For example, much of Africa is still struggling with its legacies from recent colonialism. In other regions - including much of Central America, Mexico, Peru, New Caledonia, the former Soviet Union, and parts of Indonesia - civil unrest or guerrilla warfare pits still-numerous indigenous populations against governments dominated by descendants of invading conquerors. Many other indigenous populations - such as native Hawaiians, Aboriginal Australians, native Siberians, and Indians in the United States, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, and Chile - became so reduced in numbers by genocide and disease that they are now greatly outnumbered by the descendants of invaders. Although thus incapable of mounting a civil war, they are nevertheless increasingly asserting their rights.
In addition to these current political and economic reverberations of past collisions among peoples, there are current linguistic reverberations - especially the impending disappearance of most of the modern world’s 6,000 surviving languages, becoming replaced by English, Chinese, Russian, and a few other languages whose numbers of speakers have increased enormously in recent centuries. All these problems of the modern world result from the different historical trajectories implicit in Yali’s question.