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The foundations of European Expansion and Dominion: an Equilibrium model

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2010

David S. Landes
David S. Landes
Affiliation:
Robert Walton Goelet Professor of French History, Harvard University
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Extract

A long time ago – longer than I care to remember – I proposed what an economist would call an equilibrium model of imperialism (1). Briefly stated, the argument went as follows:

-Imperialism is a response to disparities of power. The very existence of such disparity is an invitation and temptation to exploit it. Not everyone will respond to such invitation, but there will always be some who try to translate potential dominion into actual.

-Motivation is secondary: where a disparity of power exists, imperialism will never lack for reasons or justifications. These will vary from the crudest greed or will to dominance to the loftiest altruism.

-To understand the timing and extent of imperialist dominions, therefore, it is more important to study the character and distribution of power than the incentives to its exercise.

Type
The Great Debate: History and Underdevolopment
Information
Itinerario , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , March 1981 , pp. 46 - 61
Copyright
Copyright © Research Institute for History, Leiden University 1981

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References

Footnotes

1. ‘Some Thoughts on the Nature of Economic Imperialism’, Journal of Economic History. XXI (1961). 496–512.Google Scholar

2. Strayer, Joseph R., Gatzke, Hans W. & Harbison, E.Harris, The Mainstream of Civilization (2nd ed.; New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanivich, 1974), p, 218. adapted from Fulcher of Chartres,Google ScholarHistory of Jerusalem (trans. McGinty, M.E.; Philadelphïa: University of Pennsylvania, 1941), p. 16Google Scholar.

3. Bairoch, Cf. Paul. ‘Ecarts internationaux des niveaux de vie avant la Révolution industrielle’, Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations, (01.–02. 1979), 145–71. Bairoch also argues, though, in ‘Le bilan économique du colonialisme: mythes et réalités’, inGoogle ScholarBlussé, L., Wesseling, H.L., Winius, G.D., eds.. History and Underdevelopment (Leiden: Center for the Study of european Expansion, 1980), p. 33, that ‘around 1700, it seems probable that the principal civilizations of Asia (most particularly China) had attained a more advanced level of economic and technological development than Europe’. I think this is clearly wrong, and that the margin in favor of European technology was already substantial and decisiveGoogle Scholar.

4. Lynn White, Jr. disagrees. See his ‘The Crusades and the Technological Thrust of the West’ in Parry, V.J. and Yapp, M.E., eds., War, Technology and Society in the Middle East (London: Oxford 1975), pp. 97–112, which argues that technology was advancing faster in Europe than elsewhere and that as a result Europeans enjoyed military superiority over their Muslim adversaries.Google Scholar

5. The best survey, full of suggestive comparisons between European and non-European techniques, is to be found in Carlo Cipolla, Guns, Sails and Empires: Technological Innovation and the Early Phases of European Expansion 1400–1700 (New York: Pantheon, 1965)Google Scholar.

6. Ayalon, D., Gunpowder and Firearms in the Mamluk Kingdom (London,1956).Google Scholar

7. The Japanese learned to make good guns and to use them; and guns helped decide their long civil war and establish the Tokugawa shogunate. But then they were suppressed, partly because the samurai found them unworthy weapons, partly because the Japanese did not need them to ward off agressors. Their island isolation and fighting ability sufficed to discourage invasion. See Perrin, Noel, Giving Up the Gun: Japan's Reversion to the Sword, 1543–1879 (Boston: David Godine, 1979)Google Scholar.

8. Parry, Cf. John H., The Age of Reconnaissance (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson. 1964), ch. lii;Google Scholaridem, The Discovery of the Sea (New York: Dial Press, 1974), ch. iGoogle Scholar.

9. There is an abundant literature. See among others, Brown, Lloyd A., The Story of Maps (Boston: Little. Brown. 1949);Google ScholarCotter, Charles H., A History of Nautical Astronomy (London: Hollis & Carter, 1968);Google ScholarGould, Rupert T.The Marine Chronometer: Its History and Development (London: Holland Press, 1960);Google ScholarDefossez, L., Les savants du X VIIe siècle et la mesure du temps (Lau-sanne 1946)Google Scholar.

10. The best general introduction is Cipolla, Carlo M., Clocks and Culture 1300–1700 (London: Collins. 1967).Google Scholar

11. See also his ‘Cultural Climates and Technological Advance in the Middle Ages’ Viator, II (1971), 171–201; and his Medieval Technology and Social Change (Oxford, 1962).

12. On much of this, see Landes, , The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to Present (Cambridge 1972), ch. i.Google Scholar

13. Again there is an enormous literature, ranging from multivolume histories of science and technology to monographs on small details of the larger story. But I can think of few sources that better convey the liveliness and intensity of international communication in science than the correspondence of Christiaan Huygens, published as part of his Oeuvres complétes by the Société Hollandaise des Sciences (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1889—).

14. Brazil was an exception. There the Portuguese found no precious metal at first and thought to affirm their hold on the area by settling it. For this they needed some kind of cash crop, and they found it in sugar. See the analysis in Furtado, Celso, The Economic Growth of Brazil: A Survey from Colonial to Modern Times (Berkeley & Los Angeles, 1963), pp. 1–11Google Scholar.

15. Wesseling, Cf. H.L., ‘Post-Imperial Holland’, Journal of Contemporary History, XV (1980), 125–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar