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

Chapter 1 Introduction 1 Chapter 2 How the Tournament in Early Modern Europe Made Conquest Possible 19 Chapter 3 Why the Rest of Eurasia Fell Behind 67 Chapter 4 Ultimate Causes: Explaining the Difference between Western Europe and the Rest of Eurasia 104 Chapter 5 From the Gunpowder Technology to Private Expeditions 154 Chapter 6 Technological Change and Armed Peace in Nineteenth-Century Europe 179 Chapter 7 Conclusion: The Price of Conquest 205 Appendix A Model of War and Technical Change via Learning by Doing 215 Appendix B Using Prices to Measure Productivity Growth in the Military Sector 228 Appendix C Model of Political Learning 231 Appendix D Data for Tables 4.1 and 4.2 233 Appendix E Model of Armed Peace and Technical Change via Research 234 Acknowledgments 239 Bibliography 241 Index 263

"Phillip Hoffman's book answers a question that economic historians have neglected: Why did Europe conquer the world starting about five hundred years ago? Hoffman stresses how incentives made Europe's princes unusually bellicose and willing to promote improvements in war technology. Combining wide reading, the judicious use of data, and economic models that distinguish Hoffman's explanation from that of earlier historians, Why Did Europe Conquer the World? represents the very best in economic history."—Timothy Guinnane, Yale University

"Why did Europe conquer the world? Philip Hoffman offers striking new answers to this old question. Hoffman's short answer is gunpowder or military technology. His longer answer is more unsettling: the political and geographical forces that made Europe's precocious economic development possible were inseparable from the arms race which enabled European states to win wars."—Cormac Ó Gráda, author of Eating People is Wrong, and Other Essays on Famine, Its Past, and Its Future

"Philip Hoffman upends the traditional story of why western Europe conquered the world. His elegant econometric model shows that by fighting constant wars with each other and never allowing a single hegemon to emerge, Western polities had greater incentives and opportunities to improve their military technology than their counterparts elsewhere. Anyone wanting to understand how economic theories are changing the ways we look at the past needs to read this book."—Daniel Chirot, University of Washington

"Beginning with the Spanish and Portuguese in the late fifteenth century, technological military superiority appears to have been the proximate cause of Europe's ever-expanding military dominance for the next five centuries. Where did this technological superiority come from? The answer provided in this convincing and tightly argued book is interesting and as definitive as such answers get."—Stergios Skaperdas, University of California, Irvine