How the West Conquered the World

“For the aborigines, after the landing of the Europeans in America, gradually vanished at the breath of European activity.” — Hegel

For the last five-hundred years, a small number of states and their settler-colonies have dominated world affairs. This powerful club hails from a part of the world that, for most of human history, was considered a cultural and technological backwater.

Then, in a short period of time, these states sprang to immense global significance. Almost the entire world became their colonial possessions and the few who escaped this fate were still subject to its harsh treaties and general whims. Even now, though their formal colonialism has mostly disappeared, much of the world is still beholden to the linguistic, cultural, economic, and political heritage of their rule.

I am of course speaking of Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, the United States, Russia, and all the other powerful states that are part of the imagined community known as “the West”.

But how did these countries achieve this immense power in the first place? How did seven percent of the world’s landmass and fourteen percent of its population (in 1492) come to dominate world affairs for over five hundred years? That is the question that the acclaimed historian Geoffrey Robinson set out to answer in his 1998 book The Military Revolution.

The answer is not, as he explains, the industrial revolution. That process did not really begin to take off until the late 18th century and by that time almost 35% of the world was under European control. Nor was the answer, as Hegel suggests, the cultural or scientific advancement of the Europeans. European culture had a limited appeal in indigenous societies and when it did exist, it was often mutual. Furthermore, the scientific gap that would eventually arise between “the West and the rest” was, at the time, fairly small. In fact, many Europeans were awestruck by the cultural and technological richness of Asian and indigenous American societies.

The answer lies in the military prowess of the Europeans compared to the rest of the world. In Robinson’s words: “in large measure ‘the rise of the West’ depended upon the exercise of force.”

During late medieval and early modern period, the nature of warfare among European polities underwent a significant transformation. Virtually constant, large-scale wars between European polities led to innovations such as mass armies equipped with gunpowder, fortress-busting artillery, durable war-ships, and tactical innovations which in turned produced a method of warfare that was unrivaled by most of the non-European world. Aztecs, Incan, Indonesians, Indians, and many Africans all fell to the brutal conquests of the West.

In the advanced Aztec and Incan empires, large masses of troops were defeated by small consortiums of Spanish forces. In the Mughal Empire, tens of thousands of trained soldiers were unable to overtake only a few hundred Dutch troops behind their modern fortresses. Only in a few polities such as China, Korea, and Japan where military practices were roughly to the standards of the West (or were at least able to adapt to them) were the Europeans held at bay. Even these nations would eventually fall to great imperial innovation of the 19th century: the armored steam-ship.

Robinson’s book is a well needed reminder that global dominance — shockingly — is rarely a peaceful affair. Throughout history, global empires have almost always been forged by violence and terror and rarely (if ever) by “invitation.”

Of course, the imperialist will always deny it. Just as Hegel attributed the “gradually vanish[ing]” of indigenous peoples to their “psychically powerless” nature, so did the Stalinists attribute the rise of their empire in Eastern Europe to the “spontaneous passions of the oppressed working classes.”

That’s the story, but as Robinson shows, the history is different.