Why It Took So Long for Europeans to Take Over the Americas

It always puzzled me that when the Vikings discovered North America more Europeans didn’t take an interest in the New World. Heck, the Vikings weren’t all that keen on their discoveries, either, and they seem never to have gotten a foothold much further than the Maritimes.

I have since learned that the Vikings themselves put up serious obstacles to new settlers among their own kind and that getting to the New World and starting a homestead was beyond the reach of most Norsemen. There were closer environs with rich farmland that could be plundered and settled far more easily.

As for the rest of feudal Europe, those with resources to mount a colonization venture would hardly have been interested in doing so. Feudal warlords weren’t interested so much in land per se, but land that was being worked by compliant peasants. If you transported boatloads of peasants to pre-Columbian New Jersey, it would have been difficult to keep them on the manor. The threat of hostile aborigines might not be enough to keep the peasants from going off on their own and starting farms outside your sphere of influence. My native state of Georgia was originally granted to a would-be feudal lord who aimed to set up the Margravate of Azilia. He had to rely on volunteers to be villeins in his realm, and there were just no takers. England had not yet hit on the idea of transporting prisoners to far off places.

The peasants, who might very well have liked to establish homesteads as free farmers in the New World, lacked the means to do so even if they had been aware of the existence of North America. And the noble parasites who depended on them weren’t likely to let them go in any event.

It was, I reckon, the discovery of populous civilizations in Meso-America that made conquest of the New World profitable. The Aztecs and the Mayas and the Incas had a ready supply of serfs to support the Conquistadores and make it worth their while to come over. It was another century before the wilds of North America became remotely attractive for settlement by farmers and before the economic structures of European countries provided the means and the motive to finance such ventures.