In this book, Philip T. Hoffman provides a compelling and impressively expansive account of Europe’s roughly five-hundred-year rise to global ascendancy. Given its lack of political, cultural, and economic development in relation to thriving societies in China, India, and the Middle East, medieval Europe’s transition from a backwater to the conqueror of much of the world is a fruitful topic of research and debate. Hoffman argues that this dominance was far from inevitable and that a forecaster operating in the tenth century would almost certainly have been unable to predict the scope of European military conquests over the centuries that followed.

Hoffman proposes that the key factor allowing western Europe to overtake its other Eurasian rivals and conquer most of the world was a tournament-style competition between Europe’s fragmented rulers. According to Hoffman, this ‘tournament’ stimulated consistent and sustained improvements to gunpowder technology, giving Europeans a decisive edge in their conflicts throughout the Americas, Africa, and Asia. For Hoffman, this tournament model provides stronger explanatory power than earlier theories regarding the divergence between Europe and the rest of the world such as geography, epidemic disease, or a greater frequency of warfare within medieval and early modern Europe. Hoffman successfully refutes many of these older theories and makes a strong case for the importance of continually evolving improvements to gunpowder technology in facilitating Europe’s global territorial conquests during the early modern period.

An economic historian, Hoffman relies primarily on secondary sources and detailed theoretical models for his evidence. Although this methodology may be unfamiliar for some historians, he does an excellent job of breaking up the denser material into a series of appendices that can be bypassed by the general reader or studiously examined by the specialist. His use of a wide range of material, spanning centuries and continents, is impressive, and the individual chapters work well together in telling the story of the evolution of gunpowder technologies in Europe and the world. The central claim of the book – that the high value versus the low cost of war in medieval and early modern Europe incentivized steady and dramatic innovations in the efficacy of gunpowder technology compared to other parts of the world – seems convincing in light of the evidence that Hoffman provides. As he demonstrates, despite the high frequency of warfare in many other parts of the world, it was the particular dynamics of western European warfare, rather than its frequency, that motivated military authorities to invest in improvements to the gunpowder technology. In this reading, European dominance is not the result of any innate advantage but rather the product of a particular congruence of historical accidents that ensured the rapid refinement of a specific type of warfare that proved highly effective around the globe.

The one aspect of the book that would have benefited from further elaboration is Hoffman’s somewhat cursory treatment of the modern period. The majority of the text deals with advances in gunpowder technology throughout the late medieval and early modern periods, with only the final chapter covering the nineteenth century and the impact of industrialization on this model and on the global conquest that it seeks to explain. But by Hoffman’s own reckoning, Europe obtained its largest and most sustained set of territorial acquisitions during the period from 1800 to 1914. During this period, European territories and former territories expanded from 35% to 84% of the globe. This period also coincided with an exponential increase in the effectiveness of European military technologies, which Hoffman documents in impressive detail. Although he certainly does not ignore the modern period, and indeed adapts his tournament model to account for the ‘armed peace’ of the long nineteenth century, this section feels somewhat rushed in relation to the deep analysis and meticulous modelling afforded to the early modern period. Given Hoffman’s own conclusions regarding the importance of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for Europe’s global expansion, it seems as though this period receives disproportionately limited attention within the book’s narrative.

The book nonetheless provides an important and compelling addition to the burgeoning field of scholarship that seeks to account for Europe’s rise to global prominence. Furthermore, Hoffman develops an interesting and useful model for measuring advances in military technologies that could provide fertile ground for further research. It is probably impossible for one book to definitively close the debate on how it is that Europe managed to conquer so much of the world over the course of a few short centuries, given the complexity of the research question and the scope of the relevant material. Nonetheless, Hoffman’s rich and highly readable account provides a compelling and well-developed addition to this debate that will be of interest to a wide range of historians.