A Great Equalizer?

I was trying to plot out a short story set in the world I've created for the French Intrigues novels (but set sixty or seventy years after A Poisoned Prayer) when I had one of those epiphanies that can totally derail one's creative process.

The story was to be set in Montreal and was inspired by a museum I toured during a (bitterly cold) visit a year ago. The inspiration was a display about the eighteenth-century treaty that ended some two hundred years of war between the First Nations of the St Lawrence basin, war that had drawn in the French and seriously disrupted life for all parties concerned.

It was when I was trying to figure out how magic might affect such a treaty when it suddenly occurred to me to wonder:

If there's magic in the world, is colonialism even possible?

Pardon me for being overly explanatory here, but one of the strictures I built into the world for these stories was the idea that magic is restricted to the first two of the historical Estates of the European world (those being the aristocracy and the church). This restriction isn't a feature of magic itself, it's a political thing imposed as a means of keeping the lower orders in their place.

But what happens if such a European culture encounters a New World culture in which it is the ability to use magic that determines if a person belongs to the ruling class?

Now assume that such a culture possesses, through magic (which I am defining for these books as the ability to manipulate the physical universe through non-physical means), a way to resist the diseases European intruders brought with them. And a way to set the rules of contact between the two cultures in such a way as to prevent the Europeans from getting a toe-hold in the new lands.

All of a sudden the Spanish conquest of Central America looks a lot less likely. And the French and English incursion into North America is more likely to be one with the Norse Vinland than with the way it turned out in our world.

And this doesn't even begin to encompass what would have happened to the Europeans trying to impose themselves on India and Asia...

So no, I'm not going to be able to write the story I wanted to. But the potential unlocked by this realization (something I would hope I'd have realized sooner, if my first two novels hadn't been so relentlessly focused on the personal rather than the political) is almost frightening in its scope. I will never be able to write all the stories this thing has unlocked.

And then there's the change magic would make in relations between the sexes...