Traditions constitute the invisible, under-the-surface flow of history

LIVING HISTORY IN THE AMERICAS

- MICHAEL WOOD

This summer marks 500 years since the conquest of the Aztecs’ great capital Tenochtitlan by Spanish forces under Hernán Cortés. The 18th-century economist Adam Smith called the “discovery” of the New World and its aftermath one of the greatest events in human history. Maybe he was right. Never before had a whole continent been taken over, its native peoples dispossessed and enslaved, killed or died of disease; its natural resources plundered and extracted. So much flowed from this conquest: European colonisation, the Atlantic slave trade, the shifting of the balance of world history. For the Aztecs, Maya, Inca and thousands of other native American peoples, it was cataclysmic – and still is. Just look at what’s happening in the Amazon.