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An accessible survey of the history of European overseas empires in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries based on new scholarship In this thematic survey, Gabriel Paquette focuses on the evolution of the Spanish, Portuguese, English, French, and Dutch overseas empires in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He draws on recent advances in the field to examine their development, from efficacious forms of governance to coercive violence. Beginning with a narrative overview of imperial expansion that incorporates recent critiques of older scholarly approaches, Paquette then analyzes the significance of these empires, including their political, economic, and social consequences and legacies. He makes the multifaceted history of Europe’s globe-spanning empires in this crucial period accessible to new readers.
The European Union will remain united, but incomplete, asymmetrical and with undefined borders. The EU, which is much more than a common market, but less than a super-state or federation, can be conceived as an "empire." With this approach, Josep Colomer analyzes the current Europe's dilemmas: the vanishing of the states' sovereignty, the core role of Germany, the border conflicts with the neighboring Russian Empire, the differences between the euro-zone and the other member-states, and the malaise of the United Kingdom and the temptation of Brexit. 'This essay will be of clear and lasting value to a range of actors on the international stage. It is erudite and scholarly, yet accessible and elegantly written, using humor and colorful metaphors to simplify a complex subject that is often treated in a dry and abstract way. The argument is innovative, yet confident and convincing.' Helen Margetts, University of Oxford, UK 'Josep M. Colomer's 'The European Empire' offers an easily readable discussion of the ways in which the European Union has developed and deals with ongoing challenges, by underlying its achievements but also its shortcomings. Clearly written for a broader audience.' Simon Hug, Universite de Geneve, Switzerland"
What accounts for the rise of the state, the creation of the first global system, and the dominance of the West? The 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. J. C. Sharman 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. Europeans were overawed by the mighty Eastern empires of the day, which pioneered key military innovations and were the greatest early modern conquerors. Against the view that the Europeans won for all time, 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. Bringing a revisionist perspective to the idea that Europe ruled the world due to military dominance, Empires of the Weak demonstrates that the rise of the West was an exception in the prevailing world order.
This book offers a strikingly new perspective on EU enlargement. Basing his findings on substantial empirical evidence, Zielonka presents a carefully argued account of the kind of political entity the European Union is becoming, with particular reference to recent enlargement.
A pioneering comparative history of European decolonization from the formal ending of empires to the postcolonial European present.
The Oxford Handbook of the Ends of Empire offers the most comprehensive treatment of the causes, course, and consequences of the collapse of empires in the twentieth century. The volume's contributors convey the global reach of decolonization, analysing the ways in which European, Asian, and African empires disintegrated over the past century.
The startling economic and political answers behind Europe's historical dominance Between 1492 and 1914, Europeans conquered 84 percent of the globe. But why did Europe establish global dominance, when for centuries the Chinese, Japanese, Ottomans, and South Asians were far more advanced? In Why Did Europe Conquer the World?, Philip Hoffman demonstrates that conventional explanations—such as geography, epidemic disease, and the Industrial Revolution—fail to provide answers. Arguing instead for the pivotal role of economic and political history, Hoffman shows that if certain variables had been different, Europe would have been eclipsed, and another power could have become master of the world. Hoffman sheds light on the two millennia of economic, political, and historical changes that set European states on a distinctive path of development, military rivalry, and war. This resulted in astonishingly rapid growth in Europe's military sector, and produced an insurmountable lead in gunpowder technology. The consequences determined which states established colonial empires or ran the slave trade, and even which economies were the first to industrialize. Debunking traditional arguments, Why Did Europe Conquer the World? reveals the startling reasons behind Europe's historic global supremacy.
This open access book analyses Iberian expansion by using knowledge accumulated in recent years to test some of the most important theories regarding Europe’s economic development. Adopting a comparative perspective, it considers the impact of early globalization on Iberian and Western European institutions, social development and political economies. In spite of globalization’s minor importance from the commercial perspective before 1750, this book finds its impact decisive for institutional development, political economies, and processes of state-building in Iberia and Europe. The book engages current historiographies and revindicates the need to take the concept of composite monarchies as a point of departure in order to understand the period’s economic and social developments, analysing the institutions and societies resulting from contact with Iberian peoples in America and Asia. The outcome is a study that nuances and contests an excessively-negative yet prevalent image of the Iberian societies, explores the difficult relationship between empires and globalization and opens paths for comparisons to other imperial formations.
After Empires describes how the end of colonial empires and the changes in international politics and economies after decolonization affected the European integration process. Until now, studies on European integration have often focussed on the search for peaceful relations among the European nations, particularly between Germany and France, or examined it as an offspring of the Cold War, moving together with the ups and downs of transatlantic relations. But these two factors alone are not enough to explain the rise of the European Community and its more recent transformation into the European Union. Giuliano Garavini focuses instead on the emergence of the Third World as an international actor, starting from its initial economic cooperation with the creation of the United Nations Conference for Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in 1964 up to the end of unity among the countries of the Global South after the second oil shock in 1979-80. Offering a new - less myopic - way to conceptualise European history more globally, the study is based on a variety of international archives (government archives in Europe, the US, Algeria, Venezuela; international organizations such as the EC, UNCTAD, and the World Bank; political and social organizations such as the Socialist International, labour archives and the papers of oil companies) and traces the reactions and the initiatives of the countries of the European Community, but also of the European political parties and public opinion, to the rise and fall of the Third World on the international stage.
Empires and Barbarians presents a fresh, provocative look at how a recognizable Europe came into being in the first millennium AD. With sharp analytic insight, Peter Heather explores the dynamics of migration and social and economic interaction that changed two vastly different worlds--the undeveloped barbarian world and the sophisticated Roman Empire--into remarkably similar societies and states. The book's vivid narrative begins at the time of Christ, when the Mediterranean circle, newly united under the Romans, hosted a politically sophisticated, economically advanced, and culturally developed civilization--one with philosophy, banking, professional armies, literature, stunning architecture, even garbage collection. The rest of Europe, meanwhile, was home to subsistence farmers living in small groups, dominated largely by Germanic speakers. Although having some iron tools and weapons, these mostly illiterate peoples worked mainly in wood and never built in stone. The farther east one went, the simpler it became: fewer iron tools and ever less productive economies. And yet ten centuries later, from the Atlantic to the Urals, the European world had turned. Slavic speakers had largely superseded Germanic speakers in central and Eastern Europe, literacy was growing, Christianity had spread, and most fundamentally, Mediterranean supremacy was broken. Bringing the whole of first millennium European history together, and challenging current arguments that migration played but a tiny role in this unfolding narrative, Empires and Barbarians views the destruction of the ancient world order in light of modern migration and globalization patterns.