Hoffman (2026) — Why Europe?

Citation. Hoffman, Philip T. Why Europe? The Great Divergence and the West’s Rise to Global Predominance. Cambridge University Press, New Approaches to Economic and Social History, 2026.

Summary

Hoffman’s second book-length intervention in the divergence debate, a decade after the military-tournament argument of Why Did Europe Conquer the World? (2015). Where the 2015 book explained European military predominance through interstate competition, Why Europe? widens the lens to the divergence itself: why sustained economic growth originated in seventeenth-century northwestern Europe and nowhere else.

The account is an explicit synthesis of the institutionalist family of explanations. Hoffman attributes eighteenth-century northwestern European industrialization to four interconnected factors: (1) institutional protections for property rights; (2) state capacity strong enough to make property-rights arrangements credible — including the capacity to redistribute rights when growth required it; (3) cities, fed by productive agriculture, dense enough to function as innovation clusters; and (4) access to the ideas of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. Behind the four proximate factors he places deeper ultimate causes: Europe’s particular political and religious history, its intellectual inheritance, and its geographic distance from the Eurasian steppe.

The book is equally notable for what it rules out: Hoffman explicitly rejects slavery, colonialism, and “capitalism” as primary causes of the divergence, putting him in direct opposition to the empire-and-coerced-extraction position and the new-history-of-capitalism literature. Comparative chapters on France, Russia, the United States, Mexico, Japan, China, and Africa take the framework beyond the Britain-China axis to explain why growth spread so unevenly, with a recurring argument that inequality itself inhibits growth.

Key claims

• Sustained growth originated in seventeenth-century northwestern Europe; the causes are institutional and epistemic, not extractive.
• Four proximate factors did the work: secure property rights, credible state capacity, agriculture-enabled urban innovation clusters, and access to Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment ideas.
• The ultimate causes lie deeper: Europe’s history, religion, intellectual heritage, and distance from the steppe.
• Slavery, colonialism, and capitalism-as-such were not primary causes of the divergence.
• Mechanization’s payoff was extreme where the factors aligned — British cotton-yarn prices fell 93% between 1785 and 1825.
• Inequality inhibits growth, and its effects persist across decades — the framework’s main lever for explaining uneven diffusion (Mexico, Russia, Africa) as well as the original divergence.

Reception

Published June–July 2026; scholarly reviews are not yet in. The book’s positioning — a synthesis of the institutional, state-capacity, and useful-knowledge families by one of the state-competition school’s leading quantitative practitioners, against the empire-and-extraction school — makes it a likely reference point in the next round of the debate.