Empires of the Weak: The Real Story of European Expansion and the Creation of the New World Order - book review

Professor J.C. Sharman is Professor of International Relations in the Department of Politics and International Studies at Cambridge. Prof. Sharman has worked as a consultant with the World Bank, Asian Development Bank and other organizations.

"conventional answer asserts that superior technology, tactics, and institutions forged by Darwinian military competition gave Europeans a decisive advantage in war over other civilizations from 1500 onward.

In contrast, Empires of the Weak argues that Europeans actually had no general military superiority in the early modern era."

This book "shows instead that European expansion from the late fifteenth to the late eighteenth centuries is better explained by deference to strong Asian and African polities, disease in the Americas, and maritime supremacy earned by default because local land-oriented polities were largely indifferent to war and trade at sea".

"Sharman contends that the imperialism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a relatively transient and anomalous development in world politics that concluded with Western losses in various insurgencies. If the twenty-first century is to be dominated by non-Western powers like China, this represents a return to the norm for the modern era."

Asians as Empire Builders and Globalists

"The greatest conquerors and empire-builders of the early modern era were in fact Asian empires, from the Ottomans in the Near East, to the Mughals in South Asia, and the Ming and Manchu Qing in China. Giving due attention to these great powers helps to correct the Eurocentrism that has so often biased earlier studies".

"But in fact, for more than half the time there has been a global international system, it was not dominated by the West."

The author questions and refutes the common claim that Europeans were the empire builders, and that Europeans started globalization and globally connected world. Asia and Asian Empires connected the world as much as Europeans did.

Europeans as opportunists but not militarily superior

Europeans usually had to be subordinate to get trade concessions. And when they fought the Asians, they generally lost.

"Europeans adopted a general position of deference and subordination to the manifestly more powerful empires of Asia, from Persia, to the Mughals, to China and Japan".

There was no single cause which led to European opportunists finally establishing their empire. "it disconfirms the idea of a single path to military effectiveness, of sequences of necessary and sufficient causes, either technological or tactical, by which war makes states".

"European coercion of weaker African and Asian actors rested on the cultivation of local allies, and military, logistical, political, and cultural adaptations to varying local contexts".

In case of Americas, it was "disease and demography that laid low the most powerful empires, and consistently sapped the strength of indigenous resistance thereafter".

This is true today as well. "Even the United States has experienced more defeats than victories against non-Western forces over the last half-century".

European exceptionalism debunked

"new studies of other regions have increasingly debunked claims of European exceptionalism. As one historian puts it: Any time someone argues that Europe had an advantage in a given area–say property rights, or per capita income, or labor productivity, or cannon manufacture– along comes an Asian historian pointing out that that claim is false.

The case for European exceptionalism has unraveled like a ball of string".

Why Europeans succeeded?

There is no good answer amongst historians.

"Yet this process of discerning “what worked” is by no means as easy as it sounds. Victory and loss in war are a result of complex and varying combinations of factors, many of the most important of which, like leadership and morale, are intangible".

"For historians for example, the British defeat of the Qing Chinese forces in the First Opium War 1839–1842 is an un-equivocal and paradigmatic demonstration of China’s technological and institutional military backwardness compared with Western forces. Yet China’s rulers diagnosed this defeat as the result of poor leadership and treachery, rather than indicating any systematic problem or a need for wide-ranging reforms".

The author argues neither culture, nor institutions, nor technology, and nor tactics can explain Europes success. Perhaps it was all. Perhaps it was luck. Perhaps it was incompetence, lapses, dopiness, and treachery of Asians themselves. Perhaps it was a combination of all. Perhaps Europeans perservered and dared.

Summary

Europeans saw an opportunity to colonize the world and took it inspite of not being militarily stronger. They were also lucky.

They were helped by diseases in American natives; and indifference of native rulers to global changes, maritime trade, and sea based warfare.

Technology, institutions, culture probably helped. But Asian historians blame their own "poor leadership and treachery".

There is no good answer amongst historians why and how they succeeded.

There was no magic bullet like superior culture, religion, values, institutions, weapons, tactics etc. Some of these attributes could have been better in Europeans, but were they better enough to overcome great empires in battle? The author doesn't think so.

He gives example of European institutions and says "Rather than distinguishing modern, professional, rational organizations from their backward, primitive equivalents in centuries past, however, Meyer believes that the former are just as likely to be in thrall to myth and ritual as the latter".

"Organizational life is perhaps closer to the theater of the absurd, or satirical send-ups of corporate life like Dilbert cartoons or the television series The Office, than it is to the economic theory of the firm or the tenets of management text-books. Yet organizational life is nonetheless far from meaningless. Instead, the nature and activities of organizations are oriented out-ward to gain legitimacy, which outweighs all other priorities short of a direct and immediate threat to organizational survival. Organizations are products of their environment".

Sam logic applies to culture. "In keeping with much recent military history, I stress the importance of culture. But 'culture' is one of the most vague and slippery terms used by scholars".

Military effectiveness is unlikely to be a factor either. "the determinants of military effectiveness were, and by all indications still are, highly diverse and variable".


How did Europe establish a global colonial empire? Europeans saw an opportunity [good timing] to colonize the world and took it inspite of not being militarily stronger. They were also lucky.

"imperialism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a relatively transient and anomalous development in world politics".

21st century will see return of power to Asia.






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