Somehow, the conception of the modern notion of freedom is wholly associated with Western Europe, but you know who I always thought was free? Kazakhs.I mean, what are those nomads doing up over there? Riding all around day, shooting stuff, coming home to hot, meaty meals – they are living the good life. Shepherding is the rare job where staring at the clouds counts as work.

Or Mongols. I mean, yee-haw – why they ain’t nuthin’ but Chinese cowboys, amirite? For Kazakhs, Mongols and cowboys when there’s a problem: to hell with it – let’s just move, nature will take care of itself.

You know who never appeared very free to me? The Dutch. Windmills, trading, constant fear of floods…seems like a lot of endless dike maintenance and perpetual worry over unsold goods.

England, too – somehow they are the supposed to be the freest in mind, body and body politic, yet they get apoplectic if you jump the queue?

People don’t appreciate this, but the French are perhaps a whopping 2% less rigid and slavish to doctrine than the neighbouring Germans, who are considered the world’s most dangerously anal-retentive. For whatever reason, the French don’t go postal or conquer Europe – they just commit suicide.

Let’s get serious: Western “liberty” from 1491-1917 was solely for the 1%. Serfdom, debt slavery, work slavery and actual slavery – this was the lot of the European masses.

Even after the French Revolution abolished feudalism, the bourgeois, West European, Liberal Democratic system was only appreciated and celebrated by the rich, who owned the printing presses and from whom the governing political class was entirely drawn.

Let’s stop the stupidity, and start examining the history of the modern notion of freedom from an standpoint which passes the smell test. Western jingoists – you can go back to admiring your prematurely wrinkled White mug in the mirror.

The recent non-fiction book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus is a very well-received examination of often-superior intellectual, cultural and societal achievements of the New World prior to Columbus. It takes a largely anthropological and scientific tack, but it tangentially relates how one of the things West Europeans brought back home was an entirely new concept of personal freedom.

Colonizers asked themselves: ‘Are we really free inside this imperialist prison/fort?’

“Adriaen van der Donck was a lawyer who in 1641 transplanted himself to the Hudson River Valley, then part of the Dutch colony of Nieuw Netherland. He became a kind of prosecutor and bill collector for the Dutch West India Company, which owned and operated the colony as a private fiefdom. Whenever possible, van der Donck ignored his duties and tramped around the forests and valleys upstate. He spent a lot of time with the Haudenosaunee, whose insistence on personal liberty fascinated him. They were, he wrote, ‘all free by nature, and will not bear any domineering or lording over them.’

When a committee of settlers decided to complain to the government about the Dutch West India Company’s dictatorial behaviour, it asked van der Donck, the only lawyer in New Amsterdam, to compose a protest letter and travel with it to the Hague. His letter set down the basic rights that in his view belonged to everyone on American soil – the first formal call for liberty in the colonies. It is tempting to speculate that van der Donck drew inspiration from the attitudes of the Haudenosaunee.

The Dutch government responded to the letter by taking control of New Amsterdam from the Dutch West India Company and establishing an independent governing body in Manhattan, thereby setting into motion the creation of New York City. Angered by their loss of power, the company directors effectively prevented van der Donck’s return for five years. While languishing in Europe, he wrote a nostalgic pamphlet extolling the land he had come to love.

Every fall, he remembered, the Haudenosaunee set fire to the ‘woods, plains and meadows,’ to ‘thin out’….

The author goes on to describe how controlled burns were used to attract bison, which is some of the abundant proof he relates showing how Indians shaped their environment as much as Europeans did theirs, but did so in ways that were incomprehensible to the imperialists, who believed it was “unspoiled nature”. 1491 is primarily a scientific book, but this article is “tempting to speculate” on the origins of modern freedom.

So, the “first formal call for liberty in the colonies” – the first demand for proletarian-99% rights – was the result of trying to emulate the American Indians?

Makes total sense: The greatest cultural ideas usually come from cross-pollination – from jazz to ancient Greece (which was half-Turkish). European imperialists, cowering in their forts, surely discussed the Indians’ culture…and surely they adopted some of the Indians’ positive ideas [. . .]

Read more: R Mazaheri 1491 Also stolen from Indians