Not Stolen

Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World by Jeff Fynn-Paul.

The Woke distortion of history has provoked a hopeful reaction, a new crop of books looking at the basics of American history. The most recent entry in the field is “Not Stolen” by Professor Jeff Flynn-Paul. Flynn-Paul is a professor of Global History and Economics at the University of Leiden. If you are expecting this book to have been written by a Dutchman, guess again — Flynn-Paul was born in America, educated in Canada, and merely works in Europe. I've seen some of the videos featuring Flynn-Paul's discussion of his works, and he is as American as a homeless vagrant in the streets of San Francisco.


This book is a survey of American history — the American history you were supposed to learn in grade school but never learned because they were too busy teaching you to hate America. This book is in the same genre as “War on History” by Jarrett Stepman, which I reviewed last month. However, where Stepman's survey goes from the Era of Discovery to World War II, Flynn-Paul's interest is the transition of the New World from terra incognita to part of the Western World. As a result, he covers topics like Columbus, Thanksgiving, and the Trail of Tears.

The advantage that Woke History has is that it is so easy to learn and remember. In Woke History, there are good guys and bad guys. The bad guys are always Western oppressors who are motivated by evil impulses unique to Westerners because of Capitalism or Christianity. The good guys are the natives, who are victims who lived in peaceful harmony until the Oppressors shattered their world with a multi-century rampage of persecution and slaughter.

If you have that paradigm in mind, you can quickly backfill the details.

The problem is that history is complicated. People are remarkably like people. In any group, there are some good, many bad, and most moving from side to side. Oppressors are often Victims, and Victims can be Oppressors in their turn. The Woke Narrative ignores facts that contradict the Woke Narrative. For example, if Americans wanted to exterminate the Indians, why did Thomas Jefferson make an effort to distribute the Smallpox vaccine to the Indians? Jefferson sent the smallpox vaccine with the Williams and Clark expedition. In 1832, the Secretary of War was charged with the responsibility of distributing the smallpox vaccine to the Indians. (American efforts in this regard look a lot like the efforts of the German colonial administration to distribute Rinderpest vaccine to African cattle to save the African population from starvation. [See The Case for German Colonialism.])

Did you know that? I didn't know that.

On the other hand, you've probably heard that the American military gave blankets from smallpox wards to Indians to start plagues when, in fact, there is no evidence that any such thing ever occurred. There is a single written document of such a strategy. It occurred During the French and Indian Wars at Fort Pitt, which was under siege by the Indians. The commander expressed reluctance to try it because it could have sparked an outbreak among his forces, some already suffering from smallpox. On the other hand, the Indians in the area were also dealing with their smallpox outbreak. Hence, the significance of this effort at primitive biological warfare — not the first time such a thing was tried in sieges — is doubtful.

History is complicated. You have to know it empirically, not infer it based on the Narrative.

I want to hit some of the points that stood out for me.

Flynn-Paul addresses the issue of genocide. Determining the population of pre-Columbian America involves extrapolation and inference verging on speculation. In recent years, the Narrative has been pushing an extremely high population figure for America. For example, the Narrative claims that 7 million people died on the island of Hispaniola as a result of Columbus. But this population figure is absurd:

“Our best guess is that England in 1500 had only 2.1 million people, living on double the area of Hispaniola. (England's maximum capacity before the agricultural revolution of the seventeenth century was probably less than five million.) If Hispaniola really had seven million people in 1491, that would make its population roughly triple that of England at the time, and its population density about six times higher.

Fynn-Paul, Jeff. Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World (pp. 55–56). Bombardier Books. Kindle Edition.

This is unlikely: the natives of Hispaniola had a stone-age technology and no draft animals.

The more likely figure is in the tens of thousands:

“This is why archaeologists and other specialists believe that the real population of Hispaniola in 1491 was about two hundred thousand people while even the “maximalists” in this subfield argue for only three hundred thousand.

Fynn-Paul, Jeff. Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World (p. 56). Bombardier Books. Kindle Edition.

Of this lower number, were most killed?

Not at all. Genetic evidence shows that the populations of Hispaniola were not replaced; they were incorporated into subsequent populations.

In places with a heavier population density, the survival of the native population is more noticeable:

“Just as in the former Aztec lands, today we find that “white” Europeans make up a tiny minority of the population in former Incan territory, at between about 10 and 15 percent. The rest are either mestizo or Amerindian. In all three of these countries about half the population is “pure” Amerindian. Since these two population nuclei accounted for perhaps 80 percent of all New World people in 1491, the obvious conclusion is that Europeans did not slaughter or displace the great majority of Indigenous people in the New World.

Fynn-Paul, Jeff. Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World (p. 66). Bombardier Books. Kindle Edition.

In North America, population densities were far lower:

“The only reason parts of the New World, such as the present-day US and Canada and also Australia and New Zealand, are majority non-Indigenous is because the Indigenous population of these lands was so truly sparse — 1 percent or less as dense as most of Europe at the time.

Fynn-Paul, Jeff. Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World (p. 128). Bombardier Books. Kindle Edition.

And:

“For the first two and a half centuries after Columbus, Europeans remained confined to limited enclaves in the New World. Large parts of Mexico and Latin America remained in the hands of Indigenous people throughout the colonial period and beyond. As recently chronicled by Pekka Hämäläinen, most of the actual “dispossession” of Indigenous people in North America occurred quite rapidly, during the nineteenth century, due to a combination of natural population increase and European immigration.65 This land grab happened only after the Indigenous population was outnumbered by a factor approaching one hundred to one.

Fynn-Paul, Jeff. Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World (pp. 129–130). Bombardier Books. Kindle Edition.


I've played war games where one side starts at a lower level but has a greater production capacity over the long run. Things are nip and tuck until the last few turns, when the production capacity overwhelms the other side. That was the situation the American Indians faced. Approximately 10,000 Commanches controlled all of North Texas — slave raiding into northern Mexico — until the mid-19th century when the far larger American population swamped them.

North American population densities were extremely low, which influenced the way that a farming culture moving into industrialization was going to interact with them:

In hunter-gatherer societies, which ranged over at least three-fourths of New World land north of Panama, property ownership was always tenuous in the extreme. Property in these vast empty regions was claimed by small bands, who might visit it only every few years. Population density was well below one person per ten acres; often, it was much lower than this.

Fynn-Paul, Jeff. Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World (p. 213). Bombardier Books. Kindle Edition.

And:

The Indians' seminomadic lifestyle made it relatively easy for them sell their lands and retreat farther into New York State and the Green Mountains in the hope of avoiding contact with whites — as long as this could be negotiated with other Indian tribes along the way. Population densities in the region began low — highball estimates suggest that about ten thousand Indians were living in all of Vermont in 1500 — so this meant that by 1680, there was space for Indians to migrate through the region after disease, migration, and assimilation had reduced their numbers.

Fynn-Paul, Jeff. Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World (pp. 272–273). Bombardier Books. Kindle Edition.

This data corroborates the historical presentation in “How the Indians Lost their Land” by Stuart Banner.

Migration was endemic in North America. Populations were constantly displacing prior populations, often through genocide. The Commanches waged wars of genocide against the Apaches. The Navaho were in the process of exterminating the Hopi until the Americans put a lid on that process. The idea of land acknowledgments is silly since it merely acknowledges the last group of colonizers before the Americans took over.

Likewise, Indians were quite capable of managing empires with brutal effectiveness. Native populations sided with the Spanish against Aztecs, for example. And, again, as explained in “The Comanche Empire” by Pekka Hämäläinen , ten thousand Commanches ran a military empire that took slaves and property from as far away as northern Mexico and kept Europeans tied up for over 100 years.


Flynn-Paul adds another spike to the argument that Europeans were inherently racist when he points out that Spaniards treated Indian nobility as nobility. They would seek to ennoble themselves by marrying local nobility. This does not speak to any form of White Supremacy argued by the Woke Narrative.

Flynn-Paul has an interesting discussion that gauges Indian technological developments. Most were at a stone-age level. The Aztecs and Incas might have approached the same level as ancient Mesopotamia. Factor in low population density, and the population replacement was inevitable.

Warfare and massacre were not the cause:

“Despite the relative rarity of such massacres in New England history, they feature prominently in popular articles on Thanksgiving. Such portrayals are distorted from multiple angles. First, they are spun to represent one-sided instances of colonist-on-Indian aggression. Secondly, they are spun to appear unprovoked. Third, they are spun as though they were motivated by racial hatred and a desire for ethnic cleansing above all else, based on an underlying greed for land. And finally, they are spun as though this sort of thing was happening all the time — as though they were typical of and “stand for” early New England history. All four of these interpretations are false, or at least misleading. The charge of continuous warfare is a highly embellished view of colonial New England history. According to William M. Osborn, who incidentally is cited on the “Indian Massacres” page referenced above, the total casualties of Indian-settler massacres between 1511 and 1890 were about 7,193 Natives who died at the hands of Europeans, and about 9,156 Europeans who died at the hands of Native Americans.

Fynn-Paul, Jeff. Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World (pp. 240–241). Bombardier Books. Kindle Edition.

Massacres may have been more common in California, but that was at the end of the process when population density and technological differentials were at a maximum. From an ecological/environmental perspective, groups that evolve with each other learn to adapt. When a new apex predator is introduced to the ecology, the effects can lead to extinction, such as when the Indians destroyed North American megafaunas while African megafaunas continued to survive.

Flynn-Paul observes:

“According to our best guess, before the arrival of the Spanish in the 1760s, there were perhaps three hundred thousand Indians living in California. The great majority of these lived in the fertile central valley and certain coastal regions, since this provided the Natives with an abundance of food. Early observers noticed that while California itself provided some of the most bountiful sustenance anywhere in North America, the California Indians were among the most “primitive” of all North American people. The going theory is that the abundance of food, in this case, made life so easy that the Indigenous people of California did not bother to innovate. Instead, they took advantage of the Eden-like conditions to live relatively simple lives.

Fynn-Paul, Jeff. Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World (pp. 362–363). Bombardier Books. Kindle Edition.

However, even California raises questions.

One question is raised by the fact that the massacre rate doesn't account for population collapse:

Herein lies the crux: Madley's book gives the impression that in 1849, there were some one hundred and fifty thousand Indians living peaceably in California — but that twenty-odd years later, most of these had been hunted to near extinction for sport by gleefully genocidal white hunting parties, including those organized by Serranus Hastings. This is certainly the impression that the law professor Paul Caron got from Madley's book, and the figure of “100,000 killed” can be found splashed liberally across less-cautious corners of the internet. The problem is, the number of Indians who were killed outside of active warfare during the entire course of the “genocide” was in reality less than five thousand — meaning that some 97 percent of California Indians were not massacred during this time period. A 3 percent slaughter rate is horrendous enough — but it's a far cry from the 88 percent slaughter rate that Paul Caron claims in his blog post.

Fynn-Paul, Jeff. Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World (p. 360). Bombardier Books. Kindle Edition.

The explanation is complex:

According to the sources we have, it seems that a major downturn in the California Indian population occurred during and after the Wars of Mexican Independence, which broke out in 1810 and carried on until 1821. Soon after independence, the Mexican governors then proclaimed the “secularization” of the mission system in California, although this proved a decidedly mixed bag for the California Indians. Under the Mexican system, California Indians remained subject to forced labor by secular landowners who rapidly purchased the old mission lands. It was the Mexican government, then, that created the custom whereby Indians could be indentured and “sold” for their labor. Under this system, Indian children were often sold outright as slaves. The Mexican custom was carried over into the American period, and it became the grounds for much abuse. What few writers wish to emphasize is that this indentured servitude was outlawed by the California legislature as a follow up to the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 — less than fifteen years after the Americans took over in California. It took another decade, partly due to the lack of resources brought about by the Civil War, for this emancipation to be effectively enforced however. In the chaos created by the harsh and anarchic situation left by the retreating Mexican government, a great number of California Indians seem to have disappeared — to the extent that a population, formerly three hundred thousand strong, melted away, mostly during the brief Mexican period between circa 1810 and 1848. By the time the Americans got hold of the territory, the Indian population in California is believed to have been between one hundred thousand and one hundred and fifty thousand people. Of course, modern critics opt for the higher number because this makes the Americans look worse. What happened to the approximately one hundred and fifty thousand California Indians who disappeared during the last few decades of Spanish and Mexican rule in California? No one knows for certain.

Fynn-Paul, Jeff. Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World (pp. 365–366). Bombardier Books. Kindle Edition.

Social upheavals can have huge effects through mechanisms other than outright murder. Flynn-Paul explains that social upheaval can mean that children just are not born because of lower birth rates:

“In light of these cold, hard population figures, with tens of millions of mestizos and Amerindians living precisely where their ancestors lived five hundred years ago, where then is the “holocaust” of one hundred million dead claimed by Stannard and others? Up to 75 percent of them never existed at all — they are a figment of the Berkeley School's fevered imaginations. In places such as Hispaniola, the pre-Columbian population is exaggerated by the media and government organizations by several thousand percent. Of those Indigenous people who did “disappear” after 1491, most did not die a horrible death. Many were simply not born, because cultural upheaval tends to cause lower birth rates. Of those who actually died under adverse conditions introduced by Europeans, even Stannard recognizes that some 90 percent of Indigenous casualties of European intervention were due to neutral causes such as disease, rather than war. Nor as we will see in later chapters is there evidence that Europeans deliberately infected Indian populations with smallpox or other diseases.

Fynn-Paul, Jeff. Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World (pp. 67–68). Bombardier Books. Kindle Edition.

None of this means that Indians were not murdered or oppressed. They certainly were, but facts matter. History is complicated.

The Woke Narrative knows that facts matter. The Narrative has been shaped by many people who have gone out of their way to exaggerate historical events into events of monstrous barbarity. Presumably, that is necessary, or someone might notice that the natives were engaging in slaving and sacrifice on a far larger scale. In the case of the Aztecs, this was genuinely monstrous: