The outcome is the same. They lacked our weapons and immunizations- it would have been hard to catch up in parallel with the Western world. Look at Japan in the 1850s. The isolation of the prior few centuries hurt them.

Were there any positive effects of the long isolation in the case of Japan?

In an indirect way. (warning: following is highly speculative)

- being isolated made Japan backward. Also, Japan does not have natural resources, and is not an agricultural powerhouse. This meant Japan was not a juicy target for the colonial powers.

- Still, given enough time, one of them would surely have snatched it

- Japan figured out the point above, and decided to not become a colony. It industrialized at a furious pace until it became a half-decent military power

- huge stroke of luck, or something else, but Japan destroys a Russian fleet at Tsushima in 1905, and leapfrogs into the ranks of Great Powers

- they further gain a lot in WW1 by sitting on the sidelines, and eventually joining the winning side

- this goes to their head, and they proceed to do the most foolish thing at Perl Harbor, and pick a fight with the 800 pound gorilla

- this fight does not go well, predictably, so Japan ends up under US occupation for 7 years

- another huge stroke of luck: US, instead of sending Japan back to the stone age in retribution, decides to help Japan rebuild, and pumps massive amounts of aid

- Japan goes through a second incredibly fast bout of industrialization

This story ends around 1990.

> huge stroke of luck, or something else .. Tsushima

This is very much underselling how outclassed the Russians were on every level of this engagement, except in terms of sheer number of ships (they had more), and technology, which was roughly on par.

I think the 'isolation' was pretty advantageous in the sense that they managed to preserve their governmental and cultural structures for a very long time without the disruptive influence of western money and might. I imagine if they had let the Europeans in, the eventual fall of the Shogunate, partly caused by a proxy war between the French and the British (who supported different Daimyo), partly caused by public dissatisfaction about foreign incursion, would have been much earlier.

That would have put them in a much less coherent and consequently weaker postion to resist European colonization efforts in the modern era.

Sister comment was made about Tsushima

>- this goes to their head, and they proceed to do the most foolish thing at Perl Harbor, and pick a fight with the 800 pound gorilla

We in the US knew we would be getting involved in the war and had done things like oil embargo/trade disruption. The reason Japan attacked Pearl Harbor was because Yamamoto thought the only chance they stood against the US was to win such a decisive battle that we would not be able to fight them. He was trying this again at Midway(I believe) but we had broken their Coms so we were able to out maneuver them.

Edit Add: As to if their isolation was helpful or not, I think that it allowed them to preserve and strengthen their culture both the good and bad aspects of it.

I think that if a country was to close themselves off and turn inward, it could result in good things as long as they have an internal forces that prevents stagnation.

Or to put it another way, progress only seems to happen when there are driving forces, such as competing groups. A strong government i.e. Dictator by nature has to wield control in order to stay in power, in doing so any competing groups must be eliminated as they a a threat to power. This brings about stagnation.

> - huge stroke of luck, or something else, but Japan destroys a Russian fleet at Tsushima in 1905, and leapfrogs into the ranks of Great Powers

> - this goes to their head, and they proceed to do the most foolish thing at Perl Harbor, and pick a fight with the 800 pound gorilla

This summary reeks of the nationalist tendencies of Americans when describing historical events.

> This summary reeks of the nationalist tendencies of Americans when describing historical events.

Maybe. But it's also a fact.

The US warned Japan before the war that if they attacked, the US will strike back and will absolutely crush Japan. And it did happen, just as predicted. In 1945, the Japanse were preparing to defend their homeland with spears. Against soldiers coming in with machine guns, tanks, and, well, atomic bombs.

I don't know. If you manage to take over North America, you tend to win Risk, whoever you are. It's harder to do than the Australian strategy, but you do win if you manage to pull it off. And the United States has basically done it.

>huge stroke of luck, or something else, but Japan destroys a Russian fleet at Tsushima in 1905, and leapfrogs into the ranks of Great Powers

It wasn’t luck, Russia was way behind the other western powers at the time and greatly underestimated Japans capabilities.

> this goes to their head, and they proceed to do the most foolish thing at Perl Harbor, and pick a fight with the 800 pound gorilla

“Pearl Harbor” is American revisionism. What actually happened that day was one of the most successful coordinated attacks of the entire war spanning across the pacific, against both the British and American empires simultaneously. The Japanese had imperial ambitions and was up hemmed in by the USSR, Britain, and American in basically all directions. They captured not only the Philippines from the US but also dug in deeply into British SE Asia while destroying basically the entire pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor in the same day.

They ended up overextending themselves, but it was necessary from a strategic standpoint to secure the natural resources they needed from those colonies.

Japan is still and independent country full of Japanese people, who held their own against Western militaries within decades of opening. That's a very different from the apocalyptic collapse followed by replacement of the New World.

Of course, there's a huge difference between the two: Japan always had some contact with the Old World, and with Old World diseases in particular. America would probably have faced the same wave of disease, even if discovery had happened much later.

More limited contact could have potentially alleviated some of the overall population loss from disease. If they only got 2 european diseases instead of a dozen, had it sweep through them, then had another 50 years before contact again, it may have made a big difference. It could have been possible to have multiple contact events over a 200 year periods to allow disease resistance to form without losing what may have been 90% of their population in one relatively large swoop.

They would still likely suffer heavy losses due to disease and infection they have no immunity for.

You may enjoy "The Years of Rice and Salt," by Kim Stanley Robinson.

> I keep wondering how these civilizations might have developed if we'd discovered them in, say, 1900 instead of 1500s.

(presumably unpopular opinion, people love to signal)

This honestly feels like mashup of "i think colonialism/columbus is bad" signaling and that Africa is a tech hub in parallel universe pipedreaming.

There's a pile of recently discovered cultures in Amazonia and they're not exactly competing with NASA... which begs the question why you'd expect anything resembling a hockey stick progress for that hypothetical, aside from doubling down on columbus bad thesis.

"Columbus bad" isn't really a "thesis", it's a fact.

But yeah, it's against the evidence to think native american societies could have posed any meaningful defense or offense against old world countries.

Have you read 1491 and 1493. I have, and they are a couple of the most eye-opening books I have read.

They most likely would have become insular like china and stagnated similarly. Best scenario would be something like a south vs north dual empire constellation, locked into a cold war that eggs them ever onward.

But we will never know, because they did not produce a culture that could compete. Even with time to prepare, alot of these cultures abandoned advanced tech (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearms_of_Japan) and supressed the "foreign" as the local elites felt there oligarchies threatened by those strange foreigners. I guess the usual attempts were made to encooperate the threat, by offering small kingdoms, slaves and positions within the ruling religion. It did not really work out, as disease crumbled the civilizations to dust.

The other "prepared" culture (north american indians who met the vikings) did not take any lesson from that encounter either, because the tales of strange boats with christian raiders were not kept in writing and information was not exchanged with neighbors, with which they were locked in ritualistic inter-tribal warfare. Which is the main problem. The lack of information storage and exchange, due to a missing central culture.

Africa had the longest time to acclimate to western intrusion, and did so by selling its own people as goods. The few things they did take over were weapons (used for slave trading and inter tribal warfare), the only candidates for organized resistance was the islamic world (who had writtings, a specialized labour system (industrial precursors) and centralized structures), but they were & are locked in by thee own cultural problems. Only exception were the persians, which were and are the france/us of the region.

The chinese almost colonized africa, but then gave it up as a foolish endeavor, due to internal problems (starvation caused unrest) which was mostly due to there industrial revolution never reaching critical mass, which was mostly due to centralized culture/geography preventing technological competition aka harmony).

There is good fiction on the topic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Years_of_Rice_and_Salt, but you need basically a geographical reactor europes eternal boiling empire pot, with a progress state saving device attached (netherlands and england, some italian states were the scientists fled towards and from), to reach the critical mass. The ingredients were omnipresent, but the permanence of the societal reaction was hard to get critical.

Amerindians were highly vulnerable to European diseases while Europeans were similarly vulnerable to African diseases. Certain parts of Africa were known as "White Man's Grave".

Displacement by settlers in Africa was limited to areas with suitable climate. In the other areas, the natives were pretty left on their own as long as no exploitable resources were present.

> "Columbus bad" isn't really a "thesis", it's a fact.

Bad compared to who? Whatever faults you'd lay at his feet were not only de rigueur for both Europeans and Muslims of his time, but exceeded in many dimensions of savagery by the indigenous cultures he encountered. At any rate, disease and lack of immunity was far and away the agent of the demise of the natives, not Columbus or those who followed him over the centuries.

> Have you read 1491 and 1493. I have, and they are a couple of the most eye-opening books I have read.

Have you read Rousseau? The man never met a native American, and what accounts he read of their lives were certainly exaggerations, if not fabrications. In his own life, he was notoriously irresponsible. He fathered and abandoned for the orphanage -- a death sentence in those days -- five children. He was habitually leeching off friends and nobles who were susceptible to his charms, until he exhausted their patience and good will, including by e.g. seducing their wives at times.

In short, he was a scoundrel, and he saw in the the story of the natives something which he desperately wanted for himself, but which wasn't there: the possibility of a life free from societal constraint, obligations to be decent, to use one's life productively, to be responsible for others, to live morally. The man confabulated for the natives a lifestyle free of the bonds under which he chafed in France -- and we have been laboring under his romantic "noble savage" delusion ever since.

I mention all this to say, anyone who would read about the lives of natives would do well to read a little Rousseau, then read a little about the man, and mentally subtract his influence which is virtually omnipresent in all subsequent popular thought about natives.

TLDR; nobody wants to consider that the colonel may have been the good guy in Avatar, and Sully a delusional loner.

> Whatever faults you’d lay at his feet were not only de rigueur for both Europeans and Muslims of his time,

No, they weren’t, which is why he was known as a notoriously cruel administrator by contemporary Europeans, which was a substantial factor in his being removed as governor, arrested, and returned to Spain in chains.

This is also generally a fabrication. Columbus was a fanatic. This is how he was viewed and the claims of his cruelty were unsubstantiated allegations made by his enemies and the crown to avoid paying him the 10% that he was contractually owed. This was the reason for his removal as governor. Columbus returned in chains at his own insistence that if he were to be recalled to defend himself then he was a prisoner and it should be known that he was treated as such and afforded no special privilege.

Columbus the Four Voyages by Laurence Bergreen details this and many many more extremely interesting details about Columbus.

In addition to Europeans, the contemporary set I mentioned also includes

1. Arab slavers who made eunuchs of their captured (kidnapped) slaves, and

2. the Mesoamerican civilizations whose religious imperative was to keep their sacred pyramids constantly covered in flowing human blood

The corollary of your point, even if it was a fair and accurate assessment of Columbus' affairs, would be that Europeans were otherwise moral judges -- although by today's standards I'm sure you'd also condemn them just the same.

Columbus was a product of his times, as were the slavers and the natives.

“de rigeur for <X> and <Y>” means “required by current fashion for all of X and Y” not “practiced by some subset of X and Y”.

You seem to be retreating from the claim that Columbus’s behavior as governor was in line with the universal practice of his time to the much weaker and less controversial claim that it was both in some way influenced by the social context of his time and not uniquely bad in the contemporary (overlapping) “European and Muslim” world.

Which, sure, nice motte and bailey, Columbus was quite possibly not the single most abusive European and/or Muslim territorial governor of the late 15th Century.

(You also seem to want to argue about claims about Mesoamerican civilizations which I did not argue against, for whatever reason.)

Correct. Columbus's behavior was de rigueur for X=[those European engaged in exploration, settlement, and the slave trade]. It was also better than the equivalent behavior when X=[non-Europeans engaged in the same].

> Bad compared to who? Whatever faults you'd lay at his feet were not only de rigueur for both Europeans and Muslims of his time, but exceeded in many dimensions of savagery by the indigenous cultures he encountered. At any rate, disease and lack of immunity was far and away the agent of the demise of the natives, not Columbus or those who followed him over the centuries.

Even if Columbus's badness was within the range of average for his time, it's still a fact that he was bad lol.

I don't know why you're singling out Europeans and Muslims, btw--every society and group had (and has) its cruel bigots, its tyrants, its zealots, etc.

> But yeah, it's against the evidence to think native american societies could have posed any meaningful defense or offense against old world countries.

But they did pose a meaningful defense. The Mayans weren't fully conquered until the early 1800s, the Mapuche the late 1800s--effectively, it took Spain (and later Chile/Argentina) over 300 years to conquer the Native Americans. Quite frankly, the main reason they succeeded was not that the indigenous peoples were inferior, but that the Europeans could afford to wage a low-grade war for centuries, and stomach the surprisingly frequent setbacks, whereas the indigenous peoples couldn't.

> The Mayans weren't fully conquered until the early 1800s

I don't know anything about Mayan history, but Wikipedia says the Spanish conquered the Maya by 1697.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_civilization#Contact_peri...

Ya, but the Mapuche (as fierce warriors as they were) were unconquered largely because no one cared about Patagonia enough to live there. Kinda hard to conquer an area larger than France with a few thousand men.

What you may not be accounting for is the influences of the Americas on the rest of the world leading to their advancements. In particular in food production. Without corn and potatoes there may have been significantly less development in the old world over the last 500 years.

> I keep wondering how these civilizations might have developed if we'd discovered them in, say, 1900 instead of 1500s.

there are plenty of cultures in e.g. The Amazon basin that are deliberately undisturbed. You can infer from these I suppose

> I keep wondering how these civilizations might have developed if we'd discovered them in, say, 1900 instead of 1500s.

Reality check: pre-columbian americans did not have iron metallurgy, in this sense they were thousands years behind Europe and even Africa.

That's true, but their food production capabilities were generally far more advanced.

They also surprisingly did not have the wheel, or to frame it in the silliest way possible, the aztecs had the wheel, but never use it for it's mechanical properties.