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11/15/2016 How Europe Conquered the World

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Wednesday, October 7, 2015


How Europe Conquered the World
The Spoils of a Single-Minded Focus on War
Philip T. Hoffman

Philip T. Hoffman isRea A. and Lela G. Axline Professor of Business Economics and Professor
of History at Caltech. He is author, most recently, of Why Did Europe Conquer the World? [1]
(Princeton University Press, 2015).

Between 1492 and 1914, Europeans conquered 84 percent of the globe [2], establishing colonies
and spreading their inuence across every inhabited continent. This was not inevitable. In fact,
for decades, historians, social scientists, and biologists have wondered: Why and how did
Europe rise to the top [3], even when societies in Asia and the Middle East were far more
advanced?

So far, satisfactory answers have been elusive [4]. But this question is of the utmost importance
given that Europes power determined everything from who ran the slave trade [5] to who grew
rich or remained mired in poverty.

One might think the reasons for Europes dominance obvious: the Europeans were the rst to
industrialize [6], and they were immune to the diseases, such as smallpox [7], that devastated
indigenous populations. But the latter reason alone cannot explain the conquest of the Americas,
since many young Native American warriors survived the epidemics. And it fails to explain
Europes colonization of India [8], since the Indians had similar immunity. Industrialization also
falls short as an explanation: the Europeans had taken control of more than 35 percent of the
planet even before they began to industrialize. Of course, the lead Europeans took in developing
the technology of guns, armed ships, and fortications was critical. But all the other major
civilizations in Asia had the same gunpowder technology, and many of them also fought with
guns.

So what did contribute to Europes success? Mostly, it derived from the incentives that political
leaders faced in Europe [9]incentives that drove them not just to make war, but also to spend
huge sums on it. Yes, the European monarchs built palaces, but even the huge Chateau at
Versailles cost King Louis XIV less than two percent of his tax revenue. The rest went to ghting
wars [10]. He and the other kings in Europe had been raised since childhood to pursue glory on
the battleeld, yet they bore none of the costs involvednot even the risk of losing their thrones
after a defeat. Leaders elsewhere faced radically different incentives,, which kept many of them
militarily weak. In China, for example, emperors were encouraged to keep taxes low and to
attend to peoples livelihoods rather than to pursue the sort of military glory that obsessed
European kings.

For this and a variety of other reasons, leaders outside of Europe could not match Europes
innovations in warfare innovation. The huge sums of money showered on ghting in Europe [12]
gave military leaders the exibility to buy new weapons and battleships and try out new tactics,
fortications, and methods of supply. In the process, they learned from their mistakes and
improved their technologies. And because European countries were small and geographically
close, they could easily learn from their rivals errors and copy their improvements. When the
Swedish King Gustavus Adolphus constructed one of the earliest two-decked gunships in 1628,
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11/15/2016 How Europe Conquered the World

for example, it sank shortly after setting sail. But the Swedish navy and other navies across
Europe swiftly learned from this failure, and by the eighteenth century they were building
warships with two or more gun decks that were not only stable, but also had a longer range and
were more maneuverable than seventeenth-century warships.

Outside of Europe, political and military conditions kept war innovations, particularly new
gunpowder technology, from being advanced at the same relentless pace. China, for instance,
had far less tax revenue to spend on the military than the Europeans did. In the late eighteenth
century, per-capita taxes were 15 times higher in France than in China, and 40 times higher in
England, and much of the tax money China did collect went not toward new forms of ghting but
to aid archers on horseback, who were far more effective than musketeers in ghting the nomads
who had long been Chinas major enemy. Whats more, China was often the dominant power in
East Asia, so fewer rivals dared to challenge it, which meant it had little incentive to spend
heavily on its military. As a result, there was simply less use for gunpowder weapons in East
Asia.

Europe, by contrast, had no such dominant power. And once the Western Europeans took the
lead in pushing gunpowder technology forward, it was hard for China to catch up; the center of
progress was a continent away.

Europes military lead continued into the nineteenth century. Tax revenues rose as Europe
industrialized, and the innovations from the Industrial Revolutionapplied science and
engineeringmade it possible for Europeans to improve their technology not just by waging war,
but also by conducting research, which magnied what the Europeans learned on the battleeld.

By 1914, Europe had not only achieved global military dominance, it also had powerful states
that could raise huge sums of tax revenue to fund wars. In France [13] and Germany [14], real per-
capita tax revenue had increased 15 fold or more over the previous two centuries. That
enormous capacity to tax went well beyond what can be explained by the higher per capita
incomes that industrialization brought to Europe. It was the result of the same kind of learning
that advanced the gunpowder technology. The only difference was that here the learning
involved economics rather than military technology, and the rewards went to political leaders who
successfully bargained with the elites to boost tax revenues. The leaders then used the added
tax revenue to expand and equip their armies and navies.

Europes ability to tax was no small achievement. China could not raise equivalent tax revenues,
even in the nineteenth century. And countries in sub-Saharan Africa today still lack the basic
capacity to tax, which keeps them from providing security and other basic public goods to their
citizens.

Europe had yet another advantage as well: its entrepreneurs were free to use gunpowder
technology to mount expeditions of conquest, colonization, and militarized trade. Although they
usually needed ofcial permission to launch a voyage, entrepreneurs were often encouraged by
authorities eager to nd riches abroad. And they had no trouble acquiring weapons or nding
battle-hardened veterans to train military novices who joined their undertakings. By the
seventeenth century, such private expeditions had spawned gigantic enterprises that raised huge
sums on Europes burgeoning capital markets to nance ventures abroad, enterprises such as
the Dutch East India Company, which was not only a private arm of Dutch foreign policy, but also
the rst business to issue tradable shares of stock.

A nal difference between Europe and the rest of the world lies in political history. From 221 B.C.
onward, China, more often than not, was unied in a large empire. The Chinese empire soon
developed a centralized bureaucracy that drew local elites into government service and gave
them a stake in the empires survival. The rewards of government service helped hold the empire
together, and as long as the empire was strong and unied, other East Asian powers hesitated to
attack it. This meant that China had little incentive to seek out new enemies or opportunities.

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11/15/2016 How Europe Conquered the World

Western Europe, by contrast, experienced no such lasting unication after the collapse of the
Roman Empire. What it endured instead were centuries of warfare by bands of warriors whose
leaders resembled modern-day warlords. The incessant ghting groomed leaders who were
victorious in war. The conict also generated enduring enmities between leaders and their
followers, enmities that eventually hardened into lasting political borders. It was such ill willand
not Europes physical geographythat kept any single leader from ever uniting Western Europe
in the sort of durable empire that prevailed for centuries in China. In the long run, the winners in
Western Europe were the military leaders who learned how to impose heavy taxes to fund their
ghting, and as a result, Europe ended up with kings who spent pharaonic sums on warfare and
who had, in the words of Machiavelli, no object, thought, or profession but war.

Without a single-minded focus on war and the extraordinary ability to tax, there may never have
been any European empires. The wars and the taxes lavished on them gave the Europeans an
enormous lead in military technology. This enabled their conquests, and allowed them to keep
native populations under control without stationing large numbers of European troops abroad.
Without such advantages, the Europeans might have grown rich anywayand perhaps even
industrialized earlybut they would not have dominated the world in 1914.

Copyright 2016 by the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.


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Source URL: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/europe/2015-10-07/how-europe-conquered-world

Links
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Conquer-Princeton-Economic-History-Western-
ebook/dp/B00U58Y4EA/ref=la_B001HD41UO_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1444669075&sr=1-
1&renements=p_82%3AB001HD41UO%2Cp_n_feature_browse-bin%3A618073011
[2] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/2015-08-13/why-did-europe-conquer-world
[3] http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10452.html
[4] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/europe/1962-10-01/farewell-empire
[5] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/capsule-review/1998-03-01/slave-trade-story-atlantic-slave-trade-1440-1870-
making-new-world
[6] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/review-essay/1998-03-01/geography-destiny-brief-history-economic-growth
[7] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/capsule-review/1999-05-01/born-die-disease-and-new-world-conquest-1492-
1650-numbers-nowhere
[8] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/search?qs=india
[9] https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/hss-prod-storage.cloud.caltech.edu/people_personal_assets/images/Hoffman-
Why-Was-It-Europeans.pdf
[10] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/review-essay/why-they-fought
[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Rebellion_of_1857
[12] https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/hss-prod-storage.cloud.caltech.edu/people_personal_assets/Hoffman-
Prices-the-Military-Revo.pdf
[13] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/search?qs=france
[14] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/search?qs=germany

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