Hoffman (2015) — Why Did Europe Conquer the World?

Citation. Hoffman, Philip T. Why Did Europe Conquer the World?. Princeton University Press, 2015.

Summary

A formal-economic take on the state-competition-and-war thesis. Hoffman models European state competition as a tournament among roughly comparable fragments in which each state had to adopt the best available military technology or be conquered. The result: a rapid, sustained increase in European military-productivity (artillery, ship-of-the-line design, military organization, fiscal-military state capacity) that outpaced every other civilization over 1500–1800. By the 19th century, European military technology was sufficient to project power globally, enabling the territorial empire-building that then fed back into economic development.

The book is quantitatively precise, connects to Patrick O’Brien’s fiscal-military-state work, and grounds the otherwise qualitative Jones argument in game-theoretic competitive dynamics. The military-productivity time series are particularly striking.

Key claims

• Political fragmentation is a necessary condition for sustained military-technological innovation; unified empires do not produce equivalent innovation because they face no equivalent competitive pressure.
• European state competition between 1500 and 1800 generated an arms-race dynamic that drove rapid gunpowder-technology and naval improvement.
• Military-technical superiority by the 18th–19th century enabled global European territorial expansion and the associated economic consequences (empire, extraction, commercial-network expansion).
• Europe’s conquest of the world was a consequence of intra-European competition, not of unique European cultural or institutional virtues.
• The state-competition mechanism provides the causal bridge between Jones’s fragmentation thesis and the observed divergence.