The Harmful Effects Of Colonization In The New World

As the queen of Spain, there have been many difficult occurrences I’ve had to deal with during the past few years. I believe that colonization in the New World led to most of them. Spain and America would have been better off if we never started our own civilization there and barged in on the natives. Although there were many complex and tragic events, people may argue that some good came out of civilization. There may be some valid points, but none of it was worth the damage it caused. The cruelty and suffering that the natives had to go through when the colonists got to the New World was horrendous. The citizens that intruded on the natives took advantage of them and manipulated them. They may have acted nice and polite before, but considering how fearful and helpless the natives were, they decided to take everything from them. The colonists were planning on taking their land and depleting their population. According to Christopher Columbus “The inhabitants were unarmed and very timid and fearful.” Later on during the process of colonization, people started enslaving the inhabitants and treating them terribly. Antonio de Montesinos
Colonists weren’t even able to reach their original goal of spreading Christianity, and that’s where it all started to fall apart. The colonists were able to keep peace for a short period of time. They got goods from the inhabitants and traded with them too. But once they started trading, disease started to spread. According to Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva España, “Large bumps spread on people, some were entirely covered.” Small pox killed off many of the colonists and natives. Disease wasn’t the only thing that killed people. In the letter Christopher Columbus wrote, it talked about the vast amounts of land and how great and beautiful it was. In order to get that land though, the colonists killed many more natives so they could get them all out of the