Why Did Europe Conquer the World? is a 2015 book by the American economic historian Philip T. Hoffman, published by Princeton University Press. Hoffman tries to explain why Western Europeans, rather than the Chinese, Japanese, Ottomans, or South Asians, came to rule most of the world. His answer is that European politics pushed rulers to develop gunpowder weapons further than anyone else in Eurasia. By his estimates, territory that Europeans controlled or had once controlled came to some 35 percent of the world's land surface in 1800 and 84 percent in 1914. Because so much of it was taken before industrialization, he dates the decisive military advantage to the early modern period. The book was listed among the Bloomberg Businessweek’s Best Books of 2015.
Background and origins Hoffman's earlier books were on early modern France: Growth in a Traditional Society (1996), on the countryside between 1450 and 1815, and, with Gilles Postel-Vinay and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, Priceless Markets (2000), on credit in Paris before the arrival of banks, and Surviving Large Losses (2007), on financial crises and the development of capital markets. In a Q&A piece published by Princeton University Press, Hoffman said that historians, social scientists and biologists had all sought to explain why major powers arise, "so far without success", and that the question mattered because its answer "determined who had colonies, who ran the slave trade, and who grew rich or remained mired in poverty". His own conclusions, he said, came from using "a simple economic model of political costs and technological change" to find the point at which the guns, ships, tactics and fortifications of the gunpowder technology would be improved.
Summary Hoffman finds the standard explanations insufficient. Disease cannot account for conquests in Asia, where populations shared the Europeans' immunities, and crediting superior gunpowder weapons only restates the puzzle, since firearms were invented in China and were available across Eurasia. He also disputes the argument of Paul Kennedy and Jared Diamond that constant war and political fragmentation were sufficient on their own: eighteenth-century India was at war almost continuously and fought with gunpowder weapons, yet succession disputes devalued the spoils, its rulers could not pry money loose from local elites, and its innovations came from the West. His own model considers early modern warfare as a repeated tournament. Rulers spend resources to win a prize that cannot be shared, such as glory, territory, trade advantages, rights of succession, or victory over enemies of the faith, and the fighting improves their weapons through learning by doing. Four conditions must hold together for the technology to advance: evenly matched rulers must fight often; a valuable prize and politically cheap taxes and recruits must lead them to spend heavily; they must rely on gunpowder rather than on older technologies; and they must be able to copy innovations freely, including their enemies'. Only in Western Europe, Hoffman argues, did all four hold without interruption between about 1400 and 1800. In the 1780s France was devoting more than 7 percent of GDP to war and Britain 12 percent, well over twice the Chinese level; the rate of fire of French infantry rose tenfold between 1600 and 1750, and weapons grew cheaper relative to other manufactured goods. Elsewhere in Eurasia, in his account, innovation came in bursts and then subsided. China's emperors fought as often as European monarchs but usually against nomads, against whom mounted archers remained more effective than firearms, and a unified empire was large enough to deter rivals. Japanese warlords took up firearms quickly during the civil wars of the sixteenth century and devised new siege and infantry tactics, but unification under the Tokugawa shogunate removed the competition that had driven them. The Ottoman Empire divided its resources among cavalry, galleys, and gunpowder weapons, and because the janissaries spared its sultans any need to bargain with local elites, the Ottoman state never obtained the permanent taxes that such bargaining eventually gave European kings. Russia, whose Tsars could conscript serfs, joined the ranks of the great powers as the Ottomans left them. Falling behind in this one technology, Hoffman reminds, did not make these societies poorer or otherwise inferior. He traces the divergence to political history, which shaped each region through the short-run "political learning" of individual rulers and through slower cultural evolution, and to Western Christianity, whose independent papacy helped keep any one ruler from reuniting Europe. He rejects geographical explanations, and cites terrain data showing China to be the more mountainous, and finds no support for the idea that Europe's intermarried dynasties spared defeated monarchs, since rulers elsewhere in Eurasia fared no worse. Hoffman also asks why so much of the early conquest was carried out by private adventurers rather than by royal armies. European entrepreneurs could buy guns, hire veterans, and raise money through the joint-stock company, while their counterparts abroad met bans on foreign travel and trade in China and Japan, restrictions on private firearms in China and the Ottoman Empire, and an Islamic commercial law under which a partnership dissolved on a partner's death. In the nineteenth century glory and trade monopolies lost their hold and disputed prizes became easier to divide, leaving Europe in an armed peace. Even so, fiscal reform, conscription, and a growing stock of useful knowledge carried weapons development forward faster than before, now through research as much as through fighting. Conquest, according to Hoffman, brought ordinary Europeans little benefit, reminding readers how the British Empire ran at a loss between 1880 and 1912. He opposes the view that war and empire caused the British Industrial Revolution, crediting human capital and political institutions instead. The outcome was not inevitable: had Charlemagne's empire survived, or the Mongols never conquered China, world history might have run very differently.
Awards or honors Listed among the Bloomberg Businessweek’s Best Books of 2015
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