Why Did Europe Conquer the World?

Voorkant
Princeton University Press, 30 jun 2015 - 288 pagina's

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.

 

Inhoudsopgave

Chapter 1 Introduction
1
Chapter 2 How the Tournament in Early Modern Europe Made Conquest Possible
19
Chapter 3 Why the Rest of Eurasia Fell Behind
67
Explaining the Difference between Western Europe and the Rest of Eurasia
104
Chapter 5 From the Gunpowder Technology to Private Expeditions
154
Chapter 6 Technological Change and Armed Peace in NineteenthCentury Europe
179
The Price of Conquest
205
Appendix A Model of War and Technical Change via Learning by Doing
215
Appendix B Using Prices to Measure Productivity Growth in the Military Sector
228
Appendix C Model of Political Learning
231
Appendix D Data for Tables 41 and 42
233
Appendix E Model of Armed Peace and Technical Change via Research
234
Acknowledgments
239
Bibliography
241
Index
263
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Over de auteur (2015)

Philip T. Hoffman is professor of business economics and professor of history at the California Institute of Technology.

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