Philip T. Hoffman - Why Did Europe Conquer the World?

WHY DID EUROPE CONQUER THE WORLD?

THE PRINCETON ECONOMIC HISTORY
OF THE WESTERN WORLD

Joel Mokyr, Series Editor

A list of titles in this series appears at the back of the book.

WHY DID EUROPE CONQUER THE WORLD?

PHILIP T. HOFFMAN

Princeton University Press

Princeton and Oxford

Copyright 2015 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

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Jacket Illustration: The Battle of Blindheim on August 13, 1704 by Jan van Vianen, engraving, printed in Amsterdam circa 17041705. De Agostini Picture Library / Bridgeman Images. Jacket design by FaceOutStudio.

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hoffman, Philip T., 1947

Why did Europe conquer the world? / Philip T. Hoffman.

pages cm. (The Princeton economic history of the Western world)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-691-13970-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Balance of power. 2. EuropeForeign relationsHistory. 3. EuropeMilitary policyHistory. 4. Technology and stateEuropeHistory. I. Title.

D217.H596 2015

909.08dc23 2014045170

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Minion

Printed on acid-free paper.

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

C ONTENTS

WHY DID EUROPE CONQUER THE WORLD?

C HAPTER

Introduction

I magine that a time machine could carry you back to the year 900 and land you anywhere on earth for an extended stay. Where would you go live?

As you consider the possibilities, you might want a bit of useful advicenamely, avoid western Europe at all costs. Why reside there, when it was poor, violent, politically chaotic, and by almost any yardstick, hopelessly backward? There were no cities, apart from Crdoba, but it was part of the Muslim world. Luxuries (silks, perfume, and spices, which flavored an otherwise bland cuisine and served as the health food of the day) were scarce and extremely expensive. To get them, you had to trade with Middle Eastern merchants and sell the few western goods they deigned to purchase, such as furs or slaves. And if you were not carefulif, say, you wandered down to the beach in Italyyou yourself might be captured and delivered into slavery.

Choosing Europe would, in short, be like opting to move to Afghanistan today. You would be far better off picking the Muslim Middle East, for back in 900 it was richer and more advanced, culturally and technologically, and would be a much more inviting destination. It had cities; markets brimming with goods from around the world, from Indian sandalwood to Chinese ceramics; and scholars who were extending works of ancient Greek science that were still unknown in western Europe.

F IGURE 1.1. In dark gray: areas never under European control, 1914. In light gray: territory Europeans controlled or had conquered by 1914, including colonies that had gained independence. Adapted from Fieldhouse 1973, map 9.

Now let your time machine whisk you forward to 1914. How startled you would be to discover that the once pitiful Europeans had taken over the world. Their influence would be everywhere, no matter where you stop. Somehow, they had gained control of 84 percent of the globe and they ruled colonies on every other inhabited continent (some of their possessions, such as the United States, had gained independence, they had spread their languages and ideas around the earth, and they wielded military power everywhere. Aside from the United States, a European clone, there was in fact only one non-European power that would dare stand up to their armies and naviesJapan, which was busy borrowing their technology and military know-how. No one would have expected that a thousand years ago.

Why were the Europeans the ones who ended up subjugating the world? Why not the Chinese, Japanese, Ottomans from the Middle East, or South Asians? All at one time or another could boast of powerful civilizations, and unlike Africans, Native Americans, and the inhabitants of Australia and the Pacific Islands, they all had access early on to the same weapons the Europeans used. And if you go back into the past, they would all seem to be stronger candidates than the Europeans. So why didnt they end up in control?

Finding out why is clearly important. After all, it determined who got colonial empires and who ran the slave trade. And it even helps explain who was the first to industrialize. But so far this question remains an unanswered riddle, and a particularly bedeviling one at that.

Now you might think that the answer is obvious: it was industrialization itself that paved the way for Europes takeover. The Industrial Revolution began in Europe and gave Europeans toolsfrom repeating rifles to steam-powered gunboatsthat assured their military supremacy. World conquest was then easy.

But things are not that simple, for if we step back a century, to 1800, the Industrial Revolution was scarcely under way in Britain and it had yet to touch the rest of Europe. Yet the Europeans already held sway over 35 percent of the globe, and their ships were preying on maritime traffic as far away as Southeast Asia and had been doing so for three hundred years.with foreign fortresses and colonies on every inhabited continent, all well before the Industrial Revolution?

This question, once you begin pondering it, swiftly becomes a fascinating intellectual riddle, because the standard answers do not get to the bottom of the issue. Or they just fall apart once you begin to scrutinize them.

What then are those standard answers? There are really just two: disease and gunpowder technology.

Disease

The first of the standard answers points to the epidemics of smallpox, measles, and other crowd diseases that slaughtered natives of the Americas, Australia, and the Pacific Islands after the Europeans came ashore. The Europeans themselves were unaffected because they had been exposed to these diseases and were therefore resistant. Their immunity was what let them conquer the Americas and the Aztec and Inca Empires in particular.

The Europeans, however, were not the only people with this biological edge, for all the major Middle Eastern and Asian civilizations had the same advantage. Why had they tooand not just Europeansbeen exposed to the crowd diseases? The reason (as the biologist Jared Diamond has explained) is simply that there were more easily domesticated plants and animals in Eurasia than in the Americas and fewer geographical and ecological barriers to the diffusion of crops, livestock, and agricultural technology. That meant earlier agriculture in Eurasia, and with agriculture came villages, herds of animals, and ultimately cities, all of which served as breeding grounds for disease, and also trade, which spread epidemics.had reached the Americas, they too would have survived, and Native Americans would still have perished. In short, even if disease is the crux of the matter, we still have to explain why it was the Europeans who were pursuing conquest, and not other Eurasians.

The claims about disease also fail to explain how the Portuguese could gain a foothold in South Asia at the turn of the sixteenth century and then successfully prey upon oceangoing trade. The South Asians were immune too, so disease gave the Portuguese no edge. They got no edge either from the easily domesticated plants and animals that Diamond has emphasized, for the Chinese, Japanese, Ottomans, and South Asians had them early on too.