Even a cursory overview of important books (measured by sales, reviews, or citations) published in economic history over the past several decades makes clear that the most pressing question of our discipline is why is not the whole world developed? Different authors define development in different ways, of course, allowing for a shifting (at least within a narrow range) target of success. Not surprisingly, explanations can vary on the basis of that target. They also depend on what a researcher believes to be the answers to another set of questions, those that most occupied the work of economic historians during the early decades of the cliometric revolution. For that generation, effort was directed most forcefully to describing and explaining the Industrial Revolution, and especially why Britain was first. Was the Industrial Revolution stimulated by capital accumulation, or the division of labor and the extension of the market, by the deployment of new gadgets and gizmos, or by tapping into new sources of inorganic power? Was it a response to a scarcity of labor, or to the contrary, facilitated by more labor that was better skilled than had been the case previously? If the latter, does Britain owe its early success to education, occupational training, spiritual or other incentives to hard work, or even household improvements in care and hygiene? What one thinks are the answers to these questions for Britain then informs the prognosis for success in other cases. The what and how of the Industrial Revolution is far from fully settled territory, of course, but much of our attention is now focused elsewhere. For whatever may have been the particular features of the British Industrial Revolution, the bigger story appears to be what Deirdre McCloskey (“The Great Enrichment: A Humanistic and Social Scientific Account.” Scandinavian Economic History Review 64, no. 1 [2016]: 6–18) has called “the Great Enrichment,” the benefits of which remain elusive still in many parts of the globe.

Following the lead of Douglass North and others, work to address the problem of explaining the disparities coalesced around the insights of the New Institutional Economics, adopting the mantra that “institutions matter.” The European success story broadly, and the northwestern states’ super-success story within that European context—shorthanded regularly as the Great Divergence and its companion the Little Divergence—is largely seen as a matter of having the “right” institutions. High on the list of the most frequently cited desirable attributes are checks on the executive power of the state, secure rights to property of all kinds, open access to markets for goods and ideas, and perhaps to a somewhat lesser extent, a range of features that might broadly sit under the rubric of democratic governance. Clearly, this is a list that allows for much more influence on the economy from the political realm than had ever figured in the initial quest to explain the Industrial Revolution. Yet, despite the seeming agreement on political institutions as a likely (and for some, definitive) source of causal explanation, it remains far from obvious how some societies manage to adopt beneficent political practices and forms, while others seem doomed to poor, or even rapacious, governance and its attendant economic miseries.

Given the broad contours of the history of the modern world, especially as narrated from the perspective of the West, it is perhaps not surprising that the search for political explanations has drawn heavily on the history of European overseas exploration, expansion, and eventual colonization of a substantial portion of the globe’s surface. Surely that outward-pushing process, begun in earnest in the fifteenth century and not in full retreat until after WWII, is one that must be encompassed by any solution to the puzzle, as stated at the outset of this essay. But this history may also be a trap that encourages causal explanatory stories that ultimately prove erroneous. One such example—the theory of superior European military technology owing to the competitive pressures of political fragmentation, coupled with rational learning and elimination selection—is the target of a forceful rebuttal in a new book from J.C. Sharman, Empires of the Weak: The Real Story of European Expansion and the Creation of the New World Order. The title itself, promising us “the real story,” makes clear that for Sharman, there is a false story out there, circulating widely to the detriment of our theorizing about how the world has come to be as we see it today.

The reader may wonder, if the subject at hand is the history of European expansion, why begin this review with a focus on the big questions of economic history. After all, this book is not even written by an economic historian. (Sharman is the Sir Patrick Sheehy Professor of International Relations in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge.) It has nary an equation, table, or figure of any kind. Its remit lies properly in the discipline of international relations, and arguably even more narrowly in military history. Yet, its implications for the grand narrative of economic history as shaped by the “institutions rule” paradigm are potentially large. A minimum requirement for useful theorizing about rational choice outcomes based on historical narrative is getting that historical narrative right. If we do not have that in hand, everything which follows from it needs to be revisited, including Sharman argues, a good deal of our current consensus view of economic history.

The theory that lies at the heart of Sharman’s critique is grounded in the work of military historians and international relations theorists whose scholarly output is not likely to be read in-depth by most economic historians. But the broad contours are nonetheless familiar as they resonate well beyond the academy in public discourse. The claim, in short, is as follows. Europeans had better weapons (gunpowder in particular) than their adversaries, as well as superior military organization, allowing them to overpower their targets abroad and benefit from the spoils, however those might be understood. These advantages were conferred by the political competition they faced at home, given the presumption that competition selects for efficiency under the twin forces of rational learning and what Sharman calls “Darwinian selection” (p. 1). Finally, the benefits of competitive pressure extended well beyond the sphere of weapons technology and battlefield strategy to the very heart of political organization, namely centralized state formation and much enlarged fiscal capacity.

Lest Sharman be accused of taking on a strawman, it is worth revisiting the most eloquent exploration of the military technology-state building theory in the recent economic history literature put forward by Philip Hoffman (Why Did Europe Conquer The World? Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). He asks why the other advanced polities of the early modern world, spanning Eurasia from Japan and China to the Ottoman Empire, did not keep up as Europe moved ahead? And why did Europeans “continue to push the gunpowder technology further than anyone else on up through the nineteenth century?” He answers that “so far the best response is that military competition in Europe gave the Europeans an edge” (2015, p. 14). He acknowledges too that competition alone does not always stimulate innovation, but with the addition of his game-theory-adapted tournament model, it is possible to “make clear, once and for all, the political and military conditions that distinguished Europe from the rest of the world” (2015, p. 17). Finally, to connect the history of European expansion to the larger literature with which this review began, Hoffman concludes that “the institutions that fostered economic growth in Britain were the same ones that won Britain’s wars by allowing the country to mobilize resources at low political cost” (2015, p. 213).

Sharman’s goal, stated on the first page in no uncertain terms, is to contest every element of the standard account and to propose in its place a radically different narrative of Europe’s encounter with the world, especially in the early modern period. He disputes—with three substantive chapters devoted to case studies of new world conquest, company engagements in Asia, and European struggles closer to home against the Ottomans and in North Africa—the very fact of European military superiority prior to the nineteenth century. Instead, he argues that European expansion depended on their “deference and subordination” at least as often as dominance and that it always relied on a maritime strategy that avoided challenging what he calls “the land-based priorities of local polities” (p. 2). He rejects the linkage between conquest and state-building on the grounds that prior to the nineteenth century, overseas military activities were carried out by mostly small bands of adventurers or merchant companies for mostly private profit. Early modern maritime expansion did not tax the resources of the state and only rarely served to enlarge them. Even the larger state-led efforts that characterized nineteenth century colonialism, he says, were essentially prestige projects, usually unprofitable if not downright costly. He invokes instead an alternative cultural imperative for their pursuit, summed up as: “possessing colonies was the route to national greatness” (p. 139).

He also attacks the underlying assumptions of the theory, amassing a good deal of evidence, from the battlefields of history to contemporary stock market behavior, that learning from bad outcomes is far from a foregone conclusion. It is difficult in the moment for people to ascertain which might be the right lessons to draw from failure, a problem exacerabated by the confounds of confirmation bias and generally strong attachments to previously held beliefs. Moreover, as he points out somewhat sardonically, any alternate theory based on “elimination” mechanisms would require the rate of organizational death to be much higher than is actually found in the historical record (p. 150). Finally, he questions whether it even makes sense to fall back on the claim that Europe “won in the end.” From the perspective of the latter twentieth century, Europe’s “empires fell and their military capacity shriveled”(p. 7). Where we end a narrative shapes our understanding of its lessons just as much as where we begin it. Ending points matter just as much for directing the shape of our narrative as do starting points. The view from 1900 does not serve us particularly well in our theorizing.

This then is the broad outline of his rebuttal. Biases of both place and time—that is the view from Europe outwards and too much weight given to the apex of European hegemony in the relatively few decades between 1850 and 1914—have led us to causal explanations that will not stand historical scrutiny (p. 123). We have a deeply engrained habit, he argues, of underestimating the anticipated losers, for instance, when the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire is portrayed “as merely a failure waiting to happen” (p. 119). At the same time, we overestimate the virtues of the anticipated winners. Together they make us blind to features that should otherwise be visible enough, reminding us that both “in the past and at present, people commonly think they know a lot more about cause and effect than they really do” (p. 148). If Sharman is correct, even in part and certainly in toto, his work calls into question much of what we think we know about the “rise of the West,” and with it the scholarly edifice of documenting the institutions that “rule.”

But is he correct? About the efficacy of various military tactics or armaments, or the histories of particular battles or longer-term military engagements, this reviewer will have to defer to the expertise of the specialists, a great many of whom are cited in Sharman’s bibliography. He is certainly convincing on the point that despite winning numerous battles by means of greater firepower, western states have for the past half-century or more certainly lost a great many of the wars to allegedly disorganized guerrilla fighters. He is also convincing when he argues that learning in wartime is notoriously difficult to do, even when aided by the benefit of hindsight. Moreover, any given technology is rarely “consistently decisive” (p. 22), diminishing the potential for useful learning in any event. Equally compelling is his observation that polities, even those clearly defeated on the battlefield, only rarely cease to exist unless that defeat is also accompanied by catastrophic population losses. He cites by way of example the case of native populations in North America, who suffered much more on account of disease than of either European technology or organization.

Sharman is an acute historical observer with an impressive grasp of global interactions over the last 500 years. His book is peppered with withering observations of the failure of political scientists and economic historians alike to miss connections that seem obvious to him. He notes, for example, that “it is a strangely underappreciated fact that the Ottoman Empire enjoyed far more extensive and longer-lasting military and geopolitical success than supposed paragons of modernity like the Dutch or the Swedes”(p. 100). He is also adept at finding holes in the logic of the standard argument, as when he notes that “explaining victory by superior technology and then defining superior technology as anything that improves the chances of victory, is circular logic”(p. 41). The strength of his own argument is formidable, demanding that it be taken seriously. His case studies not only reveal the relatively weaker position of European states in the centuries before the nineteenth century than is commonly assumed, but also document his contention that it was “changes in ideas and cultural contexts” that were crucial to shaping both “the rise and the fall of European empires” (p. 134).

Surely more work remains to be done to fully flesh out how our historical narrative would change if it were entered into from the perspective of a different place or a different time period. But the importance of that narrative to the search for the “right” institutions cannot be disputed. If the narrative were to be substantively revised in the face of new interpretations, economic history would also need to revisit its “institutions rule” mantra, or at the very least reassess the particular institutions it has valorized thus far.

Sharman’s conclusion calls for scholars working on the problem of explaining global disparities to be “a little more reflective in thinking about our assumptions and preconceptions, a little more broad-minded in asking questions and selecting evidence, and perhaps even a little more willing to take history on its own terms”(p. 150). Toward this end, there can be absolutely no doubt about Sharman’s success. Empires of the Weak demands a rethinking of the standard story of western dominance, as well as the relationship between dominance and economic prosperity. Hopefully, it will also send us searching for a wider range of evidence about Europeans’ multiple encounters with the rest of the world over the last 500 years, as well as the histories that did not involve them at all. The relevant question for economic history may not be why did Europe conquer the world, but rather did Europe conquer the world? If the answer to that is not an unambiguous yes, we might usefully think anew about how it became so rich.