Punished UMN wrote:The Archregimancy wrote:No; at least not in this scenario.
As Vikanias points out (I disagree with some of the detail, but agree with the broader point), there would have been difficult logistical issues in getting a significant 16th-century Spanish fleet to the Pacific coast of South America, and the Inca had no navy.
Also, as I pointed out earlier in the thread, Spain's economic power that allowed it to build one of the leading navies in Europe in the later 16th and 17th centuries was built on its control of the wealth of Peru. Take away the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire, and Spain remains a middling European power, and one potentially peripheral to Charles V's ambitions as regards France and the Ottoman Empire.
I'm assuming that Charles V still exists in this timeline, incidentally, since his mother Joanna of Spain married his father Philip of Burgundy in 1496, so events in Mexico and Peru wouldn't have impacted the marriage.
As to the rest of the world, that would depend on what you define as a 'local empire' and what time period you're willing to allow. If you're willing to go all the way up to 1905, then I give you the
Battle of Tsushima.
This is a little bit of an expansive question, but do you think the colonization of the New World would have become as extensive if Spain hadn't (seemingly in large part because of historical coincidence) had such an easy time of it in Peru? It seems like if Spain's wealth would have not been significantly increased, that the centers of European economic power would have remained or at least been closer to central Europe and the Holy Roman Empire than their shift into Western Europe.
That's a more or less impossible question to answer.
But if we're assuming a scenario where the impact of smallpox, measles, and other European diseases isn't as transformative as it was in reality, then no, European colonisation likely isn't as dramatic in impact as it was in reality. Let's take North America as an example.
King Philip's War of 1675–1678 may well be the most costly conflict in the history of North America in terms of per capita death toll. Now let's imagine that the New England colonists, instead of facing an army of Native Americans from societies devastated by more than 20 years of smallpox and measles epidemics with death tolls of up to 90% in some cases (the epidemics seem to have first reached what's now Massachusetts in 1616-1619, perhaps from the French; so just before the English settlement of New England), had instead faced a full-strength Wampanoag-led coalition. I'm not sure the New England settlements could have survived that. Virginia faced similar opposition from 1610 through to the 1640s, with a particularly brutal conflict in the 1620s
resulting in the deaths of a quarter of Virginia's European population. So it's entirely possible that resentful Native American populations could have chased out early European colonial settlements across North America if we eliminate the epidemics that devastated their societies.
Now, it's tempting to say that in the end the Europeans would have won; that technological advances in Europe would have seen some form of European colonisation in the Americas in time, just as Africa was only subject to a few isolated coastal European colonies until the Scramble for Africa in the 19th century. But remember that by denying large-scale European colonial control of the Americas, we're also denying Europe the ability to profit from Western Hemisphere precious metals, sugar, and tobacco. We're also denying Europe captive colonial markets for trade. The slave trade also virtually disappears; or at least is significantly smaller.
With this in mind, where does Europe then find the 16th- and early 17th-century wealth to build the infrastructure that allows Europe to rapidly eclipse the Ottoman, Persian, Mughal, and Chinese empires over the decades from c.1650-c.1700? All of those empires were wealthier and more powerful (and arguably more cultured) than the relatively small European states existing at the periphery of the Old World when Pizarro landed in Peru. Nor is this an abstract question; let's keep in mind that the Ottomans came within a whisker of taking Vienna as late as 1683.
At this point it becomes impossible to properly calculate the consequences of delaying large-scale European colonisation of the Americas. All we can say is that it likely would have left Europe poorer and weaker compared to the Europe that did emerge as a result of large-scale conquest and indigenous social collapse in the Americas.