[thinkingemote]

>Remember that diseases travel faster than European invaders, so by the time they arrive at those locations the population is already in kind of chaos and traumatised.

What I got from that book was even more surprising. It's that by the time the Europeans got there the devastation had gone. The chaos and trauma one night expect from a horrific war had gone, like Europe 50 years on from WW2, this was over 150 (I think) later, so now instead was jungle, small villages, tiny populations. The scars back then were not visible to the Europeans, as disease hit these people a couple or more generations ago.