My problem is when people look at people in the past as having literally no agency, in terms of the choices they make. While geographic circumstances play in a role (or as Marx would have it, mean that people who do make history, don’t make it in circumstances they entirely control), people still do make choices that have consequences. Arriving on a new spot of land and immediately decided to rape and pillage was a choice that Columbus and the later conquistadors made (and the Spanish and portugese governments in their competition backed with support from Rome). PEOPLE made choices that we must attend to when discussing what happened in the new world. They made choices when they saw people dying of diseases they had no immunity to. They made choices when they enslaved, rapes, and tried to convert the survivors. THAT is history. It’s not just some static thing that was ordained to happen. It was choices people made in circumstances they found themselves in.
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