Yes, more from Stark's book

OK, on we go--another section summarized of Rodney Stark's book How the West Won. Terrific book.

Of course, slavery is terrible but in chapter 11 Stark wants to point out the falsity of the claim that Europeans forced slave trading on Africans. The enslavement and sale of black Africans by other black Africans goes back at least to ancient Egypt, where the pharaohs bought large numbers of black slaves. As mentioned before, the Catholic Church condemned slavery in the New World, but the Pope had very little power among the Spanish and Portuguese. He ends this section by saying, "We would do well to remember that had it not been for the rise of Western modernity, slavery would still be everywhere. Even today, it exists in too many places."

Another false claim Stark takes on is the myth of the "noble savage." Europe's intellectuals during this time (around 1750)depicted the Indians as people unsullied by civilization and therefore innocent, honest, gentle, moral, peaceful, kind, and generous. One of the most influential proponents of this idea was the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

However, there are many obvious historical facts that contradict this picture. For one thing, Stark points out the existence of New World cannibalism. Archaeology has also revealed the pre-Columbian remains of North American Indians who were scalped, so it's not true that it was the Europeans who taught the Indians this awful practice. Needless to say, warfare was chronic everywhere in the New World. 

In addition, the inhabitants of the New World had no notions about ecology; there is ample evidence of Indian activities inconsistent with reverence for the earth, including deforestation and worn-out fields. Take the Mayans as an example. They apparently succumbed to a combination of ecological disaster and large-scale warfare. They appear to have cleared too much of the forest for cropland, slowly wearing out the soil to such an extent they were helpless when faced with a minor decline in rainfall. There's one more  point he brings up – slavery was widespread in pre-Columbian North America, and it was as brutal as anywhere else. As an illustration, Stark says in 1838, when the Cherokee  Indians were forced to leave Georgia for resettlement in the Oklahoma territory (the famous "Trail of Tears"), they took along a number of their black slaves.

That's enough to think about for now.