Gile. Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at Kings College London and the LMU and Munich online at history of philosophy. net.

Today's episode, Lambs to the Slaughter debating the new world.

When people who were living through the Renaissance noticed the newness of their own period,

they often pointed to a trio of discoveries that symbolized the changing times,

gunpowder, the printing press, and what they called the new world.

It's a sobering thought that all three unleashed mass death. The lethality of

gunpowder speaks loudly for itself. The printing press is less obviously dangerous but can take some of the blame for creating the conditions that led to the wars of religion.

But of these three, the real color was the encounter between Europeans and the peoples of the Caribbean and Americas.

It's a controversial question how many people were living there before contact occurred

and what percentage of the Americans died as a result. At the higher end of estimates, we may be talking about the largest

extermination in human history.

Some scholars have put the pre-contact population at more

than 100 million and suggested that as many as 90 or 95% of these people were annihilated.

Even much lower estimates of both population and death rate would give us numbers well

into the millions.

It's also debated whether to call this a genocide.

Those who are reluctant to do so argue that the vast majority of deaths were caused

unintentionally simply by spreading unfamiliar diseases like smallpox.

This explanation in terms of disease is what holds way in the popular imagination,

but there's no doubt that the Europeans, and especially the Spanish,

deliberately cause staggering numbers of deaths through warfare and pitiless enslavement.

As the Caribbean historian Eric Williams wrote, it has been said of the Spanish conquistadors that first they fell on their knees and then they fell on the Aborigines.

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