That makes me wonder if, historically speaking, were the colonizers considered world power worthy people or were they just barely beyond hunter/gatherer enough to be able to take the land they wanted.

There’s no doubt that the smorgasbord of different nationalities that flooded the land definitely put their abilities together to become a world power. That is evidenced by the last 250 years. But the 300 years before 1776, the colonizing years, those folks weren’t really all that powerful in world terms. Right?

Reading up on it, and please tell me if I’m mistaken because I’m definitely not a historian, but the original colonist weren’t the powerful. They were mostly made of farmers and religious people seeking religious freedom. There were a very few elite and those are probably the ones that went back to brag about what’s over here causing the British empire to stake its claim and, then, the major push for land across the continent. But by this point, a large large portion of the Americans had already been decimated by diseases. This made the final conquest rather easy.

The story is pretty long. From 1492-1900, this land, much like every piece of land in the Americas, we’re being “discovered” and settled for agricultural farming and growth.