What explains the rise of the West over the rest over the past 500 years? To J.C. Sharman, the answer is emphatically not military superiority. The military revolution hypothesis, as promulgated by Michael Roberts and Geoffrey Parker, argues that Darwinian selection in military tactics, technology, and supporting institutions in early modern Europe allowed this region to outcompete those overseas and led to their subjugation. In the five short chapters of his book, Sharman deftly dissects and rejects this thesis. He finds that, in contrast to overweening dominance, European ventures were marked by failure as much as by success. Instead of a path dependent and Eurocentric narrative of competition leading to global hegemony, Sharman shows how the outcome of each inter-regional engagement was highly contingent on local cooperation, time period, and other non-European factors, revealing the weakness and haphazardness of European imperialism as a whole.

One key argument Sharman makes is that there was substantial regional heterogeneity in European approaches to imperialism, many of which are missing from the military revolution thesis. Take, for example, the Iberian conquest of the Americas in the sixteenth century covered in the book’s first chapter. The image of a small band of conquistadors arriving with muskets and horses to decimate major civilizations like the Aztecs and Incas appears to support the claim of European military superiority. However, Sharman echoes other scholars in pointing out the role of European diseases in wreaking carnage on native populations more than martial might. These American forays also differed from how Europeans engaged with themselves and with other regions. If the military revolution hypothesis were true, then the same tactics, technologies, and army sizes honed through European combat should have been used in the Americas as well. Instead, European forces typically fought hand-to-hand instead of with gunpowder, were dispatched abroad in much smaller forces, and were financed privately. European success owed as much to support from local allies as to disease, neither of which was part of the original hypothesis.

Sharman argues that early European expansion into Africa also fits poorly with claims of military superiority. Unlike in the Americas, Europeans themselves suffered losses from disease relative to locals, who had access to similar military technology through more frequent interactions and trade. Similar to their initial forays into the Middle East and Asia, European success in Africa was mainly limited to coasts that capitalized on sturdier ship construction and heavier artillery, but rarely made inroads to the interior. Without their maritime technology, Europeans had no material advantage and it was not until the nineteenth century that they decisively colonized the continent. Earlier maritime conquest may also represent more a lack of interest on the part of comparably advanced civilizations as opposed to military inferiority. Sharman gives examples of both land and sea-based conflicts between European powers and the Ottoman empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to show comparability in military technology and supporting institutions. European superiority was evident only starting in the eighteenth century, owing as much to internal Ottoman dysfunction as to Western innovation.

To Sharman, conflating European expansion before the eighteenth century and European dominance after is problematic. Like the Ottoman decline, the European victories in China were due in part to the delay in military engagement until the nineteenth century, Qing government weakness, and the disruption of the Taiping rebellion. The nineteenth century period of high imperialism postdates the original formulation of the military revolution hypothesis and still reflected variance with how Europeans waged war with themselves. Moreover, to Sharman the process of decolonization in the twentieth century, successful insurgencies against larger Western powers, and the resurgence of India and China in recent decades all give the lie to how persistent were the effects of military advantage.

Somewhat less compelling is Sharman’s distinction between state-sponsored imperialism and that of chartered corporations like the Dutch East Indies Company (VOC) and the English East India Company (EIC) in Chapter Two. Even without direct state administration, like the Spanish conquistadors that preceded them these institutions were effectively colonial arms of their states, marshalling the same technologies and resources and having the authority to wage violence. As discussed by Douglass North, John Wallis, and Barry Weingast in their book Violence and Social Orders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), impersonal organizations like the VOC and EIC could only emerge in certain types of states and were pioneered in western Europe before other regions. If the military revolution hypothesis includes the development of state capacity and attendant financing for war, it is unclear why these institutions should be excluded from discussion.

Given Sharman’s critique of the general tenets of the military revolution hypothesis, why does the theory still resonate in the literatures of development, international relations, and political economy? Sharman posits that this reflects both the disproportionate amount of scholarship on Europe relative to other world regions and a bias from post hoc rationalization. As the world is currently dominated by Western countries, it would be easy to see path dependence for the victors and fundamental weaknesses to the vanquished after the fact. Neither of these views persuades Sharman, as he argues in his closing chapter that Western dominance is now in question and vulnerable to the same re-evaluation.

Readers will welcome Sharman’s skepticism as an antidote to conventional interpretations of Western triumphalism and be encouraged to pursue scholarship with a more global perspective. If there is any major limitation to this work, it is that its scope is too narrowly defined. A point-by-point rebuttal is useful in reconsidering the applicability of the military revolution thesis, but Sharman fails to offer an alternative that is also testable and falsifiable. The book’s brevity leaves many unanswered questions, such as whether one can separate military advantage from imperialism and by extension economic development. If the United States can be considered an heir to Western military hegemony, do we include Meiji Japan and modern China as well given their adoption of similar Western technologies and institutions? If historical contingency and ineluctable differences among cultures and societies are at the heart of all international relations, do we abandon attempts to identify underlying patterns? Sharman concludes his book by asking readers to be more thoughtful about what historical questions to ask in order to better understand where we are from, where we are, and where we go from here. This last question is one that we can also ask him.