Why Did Europe Conquer the World?

Philip T. Hoffman

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781400865840
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The startling economic and political answers behind Europe's historical dominance Between 1492 and 1914, Europeans conquered 84 percent of the globe. But why did Europe establish global dominance, when for centuries the Chinese, Japanese, Ottomans, and South Asians were far more advanced? In Why Did Europe Conquer the World?, Philip Hoffman demonstrates that conventional explanations—such as geography, epidemic disease, and the Industrial Revolution—fail to provide answers. Arguing instead for the pivotal role of economic and political history, Hoffman shows that if certain variables had been different, Europe would have been eclipsed, and another power could have become master of the world. Hoffman sheds light on the two millennia of economic, political, and historical changes that set European states on a distinctive path of development, military rivalry, and war. This resulted in astonishingly rapid growth in Europe's military sector, and produced an insurmountable lead in gunpowder technology. The consequences determined which states established colonial empires or ran the slave trade, and even which economies were the first to industrialize. Debunking traditional arguments, Why Did Europe Conquer the World? reveals the startling reasons behind Europe's historic global supremacy.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Imagine 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 advice—namely, avoid western Europe at all costs.¹ Why reside there, when it was poor, violent, politically chaotic, and by almost any yardstick, hopelessly backward? There were no cities, apart from Córdoba, 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 careful—if, say, you wandered down to the beach in Italy—you 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.² Or instead of the Middle East, you could opt for southern China, where political regimes would soon stabilize after a period of turmoil, allowing agriculture to advance and trade in tea, silk, and porcelain to flourish. Western Europeans, by contrast, had nothing that promising on the horizon—only continued raids by marauding Vikings.³

FIGURE 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 (figure 1.1).⁴ While 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 navies—Japan, 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 didn’t 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 Europe’s takeover. The Industrial Revolution began in Europe and gave Europeans tools—from repeating rifles to steam-powered gunboats—that 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.⁵ Why were they the ones with armed ships on every ocean, and 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.⁶

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 too—and not just Europeans—been 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.⁷ So if Chinese, Japanese, South Asian, or Middle Eastern invaders 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.

There are other problems with the argument about disease too, even if we focus on the Aztec and Inca Empires. The assumption is that epidemics (of smallpox and measles in particular) were the single driving force behind the catastrophic collapse of the two empires after the conquistadores arrived. If epidemics wiped out much of the native population (so the argument would go), then they must have destabilized Native American society and made conquest easy. There is evidence in favor of such an argument. Smallpox does seem to have struck the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, at the end of 1520, only months before Hernán Cortés captured the city. With the Aztec king among the many victims, the survivors had to confront Cortés under a new and inexperienced ruler, who had not yet had time to consolidate his authority. A similar case can be made for Francisco Pizarro’s conquest of the Inca Empire, for an epidemic killed the Inca ruler and helped to touch off a debilitating civil war that ended just as Pizarro arrived.⁸

The trouble, though, is that the demographic catastrophe in the Aztec and Inca Empires had multiple causes—and not just smallpox and measles—for otherwise the native population would have recovered even if the epidemics returned repeatedly. That at least is the conclusion of a demographic analysis that takes into account how populations react after being ravaged by new diseases like smallpox. And what kept the Native American population from recovering was the conquest itself, by wreaking havoc with their domestic life. Indians fled from warfare, and survivors were forced to work for the Europeans, often away from home, so that they could not provide their families with food. Indian women were also drawn into the conquerors’ households, often as their sexual partners. In short, it became much harder for the Native Americans to have children, making much of the population decline the result, not of disease, but of brutal conquest itself.⁹ But then the argument that traces the conquest of the Inca and Aztec Empires back to social dislocation brought on by epidemics is simply far too narrow, because there were other causes behind the plummeting population, including the devastation visited on the native population by the conquistadores themselves.

There are also doubts that smallpox could have even triggered the Inca civil war, because it was unlikely to have reached the Incas before Pizarro arrived.¹⁰ It does seem to have struck the Aztecs, but we have to keep in mind that it killed Cortés’s Indian allies too, although he could then replace their leaders with individuals loyal to him. We have to remember as well that many Aztecs survived the epidemic. Warriors were particularly likely to make it through, and there were enough of them to force Cortés to fight a bitter three-month siege before he finally took Tenochtitlan. The same was true for the Incas, whatever the epidemic was that had afflicted them. Despite all the deaths from disease, the Europeans therefore had to confront enemy units that were far larger than their own, even if they had native allies. The forces Pizarro faced when he entered the Inca Empire in 1532 were particularly daunting. He had only 167 men and no native allies, yet he managed to surprise the Inca imperial bodyguard of 5,000 to 6,000 men, crush them, and capture the emperor Atahualpa. He then extorted a ransom of 13 tons of silver and over 6 tons of gold (most of it melted down native artwork) before executing Atahualpa in 1533. For his brutal triumph against such odds, the rewards were gigantic—more than he and his men would have earned if they toiled for 250 years as laborers back in Spain. Nor was that the only victory against an overwhelming enemy. When the Incas rebelled in 1536, 190 conquistadores in the city of Cuzco successfully resisted a yearlong siege by an Inca army of over 100,000.¹¹

The Gunpowder Technology

How could the Europeans triumph against such numbers? As an answer, disease alone fails. And how could the Europeans go on to conquer 35 percent of the world by 1800, and even more by World War I, with much of the acquired territory in Asia, where the population was immune to crowd disease, or in Africa, where the Europeans themselves were vulnerable to tropical maladies?¹²

For some military historians, the answer is clear: the Europeans simply had better technology. Epidemics and divisions among the natives helped in the Americas, Australia, and the Pacific Islands, but technology gave the Europeans the edge, particularly against the centralized empires of the Aztecs and Incas. It helped even more when they sent armed ships to the Indian Ocean and began to get a toehold in Asia. And it was the reason they could ultimately take over much of southern and northern Asia and virtually all of Africa (figure 1.1).

What was the technology? It was, first and foremost, the weapons and defenses spawned by a military revolution that swept through early modern Europe (Europe between 1500 and 1800) as gunpowder transformed warfare: firearms, artillery, ships armed with guns, and fortifications that could resist bombardment. It also included older piercing and cutting weapons that had been honed during the Middle Ages and that remained an essential part of fighting with gunpowder, through at least the sixteenth century and even beyond: swords, protective armor, lances for cavalry, and pikes for infantry to protect against charging horsemen. And it was the tactics and methods of organization that made it possible to squeeze more and more out of the weapons and defenses: how to turn crews and soldiers into an imposing fighting force, how to provide them with supplies efficiently, and how to get them to operate with speed and discipline even when under fire. The technology here encompasses a lot, and intentionally so, because it has to embrace everything that made victory more likely, from weapons to training and administration. Leaving part of the technology out in order to focus on the weapons alone would be a bit like trying to analyze the impact of computers by considering only the hardware and ignoring software and the Internet. As with computers, all the various parts of the gunpowder technology played a role in the European conquest, and they complemented one another and were continuously changing over time. Pikes, for example, defended musketeers against a cavalry charge, but they were eventually replaced by bayonets and disappeared by the early eighteenth century. The reason for all the change was that from the late Middle Ages on, Europeans were forever making the whole broad gunpowder technology mo...