This book, originally published in French several years ago, should be at the elbow of every global historian and every historian of empire. In eleven pithy chapters and some twenty-eight tables, the author assembles a mass of indispensable numerical data for the study of European imperial expansion, drawing on the best available sources for all the colonial powers, including Japan and the United States but (perhaps rather curiously) excluding Russia. (The argument for this is that the book is concerned with the ‘discontinuous’ maritime colonial empires, not with empires that grew continuously outward from their imperial ‘core’ – a category that would have required the inclusion of the Habsburgs and, presumably, China.) Five chapters deal with the ‘tools of empire’ and the ‘human cost of colonial conquest’: European mortality in the tropics; the role of malaria in the Americas, Asia, and Africa; the use of indigenous troops in tropical conquest; and the losses incurred by Europeans and indigenous peoples in the course of colonial expansion. In Part Two, six further chapters present a ‘comparative study of empires’. They provide the statistics of population and land area, the ‘rate and scale of colonisation’, a set of ‘comparative portraits’ of the colonial empires divided into three longish periods: 1760–1830, 1830–80 and 1880–1938. A final chapter surveys the decolonization era after 1945.

Etemad’s premise is straightforward: ‘Along with the Neolithic and Industrial revolutions, the phenomenon of colonialism is one of the major changes of direction in mankind’s history. Like both these revolutions, colonisation was a massive phenomenon … from the first manifestations of European colonial expansion to the last – empire spread over seventy per cent of the planet’s … dry land’. Of the populations of the developed world, 80% ‘have a colonial past’ as rulers or subjects, as do two-thirds of the population of the ‘Third World’ (p. 1).

Mass and scale is thus the key to Etemad’s story. The aim is to use the numerical data to reveal the profile and timing of the different waves of colonialism; to expose its changing techniques; to assess the profit and loss on the human account (Etemad is not concerned primarily with the conventional debate on economic costs and benefits); to display the contrasts between the different imperial systems of the colonial powers; and, at the end, to proffer a generic explanation for decolonization and the fall of empires. In Part One of the book, Etemad’s numbers offer a corrective to several entrenched historical prejudices, which will be especially useful to those without expertise in the colonial history of the tropical world. Thus the decline of European mortality in the tropics occurred well before ‘scientific’ medicine was widely practised. Instead, the use of quinine allowed an enormous reduction in deaths from disease, especially when coupled (as at the time of the Ashanti War in 1874) with the care taken to expose European troops to the West African climate for the shortest time possible. As Etemad wryly points out, the main reason why few Europeans died in the tropics was that very few went there, and even fewer for long. This was strikingly true of the European military presence. The number of Western soldiers found in tropical colonies was minimal compared to their numbers at home: proportionately some twenty times smaller. The balance was made up by the use of indigenous troops.

Indeed, one of Etemad’s main points, deduced from the data, is that European expansion in Asia and Africa largely depended upon using Afro-Asian peoples to conquer themselves. That was why it was so astonishingly cheap. One of Etemad’s more striking statistics is the calculation that the roughly 150 colonial campaigns waged by European states from the mid nineteenth century up to 1913 altogether cost 0.2–0.3% of the GNP of ‘colonial Europe’. Empire on the cheap indeed. Of the (up to) 300,000 white soldiers who lost their lives in the pursuit of these colonial conquests between 1750 and 1913, three-quarters died before the mid nineteenth century. French soldiers made up some 40% of the death toll, British 36%, and Dutch 9%. These figures can be compared with the scale of indigenous losses, which Etemad computes at some 30 million, excluding those who died of famine in late Victorian India. Perhaps one million died while engaged in armed resistance, but the vast majority were civilian deaths. Etemad also insists that the data show that more advanced technology was of only marginal importance in permitting colonial conquest.

In Part Two of the book, the main focus is upon the changing area and population of the colonial empires over the three chronological periods. Although the overbearing size of British possessions is not unfamiliar, it is still a surprise to find that, in 1880, the British ruled some 90% of the world’s colonial subjects and some 80% of its colonial zones. Moreover, for all their takings after 1880, the British expanded more between 1830 and 1880 than they did in the age of scrambles that followed. Tables showing the growth of colonial acquisitions by the various colonial powers are accompanied by a summary account of their course and causes. For Anglophone readers, much of this will prove very useful, although the coverage of British expansion will strike them as less satisfactory. Joseph Chamberlain appears rather oddly as an ‘internationalist’ and the son of a ‘shoe manufacturer’, and, while French acquisitions after 1918 are mentioned, those of the British are not. The treatment of decolonization is necessarily brief. Its ‘basic cause’, we are told, was ‘insufficient settlement’. Discuss!

Despite minor cavils, the great value of Etemad’s book is to allow European colonization to be measured over the longue durée and along several dimensions. It will certainly make it enormously easier to attempt useful comparisons between periods and powers. Anglophone readers will be particularly grateful for the data assembled from French, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, and Belgian sources. For these reasons, it will be an essential teaching aid for global and imperial history. My copy will remain close to my elbow.