One place we lost our way was naming places on this continent "New Something". This is another England, another France, another Spain, another Sweden, we thought. We should bring the same animals and crops from there to here; peel off the surface of home and lay it over this new place, crushing what was underneath.
@vuneu we should indeed. Although there aren't always matching names for the current borders. Like, nobody had a name for the area from Staten Island to the Adirondacks, west to Buffalo. There are a lot of names for the regions of New York, though.
@evan To be fair, this went both ways (albeit to a lesser degree). Can you imagine Italy without tomatoes, or eastern Europe without potatoes? Not to mention all the exchanges that happened before the age of sail.
@alessandro There is a big asymmetry. American crops and livestock were adopted in Europe and Asia, but American people did not mold Italian villages into Andean terraced farms or turn Asia Minor cities into Laurentian longhouse compounds. The pieces were picked and chosen by Europeans, and not shipped as an integrated agricultural/economic/architectural package.
@alessandro before sail, as far as I know, only dogs came across the Bering Strait with humans. No other plants or animals. And it wasn't for like 5-10K years after the first humans came. They were like, hey, we forgot something, we should go back.
I think of what we did here as Euroforming, like how astronauts in books do terraforming on Mars. It took a lot of work and a lot of time to breed oats and plum trees and pigs that could live here. Changing foreign animals and plants so they would fit this place.
@aadriasola@evan “Don't say New England, don't say Nouvelle France. York, England, Jersey, Hampshire, they are their own places.” means exactly that: there’s already a York. No need for another.
@adriano@aadriasola I completely understand that these were all marketing brands because settler colonialism was a pyramid scheme. The king got the land for free, granted or sold it to big lords, who granted or sold it to proto-corporations, who sold it to religious or political dissenters, who actually arrived in what they thought was a carbon copy of Scotland to find out there were already people there.
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