Empires of the Weak: The Real Story of European Expansion and the Creation of the New World Order.

• Author: Hare, J. Laurence

J.C. Sharman, Empires of the Weak: The Real Story of European Expansion and the Creation of the New World Order. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020. xii + 196 pp. Hardcover, $27.95.

Within a brisk volume spanning three chapters and 151 pages, international relations specialist J.C. Sharman sets out to dismantle one of the more persistent interpretations explaining the emergence of Western European global hegemony. His target is the notion that European powers prevailed through a set of military and technological advantages derived from the unique circumstances of their own embattled, fractured, and violent continent. The so-called military revolution hypothesis has done much to explain how relatively small European forces seemed to enjoy unprecedented success in a period of global expansion lasting from the late fifteenth through the late eighteenth centuries. Yet, as its title suggests, Empires of the Weak argues otherwise. "Expansion," Sharman argues, "was as much a story of European deference and subordination as one of domination" (p. 2).

Sharman begins by carefully defining the hypothesis, drawing on such seminal essays in the field as Michael Roberts' "The Military Revolution, 1560-1660," and Charles Tilly's "War Making and State Making as Organized Crime," along with Geoffrey Parker's 1996 monograph, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500-1800. He then offers a point-by-point refutation of both its premises and implications, utilizing newer literature on the history of encounters in Mexico, Peru, South and Southeast Asia, North Africa, and even within continental Europe. The examples are meant to demonstrate the ways in which Europeans were unable to utilize tactics from battlefields back home, how in many cases Europeans were outnumbered, outgunned, and outmaneuvered by their opponents overseas, and how the diffusion of tactics and technology not only flowed in multiple directions and from multiple sources, but also proved at times less advantageous than commonly believed. At the same time, Sharman challenges related hypotheses of the role of European states in military and commercial conquest through a close examination of private entities such as the Dutch and English East India Companies, and by showing how competing powers, notably the Ottoman Empire, exhibited far more innovative and versatile military and organizational strategies.

The result, Sharman reveals, was not a...