[WalterBlack]

(09-28-2015 03:46 PM)Quintus Curtius Wrote:  

To me, the more interesting question is this:

Why were there such big cultural differences between the Europeans who settled North America and the Europeans who settled South America?

Why did the Spanish and Portuguese intermarry and mix with the Indians of Central and South America, while the Indians of North America did not mix (or at least very little) with the northern European types (English, Dutch, German, Scandinavian) that settled North America?

Indians in North America were essentially wiped out.

In Central and South America, they were also brutalized, but there was a large degree of admixture with the colonizers. Spanish and Portuguese took native wives, and also reproduced with slaves.

British didn't really do this, or at least not as much.

North America was a caste system that was very rigid. Why was this?

Was it climate? Geography? Cultural differences between the Mediterranean races and the Northern Europeans?

The English, who settled in North America, also sent guys over to India at the same time. There were almost zero white women there, so a lot of them married Indian women.

White mischief

Quote:

The wills of East India Company officials, now in the India Office library, clearly show that in the 1780s, more than one-third of the British men in India were leaving all their possessions to one or more Indian wives, or to Anglo-Indian children - a degree of cross-cultural mixing which has never made it into the history books
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In the more loving relationships of this period, Indian wives often retired with their husbands to England. The Mughal travel writer, Mirza Abu Taleb Khan, who published in Persian an account of his journey to Europe in 1810, described meeting in London several completely Anglicised Indian women who had accompanied their husbands and children to Britain. One of them in particular, Mrs Ducarroll, surprised him every bit as much as Kirkpatrick tended to surprise his English visitors: "She is very fair," wrote Khan, "and so accomplished in all the English manners and language, that I was some time in her company before I could be convinced that she was a native of India." He added: "The lady introduced me to two or three of her children, from 16 to 19 years of age, who had every appearance of Europeans." A great many such mixed-blood children must have been quietly and successfully absorbed into the British establishment, some even attaining high office: Lord Liverpool, the early-19th-century prime minister, was of Anglo-Indian descent.

Much, however, depended on skin colour. As a Calcutta agent wrote to Warren Hastings, the governor-general of India, when discussing what to do with his Anglo-Indian step-grandchildren: "The two eldest - [who] are almost as fair as European children - should be sent to Europe. I could have made no distinction between the children if the youngest was of a complexion that could possibly escape detection; but as I daily see the injurious consequences resulting from bringing up certain [darker-skinned] native children at home, it has become a question in my own mind how far I should confer a service in recommending the third child" to proceed to England. It was decided, in the end, that the "dark" child should stay in India, while the others were shipped to Britain.

The future of such children depended very much on the whims of their parents. One of the most unashamedly enthusiastic British embracers of Mughal culture during this period was General Sir David Ochterlony: every evening, all 13 of his Indian wives went around Delhi in a procession behind their husband, each on the back of her own elephant. But beneath this enviably carefree-sounding exterior seems to have lain the sort of tensions that affect anyone who straddles two very different and diverging worlds.

One of the most moving of Ochterlony's letters concerns his two daughters, and the question of whether he should bring them up as Muslim or Christian. If Christian, they would be constantly derided for their "dark blood", but Ochterlony also hesitated to bring them up as Muslims. A letter, written to another Scot in a similar position, who has opted to bring up his children as Muslim Indians, ends rather movingly: "In short my dear M[ajor] I have spent all the time since we were parted in revolving this matter in my mind but I have not yet been able to come to a positive decision."

This period of intermixing did not last: the rise of the Victorian Evangelicals in the 1830s and 40s slowly killed off the intermingling of Indian and British ideas, religions and ways of life. The wills written by dying East India Company servants show that the practice of marrying or cohabiting with Indian bibis quickly began to decline: from turning up in one-in-three wills between 1780 and 1785, they are present in only one-in-four between 1805 and 1810. By 1830, it is one-in-six; by the middle of the century, they have all but disappeared.

Major William Palmer and his Indian wife Bibi Faiz Bakhsh Begum (1785)



The mixing got as far as the British Royal Family:

Quote:

Britain's royal family has long been taunted for its German roots, but now a more exotic lineage can be revealed after evidence emerged indicating that Prince William is the direct descendant of an Indian woman.

The Duke of Cambridge's maternal lineage was revealed on Friday by a genetic ancestry testing company, BritainsDNA, which carried out tests on the DNA of Princess Diana's two matrilineal cousins and compared them to a global database of samples.

The Portuguese shipped their female orphans abroad to stop mixing, obviously it didn’t work

Órfãs d'El-Rei

Quote:

Orfãs do Rei translates to "Orphans of the King", and they were all girls. Their fathers were Portuguese men who died in battle for the king. They were sent to the colonies of the Portuguese Empire. The Asian colonies contained more Portuguese females than was previously thought.[6] Bernard Sta Maria wrote that "From 1545, King John III began to send to India (and the Far East) with all pomp and distinction many young Portuguese women known as 'Orphans of the Queen' to be married with local young men." Both noble and non noble girls were in the órfãs do rei.

Since these girls were specifically designated as the "King's", the Portuguese government paid for their care and upbringing before and after they were sent to Portuguese India. Goa in particular received most of the girls. Some were also sent to the colony of Brazil. The "Shelter of the Castle" was one of the organizations which arranged for the órfãs do rei to be sent overseas. The age limits were 12–30 years of age.
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One of the aims of shipping the órfãs was to stop Portuguese men from miscegenating with women of other races and provide them with Portuguese wives. The prevention of miscegenation would have resulted in a greater amount of white Portuguese. The sex ratio between men and women in Goa was skewed and the shipments of órfãs do rei was an attempt to correct this.
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Some órfãs do Rei married native rulers who ere either in exiled or allied to the Portuguese.

The exiled former ruler (liwali) of Pemba converted to Christianity from Islam and was married to an órfã do rei named Dona Anna de Sepulveda in 1607. He also changed his name to Felipe da Gama, Dom Filipe, or Philip. However he became Muslim again later. One child, a son, Estevao was born from their marriage. He had been exiled from Pemba to Mombasa in 1596.

In the 1500s the exiled ruler of the Maldives, Hassan converted to Christianity and also married a Portuguese orphan. Her name was D. Francisca de Vasconcelos. The Portuguese girls also in Goa married native high caste Christians.