Asia Once Ruled the World, and May Do So Again in the 21st Century

World history focusing on the last 500 years tends to be a story of European or Western domination. The conventional wisdom is that Europeans triumphed because they had superior technology, superior institutions, and won the military competition because they were more fit and strategic. But this may have been a temporary exception to the predominant world order. In the 21st century, the tide may have turned. Most of the European colonies and American satellites have broken away. “Europeans didn’t win in the end: Their empires fell, and their military capacity shriveled. Even the United States has experienced more defeats than victories against non-Western forces over the last half-century,” observed Jason C. Sharman, a professor of international relations at Cambridge University in England.

His 2019 book was Empires of the Weak: The Real Story of European Expansion and the Creation of the New World Order.

In it, he contends “that Europeans actually had no general military superiority in the early modern era.” European expansion from the late fifteenth to the late eighteenth centuries “is better explained by deference to strong Asian and African polities, disease in the Americas, and maritime supremacy earned by default because local land-oriented polities were largely indifferent to war and trade at sea,” as Goodread.com summarizes. “Europeans were overawed by the mighty Eastern empires of the day, which pioneered key military innovations and were the greatest early modern conquerors.”

NYT review by Alan Mikhail: “To make this provocative argument, Sharman finds the early modern period, conventionally dated from 1500 to 1800, the most fruitful for thinking about where we are headed. In those centuries, the enormous empires of the East —

• the Qing,
• the Ottomans and
• the Mughals — were the most formidable states on earth. Territory equaled power, and those states held the most land…”

Not until these empires fractured did the Europeans gain dominance. In other words, the old political science theory that power abhors a vacuum, and some force will always seek to step in the place of weak or exhausted leadership.

“He dismantles the notion that the period of Western overseas expansion led to the rise of Europe, either militarily or politically. Asia’s enormous land-based empires didn’t much care about their coastlines and tolerated — more than they succumbed to — the Europeans nibbling on their shores in what were desperate, highly risky and ultimately temporary ventures. Until approximately 1750, Europeans — even in Europe, thanks to the Ottomans — held no military advantage over other powers.”

Reviewer Alan Mikhail concludes by agreeing with Sharman: “Global affairs in the year 2100 will look more like it did in 1700 than 1900 and that the center of world power will be in the East rather than the West.”