Europeans Abroad, 1450–1750 by David Ringrose, and: Empires of the Weak: The Real Story of European Expansion and the Creation of the New World Order by J. C. Sharman

Abstract

Reviewed by: Europeans Abroad, 1450–1750 by David Ringrose, and: Empires of the Weak: The Real Story of European Expansion and the Creation of the New World Order by J. C. Sharman Gayle K. Brunelle Europeans Abroad, 1450–1750. By david ringrose. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018. 286 pp. Empires of the Weak: The Real Story of European Expansion and the Creation of the New World Order. By j. c. sharman. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019. 196 pp. In recent decades world historians and specialists in premodern Asian, African, and American history have produced a rich body of literature undermining the prevailing assumptions and orthodoxies of the field traditionally known as "the Age of European Expansion." These scholars eschew the Eurocentric perception that intrepid, enterprising early modern European sailors and soldiers sailed to unknown seas, forced open trade routes to European commerce using superior weaponry—gunpowder, improved ships, and steel—and created a global trade network and a set of European empires that by the nineteenth century had set the stage for Western global hegemony. A prevalent explanation for this "rise of Europe" is that Europe underwent a "military revolution" in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Europe developed not only innovative weaponry and tactics, but also a cultural dynamic, shaped by rivalries among European states that forced Europeans to learn, adapt, and improve their military and economic strategies and institutions at a quicker pace than other societies in Asia, Africa, or the New World. Thus, Europe was able, as Philip T. Hoffman puts it in Why Did Europeans Conquer the World? (2015), to become the dominant world power despite its lower population, smaller economy, and weaker institutions compared to many other polities in the premodern world. [End Page 463] Both Ringrose and Sharman take aim at the assumptions that, first, Europe was anything other than a relatively minor player in Asian trade networks prior to the nineteenth century, and second, that Europe's "military revolution" gave Europeans a meaningful edge over Asian, African, or New World polities. They also doubt that the global dominance Europe achieved in the "Second Wave" of European conquest and colonization during the nineteenth century can endure, and Sharman posits that it has already ended. Ringrose and Sharman posit that Europe's hegemony is already at an end and that the locus of world power is shifting back to where it has lain for most of world history—in Asia. Most of Empires of the Weak synthesizes the latest historical research on European expansion and imperialism during the early modern era (1500–1750), although the final chapter examines the "New Imperialism" of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Early modern European expansion, except for the Americas, took the form mostly of "trading post" colonies established with the sufferance of African and Asian polities that permitted Europeans to trade, but by no means considered them either a serious threat to their power or their principal commercial partners. Asia dominated the world and neither African nor Asian rulers had much to fear from Europeans, who deferred to the rulers of the territories in which they sought to establish colonies, most of them small settlements sponsored by companies of commerce and focused on trade rather than territorial expansion. Europe's conquest of territory in the New World was an anomaly, as was Europe's rise as a global power in the nineteenth century. Moreover, Sharman contends that Europe may have "won" in the period from 1850 until after World War II but has subsequently "lost" as postcolonial wars in the second half of the twentieth century denuded Europe of its colonial resources and the economic expansion of Asian nations in the twenty-first century has eroded Europe's economic and military dominance. In Sharman's view, European "exceptionalism," in terms of military, institutional, or cultural superiority in the early modernera, is a chimera. Instead, political culture explains why Europeans were able to dominate certainmaritimetraderoutes. Asian and African states made the strategic choice to focus their energies on expanding their land empires while tolerating European trade—which often was little more than disguised piracy—and permitted Europeans to establish coastal enclaves, again mostly fortified trading posts, because it suited their purposes...