intellect” (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014 p. 26)

The five nations were governed internally by female clan heads, who chose the sachems who held office, set the agenda of the League and had the power to impeach the representatives and to declare war.  Women could attend council meeting.   Women also ‘owned’ property and when a man married he joined the woman’s household.[26] The clan system of democracy was matrilineal and avoided centralized power.  Maize was stored in granaries and distributed equitably, by the clan mothers.

The Great Law of Peace formally represented checks on authority, the requirement for consensus, the equal status of women, the requirement for consent of the governed and the power to impeach the sachems which were representative of a region-wide traditions of independence and individual rights.  There was no class system, labor was masterless, although divided into male and female jobs, was engaged in with cooperative consent, the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) were ruled by a council, and throughout North America “any person called the “head” of a tribe…occupied a largely honorary position of respect rather than power”.  Sachems and Chiefs played ceremonial and religious roles rather than having political or economic power. (Weatherford, 1988 p. 143) Authority rested in a group and group agreement was necessary and found through the use of a caucus.^[27]   The political economic system represented a participatory democracy and economy, based on free will, equity and independence from government rule.  The economic paradigm could be represented by a circle of cooperation and labor was, arguably the most important factor of production.[28]  Diplomatic skills and trade were highly developed and highly valued.

This form of economic and political organization can be traced to the earliest Mesoamerican civilization, the Olmec and Mayan, and was the basis of economic and political organization throughout the hemisphere.

Economic Organization in Pre-Columbian Europe

Sumer developed agricultural processes, such as irrigation and created the first cities in Eurasia.[29]  Sumer organized its economy into a class based society, Priests initially owned the land and later, as the society was attacked by outside groups, warriors became more important and Kings replaced the priests at the top of the pyramid of power.[30]  Kings received their authority from the Gods and inherited it from a lineage of Kings.[31]  Slaves were the bottom of the pyramid and provided labor for the production of food and other goods and services.  The human population expanded.^[32]  To keep the population enslaved violent domination was required.  To acquire more land and labor, war was required.  The idea of personal freedom was foreign to European thought.  In Classical civilizations, personal freedom meant freedom from conquest, defeat in war meant “literal iron-clad enslavement” and the idea of freedom did not extend to the “vanquished people brought home as slaves” who were treated with derision.[33] (Brandon 1986, p. 28)

In Eurasia, one result of the adoption of agriculture, was the evolution of a social organization based upon a model of totalitarian command economies and Empire.  For most of the last five thousand years the Eurasian structure of the political economy was a pyramid of power, where land was the most important factor of production and labor was owned.  A small percentage of the population, the top echelons of the economy owned and controlled land, economic power, wealth and labor.  Kings, Emperors, Pharaohs or a small oligarchy of aristocrats owned the land and controlled the vast majority of the wealth.  Economic production relied on forced labor, slavery or serfdom or indentured servitude. Allen (2008) says that “evidence now indicates that the standard of living fell” when agriculture was adopted throughout Eurasia and there was a “reduction of health status and well-being” due to “increased psychological stress and a decline in nutrition” (p. 952).

Even in the ostensibly “democratic” Greek and Roman societies, the democracy only expanded the ruling class from a single head to a class of aristocracy who ruled. “The end of Roman slavery was the beginning of serfdom-not freedom” (Allen, 2008 page 956). The Magna Carta only expanded rule from the King to the aristocracy, a single monarch to an oligarchic aristocratic class, but it did not create, by any means, a participatory democracy.  Slavery or serfdom was the prevailing means of production in these political/economic systems.

Agricultural laborers supported Europe’s armies, roads, cities and commerce.  The combination of land, labor and weather allowed the production of agricultural goods.  The productivity of these grains, wheat, millet, rye and oats, would depend on many factors, including weather, the quality of the land, especially the amount of nitrogen, water, the technology and methods of farming and labor.  (See Table 1).

The economies in the great river valleys, where the land was the richest, achieved high levels of productivity.

In the Roman Empire, outside the river valleys, Rome built aqueducts to bring water to its cities.  Food was grown on plantations, labor was enslaved.  Agriculture relied on rain for water, productivity was lower per acre, but this was acceptable as long as the Roman army regularly conquered territory to turn into estates for the aristocrats.  For a thousand years the villa system existed granting legal rights to land and labor.  (Rosen, 2014 p. 31) To make the land more productive, farmers in Roman times would turn fields into pasture or planted clover or peas to fix nitrogen in the soil.

In Rome, “At least one quarter of the population of the empire were enslaved; scenes of unspeakable cruelty and horror took place in the Roman circus, where public executions and public torture were major diversions of the Roman populace.”  Ten percent of the female urban population were licensed prostitutes.” (Cantor, 1993 p. 37)

“Women were terribly abused in the Roman world.  They were regarded as machines for the gratification of men” (Cantor, 1993 p. 71)

The Roman empire split in two, with capitals in Rome and Constantinople in the fourth century.  During the next century, Rome was invaded by Germanic tribes, it had used some of these as mercenaries.  Goths and Vandals invaded and sacked the Western Roman empire.  At the same time, Christianity was first embraced by Emperor Constantine in 312 A.D., the relationship between Christianity and the state was quite different in the eastern Roman Empire, based in Constantinople and in the Western Roman empire, based in Rome.   In the east, the church and the state remained as one entity.   In the west, the Catholic church was allowed to become a separate political entity, with its own laws, courts and leaders, bishops and Popes.  It influenced the western Roman empire through its power of the emperor to excommunicate.  The transition was through a number of different policies adopted over the first five centuries A.D. by different emperors.  Some of these policies forced adoption of the Catholic religion by the Roman aristocracy, many who still practiced the old Roman religion with multiple Gods.

In 400 AD, in Gaul, (present day France) part of the Western Roman empire, half the population of Gaul were not free.  30% were slaves, 20% were semi-servile coloni.  15% of the population were the “lordly class” wealthy landlords, from which the bishops came. 15% of the population were free peasants and lower clergy. (Cantor, 199, p.117) 20% of the population of Gaul, especially in the southern part of France where the Gallo-Roman population was densest, were townspeople, a bourgeois, separate from the landlords or various classes of peasants.  The towns people engaged in trade and industry. By the end of the fifth century, the Western Roman empire had collapsed.

The Eastern Roman empire survived, and by the middle of the sixth century, Emperor Justinian had begun to expand reconquering territories from German tribes, North Africa, Sicily and part of Spain.  This expansion imported the bubonic plague, which had stared in Egypt in 540 and travelled up the Nile and spread by ship to Constantinople.    “It caused one of the worst die-offs in human history.”  (Karlen, 1995 p. 74) With the cold weather the plague became pneumonic in form.  95 percent of its victims died. In Constantinople, up to 10,000 people per day were dying.  The plague travelled to Mediterranean cities and slowly inland.  For the next six years, the plague “devastated Italy, Spain, France, the Rhine valley, Britain, and Denmark”, the Balkans, Near East, North Africa and the Middle East.  “The plague returned frequently until 590” and less frequently for the next 150 years, lasting two centuries, sometimes compounded by other diseases, including smallpox, typhoid.  By the time the plague had subsided, half of Europe’s population had died. Its cities had become “scourged remnants”, and “city life had virtually ended” agriculture ebbed. (Karlen, 1995 p. 75) Many Europeans turned to Christianity.[34]

The Church was as authoritarian as the Roman Empire “Neither institution expressed any concern for the rights of individual conscience” (Cantor, 1993 p. 73)   Independence was reserved for church leaders – not individuals.  The Bishop, not the Emperor, had the right to interfere in religious and moral matters.  The Church became a second political authority in the world.

The Dark Ages followed, the value of labor rose and their position moved from slaves to serfs, tied to the land.  By 600 AD,  60% of the population were unfree serfs.  The serf was not a personal slave, he was bound to the land and had certain legal and economic rights. The lord was obligated to protect him and provide the means of economic sustenance, although often the lord neglected to fulfill his obligations. The serf provided labor on the lord’s estate and a portion of his crop.  The serf could not leave the land, he owed the lord labor and was “subject to the jurisdiction of the lord’s manorial court”.  The serf had greater personal freedom than a slave on a Roman estate, but the existence of the serf was no better than that of the slaves.  The largest and lowest social group had an “animal existence”.  (Cantor, 1993 p. 117)

“Until the twelfth century the lives of medieval peasants differed little from the beasts of the field.  They toiled, they bred and they died.” (Cantor, 1993 p.117) No more than 10% of the peasant population, including lower clergy, were free.  There was rapid deurbanization of France due to the Frankish invasion and the plague of Justinian, by 600 the townspeople had shrunk to 3%.   The aristocracy, who possessed great wealth and power, were 2% of the population, this group was the royal family and provincial aristocracy, dukes and counts with “vast estates and territorial authority”.  25% of the population were made up of modest lords and free soldiers, “some of this group were wealthy landlords, but others were merely hired thugs who made up the armies of the kings and aristocrats” (Cantor, 1993 p. 119)

This social structure in France was built on the ruins of the western Roman Empire, warfare was constant “they were ignorant of the arts of government, they were blind to the ideals of justice and peace, they had no understanding of the economic problems”.  “The collapse of the western Roman Empire was a political, cultural and economic disaster”.  (Cantor, 1993 p. 119)

By the seventh century, the Gallo-Roman and Frankish societies had thoroughly mingled”, intermarriage was rapid and extensive and a new French social structure emerged.   In Frankish society, the role of woman had been better than in the Roman, aristocratic women could own property, were more independent of their fathers and brothers.  Women could make decisions about their lives and play a role in political life. As the Roman and Frankish (Germanic) cultures mingled and intermarried, “the Frankish nobility became more Romanized and Christianized” the chauvinist Roman view of women, represented in the traditions of Roman law, dominated the more egalitarian Frankish view.   “The status of women declined into subservience”.  (Cantor, 1993 p. 119)

In 800, Pope Leo, as reward for protection and support of the papacy, crowned Charles Carolus Magnus or Charlemagne as emperor of the Holy Roman empire.   Charlemagne granted lands to his soldiers and established the system of feudalism.  “Feudalism is a system in which an entire class of men owes military service to the class immediately above them, in return for a bit of land” (Rosen, 2014 p. 26)  It was a unique system that organized society around oaths of fealty.  War was an ongoing feature of feudalism, between countries, sometimes between earls.  In Europe the economic system was based on three institutions, feudalism, manorilism and the papacy.  Feudalism was Europe’s structure of controlling territories, manorilism was the system of working the land.  “The combination produced Europe’s distinctive caste system, with wealthy and powerful nobles and sovereigns at the top”.  This extended to the Catholic church in Rome, “where a half-dozen families played the feudal game of thrones in microcosm” vying for the throne of St. Peter (Rosen, 2014 p. 62)

At the beginning of the ninth century a change in the oceanic conveyer belt caused the Medieval Warm Period, which caused warmer weather in the northwest Europe.  It lasted four centuries until the beginning of the fourteenth century.  The warmer weather made land more productive, which led to higher yields. It was the first sustained population growth since the Roman Empire in northwest Europe.  More food increased fertility, decreased infant death.  New land was needed to support the growing population.

The Vikings, whose population grew, invaded and colonized, first Iceland, then Greenland, the Norwegians occupied the Orkneys, Shetland and Hebrides.  The Danes invaded and conquered Ireland and England.  Viking ships raided up the Seine and Paris, until in 911 Charles III, King of the Western Franks, a decedent of Charlemagne, made a treaty with the Norse ruler granting him Normandy, under the feudal system. By the beginning of the eleventh century, Norman knights had conquered from Armenia to Byzantine Greece, they established a Norman king in Sicily, extending to the boot of Italy as far north as Naples. (Rosen, 2014 p. 21)

Between 1000 A.D and 1200 A.D. population in England grew from 1.5 million to 5 million, in France from 6 million to between 17 and 21 million, in Italy from 5 million to 9 million, in Germany and Poland the population tripled.  Population growth meant poverty for the majority of the population.

To feed the expanding population forests were cut down, marginal land was brought into use.  In the fifth century 80% of the land was forest, by 1300 only 30% was left.  100 million acres had been deforested.  (Rosen, 2014 p. 18) The Christian view forests and wild landscapes, were that they were in the state of sin, sanctuaries for pagan worship.  The wood was used for buildings, heat and as fuel for smelting iron to manufacture armor, weapons, axes and plows.

The expansion of agriculture into marginal land resulted in falling yields.[35]  War was a constant of feudal life. Scarcity was chronic in Europe. (See Table 1)

“Dearth and penury were continual and familiar, a few overfed rich did not alter the rule.”   Famine was a reoccurring feature of European life.  (Braudel, 1992 p. 73)

The class system, created by feudalism, kept the majority of the population near starvation.  A couple bad harvests would result in famine.  Famine is economic, by nature, it is a result of the cost of food being too expensive for a significant number of people to afford. “No famine is purely natural or completely man-made”, it is caused by a combination of human behavior and bad weather.  (Rosen, 2014 p. 131)

In 1315 bad weather, too much rain, marked the end of the Medieval Warm Period and the beginning of the Great Famine.  Ongoing wars between Scotland and England, France and Flanders added to the destruction.  A scorch earth warfare between Scotland and England demonstrated the low value of the peasant’s lives.  The armies would destroy the farms, the harvests, murder the men, women and children, and livestock, burn houses, barns and mills, what they couldn’t carry they destroyed. The treatment of regular soldiers and nobility illustrated the class system, captive soldiers were treated barbarically.  It was “an unimaginably bloodthirsty age”.  Noble captives were protected by feudal honor.

Villages were built on streams.  The mills, needed to grind wheat to flour, the forge and bakery were all owned by the Lord and leased to the miller, the smith and baker.  Laws prevented the peasants from owning their own mills or even grinding stones.

Agrarian life was harsh, the population was malnourished and one harvest away from starvation. The technology used to harvest required farmers to spend from dusk to dawn bent over, swinging an eighteen inch sickle in repetitive motions.  The caloric requirements for the work was greater than the food available.

The Great Famine began in 1315 – 1317 repeated years of excess rain led to loss of topsoil and widespread starvation. The famine lasted seven years, a combination of bad weather and ongoing war.  Millions died.  Cannibalism was always reported by chroniclers during famines.[36]  Even in the worst of the famine, the wars continued, the King collected and raised taxes in England, to pay for his wars, and required young men from the villages to leave their villages to fight, leaving a labor shortage.

The Roman practice of leaving fields fallow was passed down to Medieval farmers, but they usually did not use this knowledge. They didn’t plant nitrogen fixers, one reason why was the population explosion that occurred as a result of the Medieval Warm Period and the growth of manorilism. This resulted in lower yields, some as low as 3 to 1, and during the famine as low as 1 to 1, the peasants were eating their seed stock.  (Rosen, 2014 p. 99)

The famine was followed by the Black plague.  The combination of the great famine and the plague resulted in a demographic shock.  Labor became more valuable and for a short period they were better fed.

Peasant diets lacked protein and essential nutrients and vitamins. The poor ate inferior food and suffered disease from poor nutrition.  The poor ate “gruel and sops”, “inferior flours”, bread filled with mold, some baked only once a month.  The lack of nutrition affected their intelligence, The Dictionanaire de Tre voux (1771) wrote “the peasants are usually so stupid because they live only on coarse foods.” (Braudel, 1992, p. 78)

In Europe, there was a high rate of time discount among both landlords and tenants.  They “were virtually incapable of anything but short term thinking” “The culture was constitutionally inclined to sacrifice the future in order to satisfy the present” (Rosen, 2014 p. 100) This attitude led to wars over personal slights and unsustainable use of arable land.  Tenant farmers didn’t invest in the land, because the benefits would accrue to the landlord after the end of their tenancy and higher yields resulted in higher rents.  The landholding barons and monarch should have had a higher valuation on the future, but they did not have any interest in postponing gratification.  They were obsessed with adding to their ancestral lands through conquest and marriage, they did little to increase productivity, preferring conquest through war.  (Rosen, 2014 p. 100)

In Europe, in the medieval period, trade and the transfers of technologies between Asia, Europe and Africa occurred, but for the most part, there existed for a “millennia great technological stability.”   From 700 BC to 1700 AD the basic subsistence pattern of agriculture was unchanged.  The same grain crops were cultivated using the same methods of broadcasting the grain, the tools for growing and processing were essentially unchanged, the same animals were used, modes of transportation and the structure of the houses were basically unaltered.^[37]  (Weatherford, 1988) In Europe, during the 14^th century there were repeated famines, due to bad weather there were universal crop failures which caused millions to die.  The increase in human population, as a result of agriculture and the adoption of animal husbandry, also increased pathogens and zoologic diseases (Wells 2002) and a series of plagues and wars decreased the population.[38]  The Black Death of 1348-49 resulted in labor shortages and draconian legislature prevented wages from rising and labor mobility for a generation, but in 1358 in France and 1381 in England there were peasant uprisings.  Allen (2008) indicates that in England, after the revolt, the labor shortage resulted in the end of wage suppression and limits on mobility.   Serfs were allowed to run away and become free people on different estates, resulting in the “end of serfdom“.  He also states that “Population turnover, however, was not the same as a renegotiation of social institutions.” (Allen, 2009 page 956)

In the 15^th century Europe was the backwater of the world.  Its agricultural technology had not changed for millennium.   Clothes were made mainly from wool and some leather, with only the very wealthy owning some silk or linen.  Land available for sheep grazing was the main constraint on clothing production, not labor to manufacture it into clothing.   The trees and forests had been clear cut to allow for grazing and fuel, creating environmental degradation.^[39]  The economic system was based on feudalism.  There were large disparities between the income and material wellbeing of the serfs or peasants and the nobles.^[40]  For most of the medieval period, in most of Europe, serfs were tied to the land and had limited choice, they were heavily taxed, had no legal rights “against violence by their lords” (Allen, 2008 page 957).  The system was also a patriarchal one where women were subjugated to both their husbands and their lords and had even fewer rights than their male counterparts, no matter which class they belonged to.

During the 14^th to 15^th centuries most technological advancements were not native to Europe.[41]   New technology was obtained through trade networks from the Chinese and Arab civilizations.   The adoption of the compass, astrolabe and sextant and the availability of maps from the explorations of Zheng He’s armada, “as well as advances in shipbuilding” allowed for travel across the Oceans.  The printing press was another technology adopted in Europe in the 15^th century that would prove crucial to the expansion of ideas found in the Americas.[42]

Heilbroner (1972) describes Europe as a command economy, based on tradition.  The Kings owned the land and warfare was a constant historical feature to dominate and acquire more land.  Labor was owned and changes in technology, the way goods were produced was regulated by the King and entrenched guilds who resisted change.

Since the Neolithic revolution, Eurasia shared technologies, plagues, wars and immunities and a political economic structure based on command economies and forced labor.  There was a class system which concentrated wealth and power in the hands of a few.

Paradigms in Conflict

The Neolithic revolution led to the development of organized and developed civilizations, Somer in the Middle East and the Olmec in Mesoamerica were the earliest civilizations.   These two civilizations became the blueprint for economic organization of all the subsequent civilizations in pre-Columbian Eurasia and the Americas, respectively.

In Eurasia the economic and political organization was based on a pyramid of power, in the Americas the economic and political organization was based on liberty and equity which co-existed, these ideas were antithetical to the Eurasian model.

Both systems of economic organization resulted in highly developed civilizations, which built large monuments, roads, irrigation and developed writing systems and in the Americas the concept of zero which allowed advanced mathematical and scientific knowledge to develop.

In Europe, the most important factor of production was land, which was owned by a small percentage of the population.   This small percentage made laws and invested in armies to maintain their ownership of this key factor of production.  War and violence were underlying features of this economic model.

In the Americas land belonged to the community, the people saw themselves as stewards of the land, with a religious obligation to protect, preserve and maintain it.   The result was an anthropogenic landscape throughout both continents, which maintained environmental balance and shaped the landscape.   The economy and political system was organized into groups, who chose and deposed leaders and delegated the use of the land to their community members.

Labor in Europe was owned, enslaved, later when the plague of Justinian decreased the population by fifty percent, labor’s value rose and labor became serfs.  Over time different categories of labor arose, in the feudal system there were serfs or villeins, freemen tenants, and other the categories.  Labor was tied to the land and the Noble Lord made and enforced the laws which governed their lives.  Labor worked long hours at back breaking toil.

Labor in the Americas owned itself.  The idea of personal freedom and liberty was the foundation of the economic system, which relied on cooperation. Diplomacy was important.  The individuals, organized through groups, chose their leaders.  Labor was not broken by toil, time for religious ceremony was part of their lives. Regular forced labor did not exist.[43]

In Europe, the aristocracy had a monopoly on the ownership of capital.  During the feudal period the Lord owned the mills used to grind wheat into flour, the forge used for blacksmithing, and the ovens used to bake bread.  Laws prevented private ownership.  The peasants had to pay a portion of their agricultural production for the use of mills and ovens, as well as rent and taxes.  As a result, the peasants were continually undernourished.

In the Americas, men owned his weapons and tools, women owned her household utensils. Together, with relatives, a group would have rights to a hunting territory or fishing place. In the Haudenosaunee clan mothers, “owned” the homes, men would go to live in their wife’s homes. Individuals might own non-material possessions, such as a song or ritual (intellectual property).

In Europe, the rate of time discount was high, both landlords and tenants sacrificed the future for gratification in the present.  They put a low price on the future and a high price on the present.  Serfs and tenants did not invest in land they did not own, since the investment would accrue to the Aristocratic landlord and not them.  The Nobel’s, also had a high rate of time discount, rather than investing in the land, they invested in weapons and cavalry, to fulfill their military obligations and because they preferred to acquire land through war and marriage, rather than maintaining what they had.  The lack of investment in land led to poor agricultural practices (not leaving land fallow for example) and low yields.

In the Americas, the rate of time discount was low, they put a high value on the future.  Cared for land and water for five to seven generations in the future. High valuation of the future resulted in investment in land and agriculture.  Maintaining the environment was a high priority and an integral part of their religious beliefs and practices.  The environment was shaped and maintained to allow for the production of food, fire was used to shape forests and plains which allowed for hunting, orchards of fruit and mast, trees which provided nuts, maple syrup and other food products, berry bushes and fields of maize, squash and beans which provided a high protein balanced diet.

In Europe, the income distribution was highly skewed, the King owned the land, the nobility, who had pledged fealty, had rights to the land.  Their incomes and living standards were high, they lived a wealthy life, which put pressure on the bottom of the pyramid, the eighty to ninety percent of the people who worked to produce agricultural goods.  For example, the Prince of Wales household expenses at the beginning of the fourteenth century, were 35 million pounds per year, approximately eighteen hundred times greater than a typical subject.  (Rosen, 2014 p. 72).  In 1491, in recently unified Spain, the nobility were 2% of the population, but owned 95% of the land, the poor peasants worked for the nobility.  (Zinn, 2005).  Even in times of great famine, the nobility did little to relieve the peasants from their plight, raising taxes and drafting labor for war, confiscating grain and fodder at the prerogative of the King, while massive death and cannibalism were widespread.[44]

Income distribution in the Americas was egalitarian.  In the Haudenosaunee confederacy, maize was stored in large granaries and distributed by the clan mothers equally.  The political structure, in which clans or extended families, chose and deposed leader and which relied on consensus to govern and personal freedom and cooperation to accomplish economic activity, resulted in a classless societies, with egalitarian distribution of goods (income).   The attitude toward personal possessions, which discouraged acquisition, meant the leaders often had the least material goods.   There was a religious and social obligation to take care of all the members of a community.   Europeans, when they encountered Indigenous Americans were baffled by their inability to bribe the leaders, gifts they received were distributed throughout the tribe or village.  Native Americans were baffled by the willingness of Europeans to accept the class system and the inequality that accompanied it.

The quality of life in Europe, for the majority of the population was abysmal.  They lived in a constant state of malnutrition, their diets did not contain enough calories to sustain them in good health.[45]  A laborer doing extensive physical work, required 2,300 calories per day, but only received 2000 to 2,100 calories per day.   They lived in a constant state of hunger. The wealthy received the best grains, wheat and animal products.  The diets of the poor were mainly vegetarian, they ate inferior food and lacked protein in their diets.  The poor suffered from diseases due to malnutrition and from a variety of diseases related to the strenuous work agricultural production required.[46]   They lived in damp wooden houses, slept on the ground and shared their homes with livestock, which made them more susceptible to disease.  The population was always only two bad harvests away from famine, prices would rise and starvation and disease followed.  Famine led to greater malnutrition[47] and increased death, among the majority of the population, who were poor.  Disease and epidemics followed and massive widespread death (excess mortality) led to reduced population.  Those who survived were better off for a short period, the value of labor rose, their standard of living rose and population grew again, repeating the cycle of malnutrition, famine, epidemics and death. Braudel (1992) saw this cycle as equilibrating the population.

Epidemics and plagues exaggerated the relationship between the classes, the rich would flee from towns at the first sign of disease and the poor would be penned in and prevented from leaving.  “Death was principally directed toward the poor”.  (Braudel, 1992 p. 85)

The domestication of animals and animal husbandry which included living with the animals caused the spread of zoonotic diseases.  The dirty conditions in the homes of the poor encouraged infestation of rats, which spread disease, including plague.

Stress was high and constant.  Subject to violence by their Noble Lords, constant wars, which used scorched earth practices in which the peasants were massacred, (collateral damage).   Constant hunger, recurrent disease, short life expectancy (40 years old), high infant death, hard labor and poor diet, life was certainly stressful for the majority of the European population.

In the Americas, it was possible to maintain the dense population because a relatively disease free environment had been created.  Diseases did exist, herbal medicine, surgery and dentistry were practiced.  Hygienic and ritual bathing prevented disease.  Ritual sweat baths were common throughout North America and originated in Mexico.  The Native people bathed frequently, even in winter.[48]  (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014) The Native American diet was mainly vegetarian, maize, squash and beans provided the basis of a healthy diet.  Tomatoes, avocado, berries, nuts, cocoa and numerous other foods were eaten.  Fish, fowl and game added to the nutrition and calories.  Skeletons examined show that there was not class distinction in the available nutrition. There were sufficient calories, estimated at 2,500 per day, available so malnutrition and the cycle of illness, and epidemics that existed in Europe did not exist in the Americas.  (Mann, 2005) The unique form of husbandry practices, through the maintenance of forests and hunting grounds, prevented the spread of zoonotic diseases.

Maize (corn), the staple crop, was highly productive, one grain could produce a yield of 70 to 80 in a dry zone and yields of 150 to 800 in good land.  In some places, (in Mesoamerica for example) two harvests were possible.   Maize requires little effort, requiring only fifty days of work per year, one day in seven, allowing free time for other activities. (Braudel, 1992 p. 161).  The egalitarian nature of life, personal freedom led to less stress, a healthy population who were well nourished, taller and healthier than the Europeans.

In Europe, women of all classes had few rights and were treated poorly.  For the Nobles, property was passed to the eldest son through the policy of primogeniture.  Daughters were married to cement alliances with other kingdoms.   For poor women, life was harsh.  They were usually pregnant and malnourished.

In the Americas, women had political authority among the Haudenosaunee and Cherokee.  In other Indigenous Nations, female lineages chose the male representatives from their clan to participate in the governing councils.  Women had the right to speak at council and would participate in council on the behalf of a young or inexperienced male representative.  If a representative was found unsatisfactory, women had the power to recall him.  Governance was built on the principal that the community’s interest took precedence over individual interest.  Consensus was required for actions to be taken, not majority rule.

Women controlled property and clan mothers distributed the stored maize to the community.

In Europe, there was limited trade.  Flanders, was a center of wool processing and weaving, traded with England and Spain for wool.  Merchants in Flanders were actually wealthier than the landed nobles.   France was repeatedly at war with Flanders.  Trade, when it did occur, was usually to the detriment of the poor agricultural workers, the best grain was sold and they were left with poor quality grain.  Piracy prevented trade by sea.  Tolls made trade between towns prohibitively expensive.

In the Americas, trade was important.  Trade networks spanned the continents.  Different Indigenous Nations specialized as traders.  The road system that exist in present day North America are built on the roads created and maintained among Native American nations.   Diplomacy was required for trade and was a highly prized skill.

Attitudes toward personal property and acquisition of property differed between Europe and the Americas.[49] The Native American attitude toward material possessions and accumulation was completely foreign the European attitude.   “The theme of no anxiety on possessions, no acquisition for the sake of acquisition,” was “a precept squarely opposed to the European ethic of acquisition of the sake of acquisition” (Brandon, 1986 p. 53) The Native American attitude toward property and possession allowed the ideas of equality and liberty to exist compatibly among Native Americans, and gave the “impression of classlessness”.   For the European mind, equality and liberty were often seen as antithetical.  The Native American attitude toward property in common was in “flagrant opposition to the general European tradition of competition to acquire private property”.   With a lack of mine and thine, and the machinery needed to enforce property rights, “courts, lawsuits money, boundaries, police” were “rare or absent”.  Reports about the Americas, compared it to Utopia.  (See Table 2)

In 1491, the Americas were richer (measured in terms of goods and services), more peaceful, with healthier and happier population than Europe.  Europe was plagued by war, poverty, violence, and a class system that subjugated the majority of the population to a cycle of malnutrition and disease.

After 1492, the massive transfer of wealth from the Americas, was fundamental to changes that disrupted the traditional command economies of Europe, beginning the Renaissance. (Brandon 1986 p. 5).  The ideas that flowed into Europe, starting with the first journals of Christopher Columbus and America Vespucci, began a debate about the basic valuation and ownership of labor which was the basis of the Enlightenment. (Weatheford) Adam Smith, in the Wealth of Nations, incorporated the idea of personal freedom, liberty and masterlessness into his theory.  Smith identified labor as the most important factor of production, replacing land and formalizing an economic system based on the Native American concept and economic organization based on free will and the paradigm of the circular flow, versus the traditional autocratic command economy paradigm based on the pyramid of power which was the predominant form of economic organization in Smith’s time.  Smith, influenced by the Native American enlightenment ideas of personal freedom, levitated the value of labor above that of land.  He wrote “Labor alone, never varying in its own value, is alone the ultimate and real standard by which the value of all commodities can at all times and places be estimated and compared. It is their real price; money is their nominal price only.” (Smith p. 36)

The social and political structures of the Iroquois Confederacy (the Haudenosaunee) affected the fundamental thinking which fueled the Enlightenment and the subsequent economic and political revolutions which followed.  The conflict between tyranny (command economies) and liberty worldwide should be attributed to the Haudenosaunee and the New World attitudes toward personal liberty.   “So accepted now around the world is the ideas of the implicit equality and liberty of all people that it is hard to grasp what a profound change in human society it represented” (Mann 2006, page 378) The Native American societies offered competition to the paradigm on which European societies were based, in Jamestown, for example, scores of English escaped to Native populations, despite the threat of dire punishment. (Mann 2006 page 377).

The results of the European’s Age of Enlightenment, in which the twin ideas of Capitalism^[50] and Democracy were formed, can be attributed to the contact with the Haudenosaunee and the Northeastern Native populations but also to the flow of ideas which had entered Europe in the journals of the explorers, priests and colonists since first contact in 1492.   The concepts of free choice, and government ruled by the populace through participatory democracy, were foreign ideas to European social, political and economic systems.  They were the basis of the Haudenosaunee federation and fundamental ideas of the economic and political structures throughout the American continents.  These ideas excited the minds of European writers and philosophers.

In 1776 two influential documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Wealth of Nations, were published.   Both promoted the concept of participatory democracy and participatory economy, known as Capitalism.  Both were influenced by the then radical ideas of personal choice and independence.   Both were influenced by Enlightenment thinker Benjamin Franklin,[51] who assisted Adam Smith in his research (Cannan 1994 page vii and Ross, 1995 p 255).   These radical ideas of freedom and personal choice were based on the influence of the Native American people whom Europeans had been in contact with since 1492 and lived next to since the early 1600‘s, when North America began to be colonized by Europeans.

Adam Smith reorders the valuation of the factors of production from that which had existed in Europe since the Neolithic revolution, where land was the most valued factor of production, labor was owned and capital was also the property of the few wealthy landholders, who ruled the economy.[52]  In contrast, in the indigenous American economies labor was the most valued factor of production, and labor owned itself, was “masterless”.  Land was communally shared, although there were tribal boarders. In the Wealth of Nations, Smith adopts some of this valuation of the factors of production, “Labour…is the only universal, as well as the only accurate measure of value”[53]

Contact with the Americas allowed changes which were fundamental for entrepreneurship to flourish and technological development and adoption to increase in Europe.  A comparison of the political economic structures and thought in medieval Europe, which existed before contact with the Americas, and those that evolved in Europe and among European Americans after contact can be attributed to the influence of the beliefs of the Native Americans, and the spread of those ideas from the journal accounts of European explorers and colonists, throughout Europe arriving just as the printing presses were expanding throughout Europe.   The Native American libertarian and antiauthoritarian beliefs affected the political structures and economic theory of how the world should work.  It can be argued that the melding of the European and Native American beliefs resulted in the U.S. Constitution and the ideas of capitalism, which, over time has resulted in the collision of two conflicting paradigms of economic organization, command economies based on a pyramid of power and concentrated wealth versus an economy based on personal freedom and free choice, a combination of liberty and equality.  Adam Smith’s work represents a reordering of the value of the factors of production, labor is identified as the most important factor, personal freedom and free choice are paramount throughout Adam Smith’s writing for the creation and operation of a free market economy.  This re-ordering and re-valuation of the factors of production laid the foundations for the industrial revolution to occur.

The conflict between the two paradigms still exists.  Command economies and concentrated wealth are still the basis of many economies and a concern of many economists[54].

Braudel (1995) referring to the European conquest in the Americas wrote, “the civilizations played and won” defining civilization on the basis of European technology and economic and social structures (98).  Any history or analysis which ignores the influence of the indigenous American civilization on the economic and social transformation of Europe and America over the past five hundred years, ignores an important influence on world economic and political history.

The conflicts between the two economic paradigms, this paper has examined, have been morphed by the interaction between Native American people and the European people.  The conflict of these paradigms continues to this day.  The conflict between corporatocracy, cloaked in the label of “capitalism” and indigenous rights is still being played out in North Dakota and Iowa, over the building of a pipeline.  The conflict between the Native American value systems, widely but not universally adopted in the Americas and Europe, continues as the Native American value systems, which were the basis of their economic organization, clashed with Old World value systems based on the pyramid of power[55].  In the United States, the national rhetoric is an economy based on capitalism and democracy, both founded on the indigenous concept of personal freedom.  Although theory wanders far from the reality, the indigenous ideas that sparked the economic systems that have become the foundations of modern economies, personal freedom and communitas, are still seen as ideals, as they were during the Enlightenment.  The consolidation of economic wealth in a small percentage of the population versus a more equitable income distribution is a symptom of the conflict between these two paradigms of economic organization, in which the one based on Old World feudal paradigm seems to be winning.[56]

Table 1

A. Cereal Yields in Europe (1200 – 1820) (Braudel, 1992 p. 123)

Before 1200 – 49 Yield of 3 to 3.7 from 1 grain planted

1. England 1200 – 49                     7
2. France before 1200                     3

B. 1250 – 1820 Yield of 4.1 to 4.7 from 1 grain planted

1. England 1250 – 1499               7
2. France 1300 – 1499                 3
3. Germany, Scandinavian Countries 1500 – 1699     4.2
4. Eastern Europe 1550 – 1820 1

Declines in Cereals (1250 – 1699 (Braudel, 1992 p. 124)

Years                         Yields from 1 grain sown

England            1250-99                                  4.7

1300-49                                  4.1

1350-99                                 5.2

1400-49                                 4.6

1550-99                                 7.3

Netherlands       1600-49                                 6.5

Germany           1500-99                                 4.4

Scandinavia       1700-49                                 3.8

Eastern Europe 1550-99                                 4.5

1650-99                                 3.9

Source: B.H. Slicher van Bath, Storia agrarian dell’Europa occidentale, 1972  pp. 245-52,

Maize Yields in the Americas,

One grain could produce a yield of 70 to 80 in a dry zone

One grain could produce yields of 150 to 800 in good land.

Two harvests were possible in some places such as Mesoamerica.

Table 2: Summary of Difference in Pre-Columbian America and Europe

The Americas	Europe
Population:
Between 90 and 112 million people. More people lived in Americas than in Europe. (Mann, 2005 p 104)	At the end of the fifteenth century, Europe’s population “as far east as the Ural Mountains was around fifty million” (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014 p. 17)
At the end of the fifteenth century, the total population of the hemisphere was around one hundred million, forty million lived in North America, including Mexico.  Thirty million people lived in Central Mexico. (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014 p. 17)
Land
Land, water, air belonged to the community, “ownership” in the European sense did not exist.  Tribes had rights to territories.	Land was owned by a small percentage of the population.
Were Stewards of the land, responsible for caring for it for future generations.	Nobility controlled the use of the land.   In England, prime land was used for sheep, which provided income from their wool.
Investment in the creation and maintenance of an anthropogenic landscape.	Cut forests to increase arable land.  Brought marginal land into use as population expanded.
Among Haudenosaunee, women had rights to land.  They controlled the produce of that land, maize (corn) held in granaries were distributed by the women.	Lord taxed land use, requiring a portion of the agricultural product.  Also charged for use of mills.
Among the Maya, Aztec groups had the rights to land and designated its use to its members.	Neither Nobles or serfs and tenants invested in improving lands productivity.
Labor
Based on personal freedom, no evidence of forced labor	Labor was enslaved, later after a population fall, labor was tied to land through serfdom
Equality and liberty co-existed in the economic and political systems of Native Americans.	Equality and liberty were antithetical in the European mindset.
Personal freedom meant ownership of oneself, free will.	Personal freedom meant freedom from conquest and enslavement.  Classical Greek and Roman writings refer to this definition of personal freedom
Membership in the community was highly valued labor was offered as part of a cooperative interaction.	The European attitude to free labor was competitive, not cooperative.
Religion was part of every aspect of everyday life. Religion based on reverence for the Earth.	Religion, based on the hierarchical structure of the Catholic Church could govern the Monarchies, influenced everyday life, threat of excommunication could mean death, prevented escape from Lord’s property.
Capital Goods
Throughout Native America, a man usually owned his weapons and tools	Nobility or Religious orders that owned the land also owned the mills.  Laws prevented peasants from owning hand mills
A women owned her household utensils.  In the Haudenosaunee clan mothers “owned” the homes, men would go to live in their wife’s homes.	In England, a village might own a plow.
Together, with relatives, a group would have rights to a hunting territory or fishing place	Nobility owned the ovens to bake bread and rented them to the Smith
Individuals might own non-material possessions, such as a song or ritual.	Nobility owned the forges and rented them to the Smith
“Officials might possess accoutrements of office or sectarian treasures (perhaps of considerable intrinsic value” during their tenure in office (Brandon 1986 p. 54)	Peasants owned household items.
Rate of Time Discount
Low rate of time discount, put a high value on the future.  Cared for land and water for five to seven generations in the future.	High rate of time discount, both landlords and tenants were sacrificed the future for gratification in the present.  They put a low price on the future and a high price on the present. (Rosen, 2014)
High valuation of future, investment in land and maintaining the environment was high  and an integral part of their religious beliefs and practices.	Low valuation of the future, investment in land was low.
Investment
In care of land, maintained forest to allow hunting.   In northeast, imported Buffalo from the plains who adapted to the forests.	In weapons, armor, Calvary.  This was meant investment in metallurgy.
Attitude Toward Ownership of Possessions
Ownership of property did not have a high value. This was common throughout the Americas	Ownership of capital goods was controlled by the Nobility, who owned the land. Mills to grind wheat, ovens to bake bread, wineries.
Legal System
The Great Law of Peace, established a legal system for the Haudenosaunee Confederacy	Laws, courts, police were established to enforce the ownership of land and property.
Rules for living within community were taught from a young age.  Based on the duel ideas of liberty and equality, and reverence for nature, and cooperation as part of the group.	Armies were maintained to protect property rights
Group, Clan, Extended family would sanction lawbreakers	Laws were created by and enforced by the Nobility
Diplomacy and diplomatic skills of oratory were highly valued.   Consensus was required to proceed with any community action.	War often resorted to, to settle disputes between different political groups.  Ongoing war was a constant feature of European historical political interaction.

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Endnotes:

^[1]  Wells correlated the transition of agriculture with the migration of women, but not men, into Northern Europe.  He attributed this to patrilineal marriage contracts where the woman travels to her husband’s family.  Over thousands of years, these marriage patterns created a Northward movement of agricultural technologies and the transition of Europe from hunter gathers to and economy based on agricultural, not reaching the British Isles until 2,000 years ago. (Wells, 2002 and 2006)

[2]. Braudel (1992) classified the America’s as “underdeveloped cultures”, increasing the Mayan and Aztecs to “advanced cultures”, but no “culture” advancing to the category of “civilization” which was densely populated.   Braudel bases his classification on the adoption of specific technologies, such as the hoe and metallurgy, which were developed in the Old World, as well as population density.  Braudel does what many authors have done, they define “civilization” in terms of Europe’s development, technology, economic paradigms and social value.  See also Cantor (1993) for another definition of “civilization” based on European history.  See Mann (2005) and for discussion of the of civilizations that existed in the Americas, based on new research.

[3] Anthropologist debate whether later civilizations in Mesoamerica came from the Olmec or whether the Olmec were one of “a half-dozen ‘sister cultures’” that arose after the development of maize agriculture.  “Mesoamerica was the home of a remarkable multisociety ferment of social, aesthetic and technical innovation” (Mann 2005, p232)

[4] See Mann (2005); Nunn (2010); Weatherford (1988) to name a few.

[5] See Mann (2005); Nunn (2010); Weatherford (1988) to name a few.

[6] See Brandon (1986); Johansen (1982); and Grinde (1990)

[7] The indigenous economic and political systems were organized on the basis of personal freedom and communitas Europeans marveled at the prosperity and a government “without laws”.

[8] Explorers, invaders, colonizers and priests all wrote letters and journals which influenced the literature (Thomas Moore’s “Utopia”, Shakespeare, Voltaire) (Brandon 1986) and philosophy, (Hume, Adam Smith), (Simpson 1995).  Colonists, who were to become the American founding fathers, (Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson to name two) were directly influenced by indigenous American civilizations, especially the Haudenosaunee.  (Grinde and Johansen (1990), Johansen (1982)) see also Isaacson (2003).

[9] See Brandon (1986) for a comparison of the view of personal freedom in Pre-Columbian Europe and the Americas

[10] See Grinde and Johansen (1990), Johansen (1982) for an examination of the influence of the indigenous American political organization, especially the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, which was the largest, most powerful political power in North America during the colonial period.  See Brandon (1986); for a discussion of the influence on European philosophers, literature and the Enlightenment.

[11] See Diamond (1999) and Mann (2005).   Diamond (1999) says there are only a few animals which can be domesticated and he attributes the growth of domestication of animals in Eurasia to which animals were available.   Mann (2005) discusses the Indigenous American system of managing the landscape to manage animal herds.   See also, Dunbar-Ortiz (2014) for discussion of the Indigenous American system of animal management.

[12] Anthropologist debate whether later civilizations in Mesoamerica came from the Olmec or whether the Olmec were one of “a half-dozen ‘sister cultures’” that arose after the development of maize agriculture.  “Mesoamerica was the home of a remarkable multisociety ferment of social, aesthetic and technical innovation” (Mann 2005, p232)

[13] This is according to Sylvanus Griswold Morley and George W. Brainerd, specialists on the Maya.  Other scholars point out evidence of “authoritarian priestly dynasties”, occasional human sacrifice and warfare.  Dunbar-Ortiz (2014) description indicates that the Mayan were organized in a social hierarchy, with a nobility which drew servants from war prisoners, criminals, debtors and orphans.  The servile status was not hereditary.  Farmers worked for the ‘nobility’, it was unclear whether this was exploitive or cooperative relationship.   “Increasingly burdensome exploitation of labor” and higher taxes resulted in uprising and the collapse of the Mayan state.  (Dunbar-Ortiz p. 18) Brandon (1986) explores the debate on the political and economic structure of the Mayan and Aztec, he presents the argument that the hierarchal view of these civilization is based on the application of European ideas of Kings and Emperors to tribal leaders without the “constitutional rights of a European sovereign” who were subject to the decision of a committee for all of their actions. (Brandon 1968, p. 50)    The leaders were chosen by a committee, which represented the groups, which the society was organized into.  Dualism was the basis of political organization, a leader was chosen for outside relations and another for internal affairs.   Leaders could be deposed if they did not follow the popular will.

^[14] Allen (2008) indicates the cities of Europe between 1500 and 1800 were “death traps” which “maintained their populations through massive migrations.”  (Allen, 2008 page 961)

[15] Sherburne F. Cook is a physiologist and Woodrow W. Borah is a Berkeley historian.

[16]  Mann (2005) p 105.  This estimate was based on work by Dobyns in conjunction with other historians and anthropologists based on examination of localized records.

[17] Turquoise was mined in what is the present day Southwest of the United States.  Gold and silver were used only for ornamentation and art.

[18] Moctezuma, for example, was identified as a “weak and vacillating monarch” when he was in reality “a tribal leader devoid of the constitutional rights of a European sovereign” and subject to the unanimous agreement from the council for every decision.  (Brandon, 1986 p. 50)

[19]  A war captive would be chosen and would be given all the material possessions they wanted.  For a year they would live in wealth, with four wives and a retinue of servants.  Dressed in “the greatest splendor and magnificence” in jewels, golden bracelets and costly cloaks and sandals.  Honored wherever he appeared.  At the end of the year, at the festival of the God Tezcatlipoca, he willingly climbed the pyramid alone, discarding all his possessions as he went, until naked, he at the top “the priests fell upon him”.  (Brandon, 1986 p. 51)

[20] This is in present day Colorado Plateau, the four corners region of present day Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014 p. 22)

[21] The nations of the Mississippi Valley were the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Musogee Creek, Sminole and Natchez in the west.  The Natchez was one unique in its social organization, built on a hierarchy, which most closely resembled a European monarchy.  (See Brandon, 1974)

^[22]  This observation was made by a European traveler in 1669.  Mann 2006 page 297.

^[23]  Brandon, William; New Worlds for Old reports the description of explorers, priests and colonists which constantly discussed these observed traits.

^[24]  These dates were calculated using astronomical calculations and traditional lore.  (Mann, 2006 page 373) See also Burns, 2004 page 5 and Weatherford (1998) page 135.

^[25]   “Iceland’s Althing, founded in 930 A.S., is older” (Mann, 2006 p. 373)

[26] There is scholarly work which indicates that female suffrage movement, which began in Sennaca, NY were influenced by the Mohawk women who lived in equality on the neighboring reservations.  See The Sacred Hoop, Allen, 1986

^[27]  The word caucus comes from the Algonquin languages.  A caucus allows informal discussion of an issue without the necessity of voting for or against any  specific question.  (Weatherford, 1988 page 145)

[28]  Based on conversations with Joseph Bruchac, PhD director of Ndakinna Native American Education Center, Greenfield, NY  See also See Brandon (1986)

[29]  See Mark (2011)

[30] See Watkins (retrieved 2016)

[31]  See Mark (2011)

^[32] Palaedemographers who use archaeological and anthropological methods to estimated world population had grown from 10 million people at the time  agriculture originated approximately 10 thousand years ago to 500 million by 1750, at the eve of the industrial revolution.   “Paleolithic hunter gathers populations had taken over 50,000 years to increase from a few thousand individuals living in Sub-Saharan Africa to 10 million scattered around the globe.”  (Wells, 2002 pg. 151)

[33] See Brandon (1986) for a comparison of the view of personal freedom in Pre-Columbian Europe and the Americas

[34] The plague continue to travel to Persia, Arabia, India, Southeast Asia, reaching China in 610 and revisiting for the next 200 years.   Nobody knows how many people died.  The Byzantine empire replaced the Western Roman empire on Constantinople.  The Romano-British people became open to Saxon invasion.  Islam may have spread in the wake of the devastation, and Buddhism may have been embraced for the same reason.  (Karlen, 1995)

[35] Yield equals the difference between seeds planted and the amount available for consumption, after seeds are saved for the next crop.

[36] Johannes de Trokelow, a monk and chronicler, wrote in his Annales, “men and women furtively ate their children and even strangers in many places” (Rosen, 2014 p. 135)

^[37] Jack Weatherford 1988) examined the technological change in a German village of Kahl, he wrote “The Romans came and went and ownership of the village passed through a long succession of emperors, kings, counts, archbishops and princes” but the basic technology did not change.  (page 41).

[38]  In the middle of the sixth century the plague of Justinian reduced the population of Europe by fifty percent.  It ended the Roman Empire, which had split, and which Emperor Justinian had been expanding from the eastern capital in Constantinople.  The bubonic plague “caused one of the worst die-offs in human history” (p 74).  Europe’s cities became “scourged remnants” heaped with dead.  “Europe’s agriculture ebbed, and trade almost halted” (p 77). “When the first pandemic receded” Europe’s population was cut in half, “city life virtually ended” and the Dark Ages had begun.  It took centuries for Europe to recover. (Karlen, 1995)

^[39] Weatherford, 1988

^[40]  See Allen, 2008 page 953 for data on 1688, a period which would have already begun to feel the effects of the “discovery” of  the Americas.  Zinn (2005) points out that in 1491, in recently unified Spain, the nobility, which were 2 percent of the population, owned 95% of the land, its population were mostly poor peasants that worked for the nobility. (p 2)

[41] China, in the mid fifteenth century became a huge trading nation which expanded navigational technology and astronomical science.   Zhu Di, became the Ming Emperor in 1402.  The Eurasian cultures and civilizations had developed through the constant interaction with each other over the centuries along the Silk Road.  When the Ming Empire, in China, deposed the Mongolian Empire, which had ruled from China to Turkey since the thirteenth century, the trade through the Silk Road was no longer possible. Zhu Di created trade partnerships through a fleet of treasure ships.  He made advances in navigational technologies and set up astrological sites throughout Asia.   He sent envoys throughout Asia and sent “fleets of leviathan ships” through the Indian Ocean to establish trading and astrological sites with kingdoms throughout Asia, India and Africa.   He brought “rulers and their envoys” to China “to pay tribute to the emperor and bear witness to” his “inauguration” in 1421. (Menzies, 2002).  Menzies (2002) claims that these ships circumnavigated the world and created the maps which later were transferred to Europe, along with the astronomical tools, through the Arabs, who had traded from the Atlantic to the Pacific for centuries (page 389).  This expansion of trade and technology stopped abruptly when the lightning struck and burned down the Forbidden City in 1421, three months after Zhu Di‘s inauguration.  This was seen as an omen from God and the Mandarins used this as a rationale to stop the trade networks, infrastructure expansion and rule of Zhu Di. (Menzies, 2002, and Landes, 2006).  Even during this period of relatively peaceful and internationally cooperative expansion of trade, the power pyramid based on a command economy, remained the basic economic/ political structure, with forced labor required to build the Emperors projects.  Women were on the very bottom of the domestic and national social structure, having fewer rights than their male counterparts.  See Menzies (2002) for a description of the growth of Chinese navigational technology.

[42] See Brandon (1986)

[43] In Mesoamerica, war captives were enslaved, but not used as forced labor.  In Northeast America war captives were adopted into the community, or killed.  (See Brandon, 1986)

[44] Edward II raised taxes for the ongoing war with Scotland during the great famine.  (Rosen, 2014)

[45]   The caloric requirement required for work was greater than the food available.  Estimates by Robert Fogel, of the calories required by a 5’6”, 140 pound laborer doing extensive physical labor are two thousand, three hundred (2,300) the amount of calories available, estimated by Jan Peter Pals to a laborer was around two thousand (2000) to two thousand three hundred (2,300), hunger was endemic.   Exhumed skeletons from the thirteenth century show a variety of diseases related to work.  Severe osteoarthritis, bone deformation, and brittle, ivory-like degeneration caused by the repetitive motions and back bending nature of the agricultural work.  Rosen (2014)

[46]  All peasant diets lacked protein, half the population was deficient in calories, lipids, calcium and vitamins A, C and D.  Women, who were pregnant most of the time, were deficient in vitamin B₁₂, folic acid and C, increasing the severity of malnutrition. (Rosen, 2014 p. 158)

[47]  Famines kill slowly and indirectly through diseases, marasmus kills infants, skeletal emaciation with bloated stomachs.  Kwashiorkor is the same syndrome in children older than one and a half years old, causing ulcerating sores and distended bellies, destroying the liver leading to death.  Both are caused by protein malnutrition.  Pure calorie deprivation (PCM) lead to malnutrition and death.   Absence of vitamins and other essential nutrients cause disease, absence of Vitamin A causes xerophthalmia ulcers on the cornea lead to blindness, pellagra caused by vitamin B₃/niacin deficiency causes diarrhea, dermatitis, dementia and death, vitamin C deficiency causes scurvy, loss of teeth and hair, severe liver damage and painful death.  (Rosen, 2014 p. 159)

[48] European colonists noted this practice, “Men, women and children, from early infancy, are in the habit of bathing” (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014 p. 17)

[49] “The one greatest dividing difference” in the attitude of the Old World and New World was the “attitude toward property, the usual Old World tendencies can be summed up in the word dominium, the New World’s communitas”.  The Old World was preoccupied by authoritarianism and “the ultimate act of dominium, total war”.  The New World was preoccupied with “group relations”, lacked interest in “the acquisition of property” and frequently lacked a central authority.  (Brandon, 1986 p ix) Personal freedom was fundamental to operation of  many Native economies in the New World, forced labor was the basis of the Old World’s command economies.

^[50]  Mann (2006) and Weatherford (1988) discuss the influence of Native American ideas on socialism and communism, but not capitalism.  This paper’s argument is that Adam Smith’s ideas were greatly influenced through the link with Benjamin Franklin by the Native American beliefs in individual freedom and liberty.

[51] Benjamin Franklin had close contact with his Native American neighbors.[51] acting as an ambassador to the Haudenosaunee confederacy and printer of treaties.

[52] Heilbroner points out that the idea of factors of production did not exist as an abstract concept in these command and tradition based economies.  Land could not be sold, only conquered and labor was “tied to the Lord’s estate” and “rarely if ever paid for any of his services” (p26).  No personal freedom existed.

[53]  Smith, Adam; Wealth of Nations, page 41

[54] Thomas Piketty, in Capital in the Twenty Fist Century, 2013 discusses the concentration of wealth.  Robert Reich also discusses this topic.   Saudi Arabia, Russia, China are command economies, to mention a few.

[55] Included in the indigenous value system is the equality of women, economic equality and a time preference which puts a high valuation on the future, “five generations ahead”.   Some example of Old World value systems would be Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Afghanistan to name a few.  The ongoing conflict between environmental protectors and corporations based on old oil technologies represents a conflict between two different valuation of time preference.

[56] See Piketty (2014)