[aBioGuy]

No has mentioned that the initial assertion is incorrect? The US Government sent troops to remove native inhabitants. Then they gave the land away. Having an army clear the land ahead of time makes a lot of homesteading possible.

[alwa]

And for that matter, the clearance job wasn’t always exactly complete: part of the price of admission to your “free homestead” was fending off the occasional raid by its armed and rightfully furious former occupants.

I suppose a similar sense of menace applies to some of the options on the linked inventory, but my first interpretation of the task was to think of places sufficiently remote/economically-irrelevant as to be uncontested.

[tsss]

Rightfully? What right do they have to the fruit of the earth more than any other person? They only have the right to take it by force, if they can, as they did before from other people and animals.

[stetrain]

You think you have a right to take something by force, but the other person doesn't have a right to be furious about it and try to take it back?

[tsss]

They certainly can't complain about someone else taking it from them when that's how they got it in the first place.

[stetrain]

If you came home and your property had been taken by force, you wouldn't complain? You wouldn't be furious, and try to get it back?

[jlmorton]

I agree the assertion with regard to America is incorrect. However, there were several truly inhabitable-yet-uninhabited territories discovered during the Age of Discovery.

http://www.radicalcartography.net/discoveries.png

[s1artibartfast]

I dont think that is a historical take. I think the vast majority expansion was homesteading first, which troops and militias coming in only later and as needed when inevatible resource conflicts arose.

This is is closer to the cycle that expansion has always taken. Groups first expand, develop economic interests, and then fight over those economic interests.

[velcrovan]

For real, the entire “lawless, free, wild west” cultural image we have was a federally subsidized endeavor from beginning to end. It needs to be re-understood as a giant welfare project for white Americans

[BurningFrog]

The Americas largely were empty land ready to be taken by colonists, because Europeans brought old world diseases that killed 90+% of the native people, often before they'd even seen a European.

[watwut]

The whole of westward expansion can not be explained with that alone at all. It took a lot of violence, multiple wars and like 400 years.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

Without smallpox et al., it very likely would not have happened at all. The settlers/colonialists would have faced a massively larger existing population, and would almost certainly have lost the violent struggle. There would still be people of European descent in the Americas, but not as part of the dominant culture.

[BurningFrog]

I think so too.

The Aztecs could have picked up tech like gunpowder and horses in a few decades and easily kept the Spanish out of their home turf, if 90% of them hadn't died from Smallpox and Maasles.

[watwut]

Which is completely different claim then that the land was empty and that ethnic cleansing by troops did not happened or did not played much role.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

I don't know if you're being sarcastic or not, so just to clarify ...

it is absolutely a different claim. The land was not empty at all, though it did have millions less people than it had had a century or two earlier. Ethnic cleansing by violence was absolutely a central part of the expansion of the US (and also New Spain before it). The only difference is the question of whether, in a violent struggle between the American peoples at their pre-smallpox population levels and arriving European settlers, the latter would have won (and with relative ease). My point/claim is that they probably would not.

[BurningFrog]

Sure. Note that I wrote "largely", not "completely".