Sugarcane Arrives in the New World Before Columbus:

Historically, sugarcane had two centers of origin in terms of cultivation, one in highland New Guinea and one in southern China. The two sort of merged, with a lot of hybrids between the two species involved. Cultivation spread through Austronesian trade and colonization. Austronesians were/are kind of superset of the Polynesians, in that they include the Polynesians and quite a few similar people, great seafarers who ended up in unexpected places like Madagascar and New Zealand, taking sugar cane cultivation with them.

They never officially reached the New World, though there is a lot of speculation that they had some contacts there before Columbus, with the most persistent claims coming from Chile and California. In any case, they didn’t bring sugar cane cultivation with them if they did reach the New World.

What if they did reach the New World and brought sugar with them? The New World already has an established sugar industry, at least in places, before Columbus arrives? Europe was an avid consumer of sugar and established sugar plantations wherever the plant would grow. Historically, the West Indies sugar islands became the most valuable pieces of land in the New World in the 1600s and 1700s, providing the likes of France, Holland and England with more revenue than huge hunks of North America and considered more valuable at the time.

They were also awful man killing hellholes because of the demands of sugar production, devouring African and Indian slaves and Irish “indentured servant” prisoners of war at fearful rates. Slavery on the sugar islands achieved the extremely difficult task of making cotton plantations of the old south look good by comparison, which is a good sign of how awful they were.

With sugar production already widespread on the American tropical mainland, would the sugar islands still be important? Would they still develop the way they did historically and be seen as prizes to be fought over the same way they were historically? Would having a valuable, easy to trade for commodity in the New World attract European trade as opposed to conquest, or would it speed up European conquest by making it more lucrative?

Cotton Arrives in the Interior American Southeast Before Columbus:

Cotton agriculture spread from Mexico to the Pueblo Indians in the American Southwest, but failed to spread to the US Southeast. Ironically, the future home of King Cotton didn’t cultivate the stuff in Indian times, probably because the coastal areas weren’t ideal for it and there was a stretch of western Texas that remained totally non-agricultural because of low rainfall.

Let’s say that cotton agriculture somehow managed to bypass one of those barriers and becomes common among Southeastern Indians. The Mississippians adopt it avidly and do a lot of trade in cotton-based goods all across the eastern US to the coast. Indian weavers produce clothing and all the other cotton goods Indians demanded.

What impact does that have? Soil depletion as a downside, probably. More developed Indian trade networks and transportation would be an upside, at least until European diseases showed up and traveled quickly along those routes. There would presumably be less Indian demand for European textiles due to the competition from native sources, though how much that would impact trade, I don’t know. Indian weavers would probably copy European styles with Indian touches, making them formidable competitors for Indian markets.

What overall impact would this have on Indian/European relationships? Anything that reduced Indian dependence on European goods would probably make the relationship a bit less unequal. Beyond that, it’s hard to say.

Potatoes Arrive in Western Mexico Before Columbus

Potatoes were first cultivated in South America, in the area that eventually became the Inca empire. From there, it spread south through Chile and eventually to as far south as Patagonia.

For some reason, they didn’t spread north to Mexico until after the Spanish conquest, though the wild plants potatoes were domesticated from grew in Mexico too. They were never domesticated there.

Why didn’t potatoes spread north? I haven’t seen any definitive reasons given, but from the distribution I suspect that for some reason they didn’t grow well in the tropics or that they couldn’t compete with other tropical root crops.

There was a way around that, though. There were two periods before Columbus where Western Mexico and Ecuador were in direct contact, apparently through ocean voyages from Ecuador. Quite a few cultural traits spread from South America to Mexico, probably including copper and gold metal-working in the first period of contact and the first very early uses of bronze in the second period.

That trade isn’t easy to date, but the first period was probably around 800 AD, while the second period probably started a few hundred years before the Spanish conquest, probably around 1200 AD and was probably ongoing sporadically when that conquest happened. I’m not sure why there was a hiatus or exactly how long it lasted, but the voyages are fairly well established. It may have dated back as far as 400 BC.

The voyagers from Ecuador apparently stayed in Western Mexico for up to six months when they got there, waiting for periods of calm seas and the right currents so they could go home, so there was plenty of time for them to interact with their hosts. Why didn’t they bring potatoes with them historically? Probably because they were from a tropical area themselves. Still, potatoes were a valuable food source in areas the Ecuador traders visited and in the Andes they were often dried to a lightweight food that kept well. All it would take would be some trader getting a taste for potatoes and transplanting a few, or noticing that the wild potatoes in Mexico were essentially the same thing with less refinements and you end up with potatoes being cultivated in Western Mexico.

From there, they would almost certainly spread north, a simple, easy to grow crop that grew places where corn didn’t and provided a lot of calories while not wearing out the soil the way corn did as a stand-alone crop.

So potatoes spread north, allowing agriculture in areas that wouldn’t support it before. Nomads settle down and become farmers in areas they couldn’t before along the fringes of Mesoamerica. Indians along the frontier in central Mexico between farmers and desert hunter-gatherers can rely on their farming a bit more. Indian populations grow in the fringes of the desert, decreasing the distance between farming communities around the desert. As farming pushes north, so do advanced culture traits. The non-agricultural gap in western Texas between farming Indians of northeastern Mexico and the Caddoan-speaking farmers of eastern Texas shrinks, allowing innovations to flow both ways, but mostly north from Mexico.

How far does this go? There is a trade-off here. The earlier this process starts, the more advanced cultures spread north from Mexico, but also, the more Indian cultures diverge from the ones we historically ran into. If potatoes spread north very early, like around 400 BC, the cultural landscape in North America might be totally unrecognizable. If they spread around 800 AD, their influence might be more restricted, but might well spread over much of the western US. Idaho potatoes, maybe? California potatoes might actually be more interesting, giving California Indians an already developed crop that they could easily grow, unlike corn, which apparently doesn’t do well in California without irrigation. Historically, California Indians may, by the time of Spanish missions, have been a short distance toward domesticating some of the native California large-grain plants, but with an already viable crop to depend on, in this scenario they may have gone further down that road, becoming another center for domesticated plants and having a larger, more politically sophisticated population when Spanish settlers came.

With seven hundred years between the point of divergence and European contact, probably no American Indian who met the Europeans would have ever been born. Individual tribes might or might not have existed, though the broader cultures they were from would probably be recognizable. There would undoubtedly still be a Mesoamerican Indian culture. Would it be dominated by an Aztec empire? I would put the odds at under 50-50. Too much time. Too many things that had to come together just right to propel them to power and might not have with a change going this far back. Still, a Mesoamerican culture spread further north, maybe with local variations where historically there were only nomadic tribesmen could be interesting.

If you like these kinds of speculations, you may enjoy my collection American Indian Victories. It’s mostly essays like these, though mostly longer and in more depth, but I do have some fiction pieces in there too.

Feel free to check it out on Amazon at:

If you like alternate history fiction involving American Indians, you might enjoy a couple of novels where European settlement of the New World never happened:

All Timelines Lead to Rome – https://www.amazon.com/Timelines-Lead-Rome-Dale-Cozort-ebook/dp/B009BWKF30/

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