More fabricates for the assimilation of the indigenous people of the continent into the society of the Utopians. Another odd fact is the notion that the soil itself, which might be too barren to support one segment of the two groups of people making up the colony will do just fine and even better when both the colonizer and the colonized are forced to share it together. I suppose the implication is that the Utopians are such accomplished husband-persons, in comparison to the natives, that their work will always already double the amount of food the original inhabitants are able to coerce from the soil. What a chilling statement that is. A prescription, as it turns out, for every bit of brutality England meted out against the Other everywhere its empire spread across the face of the earth.
Natives never utilize the land as efficiently and as destructively as invaders do.
America was a wasteland by Eurocentric measures because native Americans had maintained it in its natural state and had not turned it into a place that could no longer support its own indigenous population. One would almost have to believe that the Iroquois had read and studied More's prescriptions for political expansionism very carefully in order to have utilized his program of genocide so well and effectively. On the other hand, of course, it is quite possible that Engels simply appropriated More's perception of Eurocentric colonization as a means of explaining a native American cultural phenomenon that had nothing to do with territorial or political expansionism or colonization of someone else's land or property. To return to Index click X in the upper right-hand corner of the page.