Probably not, but this counterfactual depends on the circumstances, and depends on your values. For example: people might argue about the relative harms of various kinds of slavery vs. cultural genocide vs. land dispossession and forced displacement ....

After contact there were waves of mass die-off of people throughout the Americas due to disease brought from Eurasia: are we positing that those deaths still occurred? Because they were extraordinarily destabilizing. For example, if we hypothetically imagine that the balance of disease severity was the other way around and 90% of the population of Eurasia was wiped out over a century in several waves of horrific pandemics, then history would look quite different indeed, and it's all but impossible to predict precisely how.

European states other than Spain also did horrific atrocities in their conquests and colonial projects. Are we positing that we just replace Spanish kingdom(s) with some alternative European monarchies? Or are we imagining a situation in which peoples of the Americas retained some autonomy?

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WalterBright 3 days ago | parent [-]

The Black Death killed approximately 30–60% of Europe's population between 1347 and 1353.

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jacobolus 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Now imagine that happening once per generation for 3 or 4 generations in a row, followed by / contemporary with getting invaded by an alien army with significantly superior weapons and ships whose goal was total domination and enslavement / elimination.

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rayiner 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Exactly. Your average European alive today likely is better off because half their ancestors died of the plague.

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Tor3 3 days ago | parent [-]

So the general theory is that if you kill half of the population the descendants will be better off? What's the mechanism, and what happens if you follow that to its conclusion?

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3 days ago | parent | next [-]

[deleted]

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rayiner 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

There is a whole body of research on this: https://history.wustl.edu/news/how-black-death-made-life-bet...

	▲	Tor3 a day ago \| parent [-]
		That's only about the black death, and some specific reasons for why that helped, kind of, _some_ parts of Europe. First, it definitely didn't help everyone - Norway, for example, lost all economic power and went into the 400 year night, as it's called (it was under Denmark). And secondly, it's a single case. You can't create a general rule from that. It's vastly different to compare that case to when e.g. 95% of the population died out in certain places during the Spanish conquest. And, again, take that "rule" to its logical conclusion: How many people will inhabit the Earth after a while, and under what conditions will they live?