In my humble opinion, the superior culture is the one that does the best job of protecting the weak from exploitation by the strong.
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Chickenpox and measles did not kill the Native American cultures, they died because they made poor slaves.
No Joe, you've been somewhat (not completely, of course) misinformed.
By the time there were enough White men to really enslave the AmerIndians, (on the continent itself, I mean) more than half of them (possibly as many as 90%, according to some historians) had already died on the continent.
Few of those which died ever met a White man, either
There's a wonderful account written by a very French missionary who went down the Mississippi with one of the French explorers, long before anyone was settling in those lands
They found cities in the mid west which once had populations in the tens of thousands on the way downstream, and completely devoid of life when they came back.
The White men's diseases traveled a lot faster than the settlers and colonialists since the AmerIndians had extensive trade routes ranging across most of the eastern half of the continent.
While I know that the Spaniards and Dutch tried enslaving Indians, and certainly they died in droves in chains, estimates of the AmerIndians in the NA continent raged up to 30,000,000 before Columbus landed.
No way in hell there were that many Indian people on the continent by the time the French or Dutch or English were colonizing, because had there been that many Indians still in fuctional societies, the early colonies wouldn't have survived their first hostile encounters.
Even the Aztecs which Cortez supposedly dominated by force of arms were already mostly incapacitiated by measels (or pox, nobody's really sure) thanks to their contact with Spanish.
The simple fact is that productivity and profitability on 'New World' plantations was increased by genocide of the native population and importation of Africans. It was a simple business decision.
No argument, except on the scale of the crimes.
Indians made lousy slaves. They died quickly and didn't take to grunt work, either.
Can you imagine the 'Apartheid' style mess we'd have in the US if the natives here had been more profitably enslaved?
Yes, I can. We'd have never imported blacks if the natives had been better slave material, and not so likely to up and die on the job.
Guns germs and steel, man.
A formitable combination that Europeans brought with them, but of the three, germs were their best allies, believe me.