Why Did Europe Conquer the World? (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World, 54) Hardcover – June 30, 2015

In this book Mr. Hoffman purports to explain why the Western European countries were able to conquer the other areas of the world over the four centuries that began with the 16th century. His thesis is that Western Europe had developed much more advanced gunpowder-based military technologies, which he labels as “the gunpowder technology.” He states that these countries used this overwhelming technological advantage to subjugate the rest of the world by the end of the 19th century. More important to his thesis, Mr. Hoffman asserts that the Western European countries developed uniquely advanced gunpowder technology as a result of a history and culture of internecine warfare among themselves over many centuries. He defines a “tournament model” to describe the operation of this on-going military rivalry. The tournament model is a framework which incorporates considerations of opportunity for frequent conflict, the ability to raise resources for conflicts, and the rewards and outcomes from these conflicts. Analyzing all regions of the world using his tournament model, Hoffman argues that the conditions to create significant on-going advances in the gunpowder technology existed uniquely in Western Europe, and this set up the Europeans to successfully conquer of the rest of the world (although seldom each other).Overall Mr. Hoffman’s arguments for his thesis are unconvincing. Certainly the Europeans had better military technology and overwhelmed their opponents with it whenever they sought to expand their control beyond Europe. But Hoffman’s tournament model does not adequately explain why no Western European society was able to conquer the others and establish a hegemony (as ultimately occurred in China and Japan). The tournament model explains how a European ruler could raise the resources to start a war, but it does not examine the vastly larger scale of resources needed to achieve complete, dominant victory against an equally-sized, well-armed opponent with roughly equivalent technology. The major European nations could start wars against each other, but they couldn’t win them. And once the international alliances of the attacked became the norm in the 19th and 20th centuries (Napoleonic Wars, WW1 and WW2), the attacker only lost. The tournament model doesn’t address this dynamic.But that is not the only problem with using Hoffman’s tournament model to explain why the political dynamics of conflict in Western Europe were so unique that it drove the development of gunpowder technology faster than in any other region or civilization. Hoffman’s tournament model specifies four conditions for accelerated development of the military arts and technology that Hoffman attributes to regional success – “frequent war, massive military spending, heavy use of gunpowder technology…, and few obstacles to adopting military innovations.” Even as profiled in his book, it is difficult to see a difference in the frequency of war, against external and internal opponents, between Western Europe and the other major regions of the world. Armed conflict was common and nearly continuous, even for the hegemonies in China and Japan. Throughout history, all rulers devoted the resources needed to surviving the constant threat of conflicts. And all of the other regions had access to gunpowder technology, and some sooner than the Europeans. These aspects of Hoffman’s tournament model appear to be pushing a post hoc ergo propter hoc argument.It is the fourth requirement of the tournament model that is not just necessary, but also sufficient to explain the success of the Western Europeans. Western Europe accelerated their development of military technology over other regions only when their national production began to grow from the Great Enrichment. Their sheer volume of material production, with the larger resources for military expenditures that yielded, enabled them to accelerate the development of their military technology. These advances were enabled by the Western European Enlightenment, which was all about discovering and adopting innovations in all spheres, not just military technology. The unique philosophical revolution that started in the 16th century in Western Europe is what set that region apart, and made it possible for it to conquer the world.The Western European Enlightenment is what ultimately led to its military domination over the rest of the world. Certainly the Europeans had better military technology. But that is not the only reason why the Europeans were able to dominate the Stone Age hunter-gatherer tribes of North America, or the Bronze Age proto-writing civilizations of Meso and South America. European civilization was so much more advanced on so many dimensions that ascribing the advantage solely to gunpowder weapons is misleading. And quite apart from military technology, it didn’t hurt that European-based diseases decimated their opponents much more effectively than New World diseases killed off the invading Europeans. Later, Europe’s increasing military technology advantage was much more salient in the 19th century when the Europeans met up with the more advanced civilizations in India, China, Japan and the Middle East. These civilizations had had access to gunpowder technology for centuries, but they did not have the philosophical and cultural foundations to develop and exploit innovations like the Europeans did. The development of superior military technology was a consequence of the European philosophical revolution, not from a tournament of internecine warfare driven by political history.There are other disappointments with Hoffman’s book. Contrary to the title of the book, Hoffman doesn’t strictly explain, under his tournament model, why Europe conquered the world. At best, the tournament model explains what enabled the Europeans to do this. In the book he makes some side argument that there was frequent warfare in feudal Europe because it is what nobles and rulers were bred for. This seems weak and does not differentiate Europe from the military cultures that clearly existed in China, Japan, the Islamic world and the rest. The tournament model does not really address the root cause for war beyond some simplistic cost-benefit analysis and allusions to an honor culture.Finally and most importantly, Hoffman’s thesis misses the real point. Western European ideas, ideals and institutions from the Enlightenment were what really enabled those countries to conquer the rest of the world, and they were subsequently introduced to the conquered nations. Throughout the globe, Western European ideas, ideals and institutions still endure. All countries today at least pay lip service to the ideas of individual rights, rational scientific development, rule of law, representational government, and the rest of the Western philosophically-based innovations. This was the real and most important conquest. Unfortunately, Hoffman’s book does not recognize this.Hoffman notes that the Western European military conquests of the rest of the world have been unwound. But he overlooks the real conquest – Western European philosophies, ideals and institutions still reign. And that has almost nothing to do with “gunpowder technology” and a “tournament model.”

This is a book by an economist. As is de rigueur in their profession, it involves a number of economic equations. Mathematical expressions to explain why actors act the way they do. Economists are inclined to confess with some honesty that the models are not perfect, but they're the best that they have. Is there question is not the models don't work, but that no model is perfect.The model in this instance is the tournament model. It is kind of like game theory. If the costs of going to war are small, and the rewards are large, leaders will go to war. They get the glory, and the peasants get the shaft.That simple rule seemed to prevail in late medieval and early modern Europe. The countries were always at war. The kings and princes benefited from war. As the author points out with an impressive array of statistics, kings and princes rarely died when they lost, however many subjects may have died, and they gained great riches and renown when they won. If you were a sovereign, war was the thing to do.His thesis is that European powers were always at war, that war brought about innovation and improvements in technology, and that because Europe can was the first to innovate, especially with gunpowder, the singular most important invention of the period, they came to dominate the world.The author says that other people have had theories as to why the West came out dominant, and those theories are lacking. There is Jared Diamond's Guns Germs and Steel which posits that it was a matter of geography. The geography of Eurasia allowed agricultural technology to spread East-West and allowed the Eurasian peoples to develop civilization earlier. There is a trade argument. Once the Portuguese in particular learned open ocean navigation, the Europeans had advantage. They could trade easily with one another on the open Atlantic, as well as the Mediterranean. More than that, their ships carried them to the four corners of the earth. As Hoffman indicates, they were able to bring their war machines which were more effective than any of the locals they encountered. They were certainly vastly more effective than those of the Native Americans, Stone Age people who simply could not resist Pizarro, Cortez and the other conquistadores. But Europeans also dominated in Japan, India, Indonesia and other places where they touched down. Western technology simply overwhelmed the natives' ability to defend themselves. As always, as the author carefully points out, there was dissension among the tribes wherever they went, and certain of the locals found it beneficial to ally themselves with Europeans.To quote from the book, " Above all else, we want to explain improvements in the gunpowder technology and understand why the Europeans pushed it further than anyone else. We can distill what the model says on that subject into four essential conditions for advancing the gunpowder technology via learning by doing:"1. There must be frequent war. Rulers must therefore face similar political costs of mobilizing resources and must be battling for a prize that was valuable relative to the fixed cost of establishing a fiscal system and a military apparatus. There cannot be huge differences in the size of their countries or economies or their ability to borrow, although credit can allow the ruler of a small country to fight a larger opponent."2. Frequent war, though, is not enough, for rulers must also lavish huge sums on it. Once again, the prize must be valuable, but in addition, the rulers’ political costs of summoning resources must not only be similar, but low."3. Rulers must use the gunpowder technology heavily, and not older military technologies."4. Rulers must face few obstacles to adopting military innovations, even from opponents. Each of the four conditions is necessary with high probability: if one of them fails to hold, the gunpowder technology will likely fail to advance."Together, however, the four conditions are sufficient. When they all hold, learning by doing will in fact improve the gunpowder technology. Greater relevant knowledge (so the model also implies) will spur innovation to an even faster pace and ensure that it does not wane as the gunpowder technology ages."The author's attempts to mathematicise history, to devise formulas to explain his thesis, are interesting. It involves parametrizing historical financial data – productivity, GDP, prices – in a way that can be compared across very different cultures and across time. This is difficult enough. He then goes into the productivity of soldiers. How do you measure their productivity? Their killing efficiency? It is a bold effort even to attempt. By doing so, however, Hoffman gives good insight into the ways in which weaponry, tactics, and even the psychology of soldiering changed through the period under study.Though the introduction and first chapter would lead one to think otherwise, Hoffman is, in the end, quite modest in the claims he makes for his models. They are useful tools, but they are only that, a tool to augment the standard techniques of historical explanation.Hoffman's publisher being Princeton, a bastion of political correctness, may have led him to leave important variables out of his equation. He discusses evolutionary anthropologists at length. These academics would attribute differences in inventiveness to cultural factors. He makes no mention whatsoever of evolutionary psychologists, who have a lot to say about the evolution of intelligence. Other authors such as Harpending and Cochran, Clark and Wade write extensively about major, recent evolution among different peoples. Evolving intelligence would appear to be a variable not to be left out of the regression.Overall, a five-star effort. Hoffman's book has a lot of explanatory power, and it introduces a useful synthesis of tools for analysis of history.

I wanted to like this book. The thesis, that European military competition drove innovation such that Europeans were able to conquer the world has a certain plausibility. And he writes very well. And he has certainly managed to express his thesis mathematically. But I found it overly simplistic and the author seemed to agree, because he adduced the importance of political history as a differentiator. More discussion of this, as in Acemoglu's work Why Nations Fail , would have made it a much better book. As it is, I would know I would recommend Acemoglu' s book over this, if I had to choose. But I f you could have both this book is worth buying

Great book

puts things into a pragmatic, non-emotional perspective

This book explains some new theories about the reasons for European preponderance at the end of the XIX century. Reasoning is based on a series of mathematical models trying to predict the behaviour of different countries, particularly behaviour of ruling classes. The approach is interesting, even if some of the conclusions and assumptions can certainly be discussed. The mathematical models would need some more detail. At least in the e-book format they are difficult to follow (not because the mathematics are complex but because the formula are not well formatted). Clearly the book is based on more detailed studies and this is just a summary. Good, but more details would be needed to be really convincing.

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