Anglo-Indian Relations

Abstract

Some Americans in the eighteenth century described North America as having been an uninhabited wilderness when their forefathers first arrived there from England. Until recently, even historians treated the colonies as though they had been settled from Europe with hardly any contact with native peoples. When they did encounter them, as often as not they were dealt with as problems to be eliminated. In the past 30 years or so, however, scholars have stressed that the eastern seaboard was inhabited by native North Americans, or Indians as the colonists called them, long before any white people arrived there. Indeed, one account graphically describes the arrival of the English as ‘the invasion of America’. The numbers of Indians living in the areas which the invaders occupied has been calculated at about half a million in 1600. Contact with Europeans, and with the diseases which they brought with them, precipitated a demographic catastrophe in the seventeenth century which wiped out perhaps half of them, reducing their numbers to a quarter of a million by 1700.