Europe was able to expand its empire and dominate the world through a variety of factors, including advances in science and technology, climatic and geographic conditions, and the effects of disease. The scientific mindset that came with the Industrial Revolution played an important role in this process, but geographical advantages and the unintended contributions of pathogens were also crucial to the growth of empires.
Empires helped to fuse many small cultures into a few large ones. Within empires, ideas, people, goods, and technologies spread more easily than in politically fragmented regions. The ease of information sharing, ease of commerce, and unification of goods that empires fostered helped bind people together. As a result, the imagined system of empire was maintained. The people who led empires didn’t just create them. They deliberately spread ideas, institutions, customs, and norms to make it easier to govern, reinforcing the imaginary systems that people had built. For 2,500 years, empires have been the most common form of political organization in the world, and their ease and convenience have kept them alive into the modern era. In the modern era, empires have been centered in Europe. Until recently, European nations conquered and colonized other nations in an effort to dominate the world. No one would argue with Europe’s hegemony as an empire, especially considering that Britain owned so much territory around the world that it was called “the land where the sun never sets.” But this begs the question: why was Europe able to grow empires and conquer the world?
This question can be easily answered if we consider that the empires of the European region were globally influential and more powerful than other empires around the world from the very beginning of the concept of empire. “Europe was able to conquer the world because it was able to use its economic and military superiority to overpower other empires based on its early power,” you might say. However, this answer is not very convincing. The balance of power in the early days of empire building was not in Europe’s favor. In Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari writes
“It was not until the end of the 15th century that a significant military and political empire emerged in Europe. But even after the emergence of empires, Europe was no match for the Asian powers, and Europe was able to conquer the Americas only because the Asian powers had little interest in the region.”
As such, Europe did not have much influence as an empire. In 1775, Asia accounted for 80 percent of the world’s economy, making Europe a peripheral player. So how did Europe manage to conquer the Americas and gain economic and territorial control of the entire world in just 200 years?
Yuval Noah Harari points to science and technology as the answer to this question. In the 1800s, the Industrial Revolution took place in Europe, a turning point in human history. Europe embraced the mass production and leaps in science and technology that the Industrial Revolution brought and overcame their differences. Harari explains that China’s failure to embrace science and technology stems from differences in social structure and perceptions of society. Europe, he says, had scientific and capitalist habits of thought and behavior before it enjoyed technological superiority, while China and the rest of the world did not. However, there are several flaws in this argument. First, the habits have not been objectively and scientifically proven. It’s a stretch to claim that there is a habit of thinking scientifically based solely on social structure, and there’s no specific mention of what a “habit of thinking scientifically” is. Even if we assume that Harari’s statement is true, there is a problem. Even before the Industrial Revolution in the 1800s, people were making progress through scientific discovery. Harari’s view doesn’t explain why China was ahead of the curve in pre-industrial advancements. History-changing inventions like paper, gunpowder, and stirrups all came from Asian countries, and Europe worked tirelessly through trade to import these technologies. If Europeans were in the habit of thinking scientifically, they would have been more advanced in this regard than their Asian counterparts even before the Industrial Revolution. This means that there were other reasons besides the Industrial Revolution of the 1800s for Europe to expand its empire.
In addition to the Scientific Revolution, there are two other reasons why Europe was able to spread its imperial hegemony across the globe.
The first is climatic and geographical influences. Climatic influences allowed empires to spread rapidly in an east-west direction. The Earth is divided into tropical, temperate, and cold climates as you move upward from the equator. Due to the influence of sunlight on the Earth, there are generally similar climate zones at different latitudes. This horizontal distribution of similar climatic zones has made it much easier for the crops that humans depend on to spread across the landscape, says Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel.
“Because a species or culture has evolved to fit the climate and natural environment of a region, it is easy to move within a climate, but much more difficult to move between climates.”
Crop migration within similar climates eventually led to the spread of crops that people relied on as staple foods, which led to cultural uniformity in dietary habits. This cultural unity allowed empires to rapidly conquer Eurasia and other continents. Even with this cultural unity, the Europeans were able to outcompete the Chinese because of the differences in the crops they grew. The Chinese lived in the middle of the continent and ate rice as a staple food in humid climates. Rice can only grow in rainy areas, making it difficult for it to spread westward to arid Europe, Africa, and elsewhere. In contrast, wheat and potatoes, the staple foods of the Europeans, were less climatically restricted than rice. Wheat and potatoes could be grown with less rainfall, allowing them to spread to many regions.
Geography also played a role in Europe’s outpacing of China. Even if climatic influences allowed crops to spread, empire growth would be slow if it wasn’t easy to reach new areas. China was located in the middle of the Eurasian landmass, with the vast Pacific Ocean to its east, making it impossible to go any further. In the Midwest, deserts prevented the spread of staple crops, which is why expansion was relatively slow. In Europe, on the other hand, there were similar climates to the east that were ripe for expansion. To the west was the Atlantic Ocean, but its narrow width allowed them to expand their empire with the spread of crops after they discovered the Americas. Furthermore, its proximity to the African continent, unlike China, which had no continent around it, created an environment conducive to spreading. In other words, it was not only scientific and technological advances, but also a fortuitous geographical advantage that helped Europe dominate the world.
The European conquest of the New World was a remarkably short process, even considering the advances in science and technology, climate, and geography. Another factor also played a role in the growth of the European empire in the Americas. It was the plague. It wasn’t economic or scientific factors that contributed to the empire’s growth, but a living organism. As Europeans privatized their livestock, they naturally had a lot of contact with animals. In the process, they were exposed to the diseases they carried and developed immunity to them. This was not the case for people in the Americas. They had never been exposed to livestock before Europeans arrived, and they didn’t have the opportunity to build immunity. It wasn’t science and technology or geography and climate that brought Europeans to the Americas, it was disease. Jared Diamond said
“Of the Native Americans who died after Europeans set foot on the continent, far more died from diseases introduced by pathogens from Europe than died on the battlefield. Between 100 and 200 years after Christopher Columbus’ discovery of the New World, diseases introduced from Europe decimated the entire Native American population by 95 percent.”
In the blink of an eye, 95% of the indigenous population was decimated by European diseases such as smallpox, measles, malaria, and tuberculosis. It was easy for Europeans to take over an area that was empty of people. Diseases were an unintentional contributor to the European empire’s conquest of the Americas and beyond.
It would be unfair to say that Europe was able to build a world dominating empire simply because of its advances in scientific knowledge. We can see that empires were shaped not only by technology, but also by seemingly unrelated factors (terrain, disease). In that sense, the theory of empire growth presented in Sapiens is logically flawed. As you can see from the examples of empire growth in this essay, there is no single cause for any event in history. There are many aspects that work together to create history, aspects that we may not have predicted at all. Of course, it may be impossible to interpret history by predicting all of these aspects. What we should be wary of is interpreting history based on only one aspect. When explaining history, we need to analyze enough economic, scientific, and environmental aspects to give a complete and correct interpretation of history.
