Don'tTakeYourselfTooSeriously

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If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me on my talk page. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 17:24, 9 September 2020 (UTC)

November 2020

Hello. Thank you for your contributions to Wikipedia.

When editing Wikipedia, there is a field labeled "Edit summary" below the main edit box. It looks like this:

Edit summary (Briefly describe your changes)

I noticed your recent edit to European colonization of the Americas does not have an edit summary. Please be sure to provide a summary of every edit you make, even if you write only the briefest of summaries. The summaries are very helpful to people browsing an article's history.

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Please use the edit summary to explain your reasoning for the edit, or a summary of what the edit changes. With a Wikipedia account you can give yourself a reminder to add an edit summary by setting Preferences → Editing → Prompt me when entering a blank edit summary. Thanks! Elizium23 (talk) 01:29, 5 November 2020 (UTC)

Peer review of European colonization of the Americas

Your edits make a significant upgrade to the this article. Thanks for you work so far. Here are some thoughts on what could make it better…

• The lead: Opening paragraph should conclude with a one-sentence statement of significance: that European colonization implanted the political systems, geographic boundaries, and languages that predominate in the hemisphere's largely independent states today. The second paragraph weirdly only refers to North Amercia and needs to be expanded to summarize the Caribbean, Mesoamerica (okay to merge w/ North America, but that require adding New Spain), and South America. The third paragraph might be better if it emphasized the confrontations w/ indigenous peoples over inter-empire rivalries (except in North America, where these were the leading dynamic). It would be great if there were a sentence listing the major areas where European colonization remained minimal or non-existent through the time of independence, as a short list running from the Inuit Arctic and northern interior of Canada, south through the Great Plains, and ending with the Mapuche/Araucanian southern cone of South America.
• Norway: I think Norway as opposed to Norse / Norsemen / Vikings may be anachronistic. Otherwise this looks good.
• Spain: Some good additions are here, but the tone is sometimes encyclopedic and other times polemical. State facts rather than making a case here. Also, the sources aren't as high quality as they could be. Secondary sources are preferrable to encyclopedias, which in turn are preferable to textbooks.
  • "The Spanish had different goals…": The first two sentences here are substantially accurate, but subjective and not true across the whole Spanish empire. I recommend finding a more reliable source and attributing the description to them. Likewise, Patricia Seed can be cited as a source for the view that "The Spanish justified their claims to the New World based on the Ideals of the Reconquista…"
  • "With the arrival of more explorers hoping to gain riches and power, more natives were tortured and stolen from their land." is editorializing. (Editiorializing I agree with, but it's not encyclopedic and can be omitted.)
  • "Requerimiento… a tool for manipulation." It can be both unintelligible and a tool for manipulation. See [1].
• Portugal: solid additions. Check for a couple words and grammatical errors here.
• English:
  • "the British explorers came to expand their empire."—Technically (unless we count Ireland), the British Empire began with its colonization in the Americas.

Saving for now; I'll comment on the slavery section tomorrow.--Carwil (talk) 05:09, 12 November 2020 (UTC)

• • "there was very little interaction between indigenous and British society." — I see what you're doing here. But!: Weaver, Jace (2011). "The Red Atlantic: Transoceanic Cultural Exchanges". The American Indian Quarterly. 35 (3): 418–463. ISSN 1534-1828. Retrieved 2011-10-07. Reframe this to say there was often a separation between English colonial communities and indigenous communities.
  • There should be explicit mention of plantation agriculture and slave labor as a primary aspect of the colonies of the southeast US and the Caribbean.
• Conversion:
  • "As slavery was prohibited between Christians and could only be imposed in non-Christian prisoners of war or on men already sold as slaves" ; True for a time, but then this changes in Catholic doctrine and is entirely bypassed in Protestant England. Ultimately the article should explain this, but you can leave it for now.
  • Describe the geographic reach of the mission system in North and South America
• Re the material on mestizaje / colonialism and race… I would recommend bringing all this material into a new section called Colonization and race rather than separately under Spanish and English colonization. Bring the "most significant difference" paragraph here. Avoid "interbreeding" as a term for humans. And throughout the hemisphere, there are there large regional sources of population: arriving Europeans, Native Americans, and forcibly transported Africans. Good summaries of the disparate migration processes are in p. 126-128, 137-142 of Manning, Patrick (2012). Migration in World History. Themes in World History (2nd ed. ed.). Hoboken: Taylor and Francis. ISBN 978-1-283-71257-6. {{cite book}}: |edition= has extra text (help). The racial order in colonial Latin America is neatly summarized (well, as neat as this thorny matter gets) in p. 24-30 of the 2012 edition of Wade, Peter (2010). Race and ethnicity in Latin America. Anthropology, culture and society (Second edition.. ed.). London ;: Pluto Press. ISBN 978-1-84964-551-5.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link).
• Slavery: You've added lots of useful information here about enslavement of indigenous peoples, though you should reorder a bit to make it a bit more chronological.
• See David Eltis, Coerced and Free Migration: Global Perspectives (2002), p. 62 for hemisphere-wide estimates of the number of arrivals to the Western hemisphere by century.

Okay, those are all my suggestions. Hope they are helpful. Looking forward to your final article.--Carwil (talk) 14:39, 12 November 2020 (UTC)