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By Root 1157 0

hundred years of initial European contact, one trend was unmistakable and irreversible: these encounters changed or destroyed the existing political, social, and economic arrangements in non-Western societies. The old order collapsed or was destroyed, or often a combination of the two. This was true no matter the country’s size, from tiny Burma, where the traditional structure crumbled under British rule, to the large tribes of Africa, where European nations drew new borders, created new divisions, and put favored groups into power. In many cases, this external influence introduced modernity, even if sometimes accompanied by great brutality. In other cases, European influence was regressive, destroying old ways but creating little to replace them. In any event, the Americas, Asia, and Africa were forever and irreversibly altered by their discovery by the West.

The direction of European expansion was determined by the balance of power. For several centuries, despite their mastery of the oceans, European nations did not have any military advantage over Turks and Arabs. So they traded with—but did not try to dominate—the lands of the Middle East and North Africa until the early nineteenth century. In Asia, the Europeans saw few easy pathways into the continent and instead set up trading posts and offices and contented themselves with the scraps ignored by the Chinese. In sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas, by contrast, they were clearly stronger than the natives and knew it. Portuguese expansion started in Africa, with moves into the Congo and the Zambezi in the early sixteenth century. But the climate there was inhospitable for settlement, so they turned to the Western Hemisphere.

America was a mistake—Columbus was searching for a path to the Indies and bumped up against a large obstacle—but it turned out to be a happy accident. The Americas became Europe’s great escape valve for four hundred years. Europeans left for the New World for a variety of reasons—overcrowding, poverty, and religious persecution at home or simply the desire for adventure—and when they landed, they found civilizations that were sophisticated in some ways but militarily primitive. Tiny bands of European adventurers—Cortés, Pizarro—could defeat much larger native armies. This, coupled with European diseases that the natives could not withstand, led to the wholesale destruction of tribes and cultures.

Colonization was often done not by countries but by corporations. The Dutch and British East India companies were licensed monopolies, created to end competition among the businessmen of each country. The French equivalent, the Compagne des Indes, was an independently run state corporation. Initially, these commercial enterprises were uninterested in territory and concerned only with profits, but once invested in new areas, they wanted more stability and control. The European powers, meanwhile, wanted to keep rival countries out. Thus began the land grabs and construction of formal empires, of which Britain’s grew to become the largest.

With formal empire came grand ambitions. Westerners began looking beyond money alone to power, influence, and culture. They became, depending on your view, ideological or idealistic. European institutions, practices, and ideas were introduced and imposed, though always maintaining racial preferences—the British court system was brought to India, for example, but Indian magistrates could not try whites. Over time, the European impact on its colonies was huge. And it then spread well beyond the colonies. Niall Ferguson has argued that the British empire is responsible for the worldwide spread of the English language, banking, the common law, Protestantism, team sports, the limited state, representative government, and the idea of liberty.11 Such an argument might gloss over the hypocrisy and brutality of imperial control—economic looting, mass executions, imprisonments, torture. Some—the Dutch and the French, for example—might quibble with the exclusively English provenance of such ideas. But in any case, it is undeniable