Early colonial encounters with ‘prehistoric men’ had no political consequences.

Evidence

It is, however, a matter of record that nothing much had happened as long as savage tribes, outnumbered by European settlers, had been exterminated, as long as shiploads of Negroes were imported as slaves into the Europe-determined world of the United States, or even as long as only individuals had drifted into the interior of the Dark Continent where the savages were numerous enough to constitute a world of their own, a world of folly, to which the European adventurer added the folly of the ivory hunt. Many of these adventurers had gone mad in the silent wilderness of an overpopulated continent where the presence of human beings only underlined utter solitude, and where an untouched, overwhelmingly hostile nature that nobody had ever taken the trouble to change into human landscape seemed to wait in sublime patience “for the passing away of the fantastic invasion” of man. But their madness had remained a matter of individual experience and without consequences. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 497

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the toolkit: distinguishes individual colonial madness (without consequences) from the mass colonial racism that followed — the threshold Arendt marks before whom moral/political consequences begin.