I actually made it all the way home with this book before looking at the subtitle, which immediately made me DEEPLY concerned I had picked up some unhinged rant about the NWO and inevitably (((Jews))). Fortunately Sharman is an actual Cambridge professor and presumably just isn’t on the internet enough to know about the implications of his subtitle.

This is a short, hefty book. He’s trying to make it an accessible overview--he doesn’t succeed. There’s way too much academic theory for the lay reader. What it is, however, is compelling. I’ve been noticing for years that the arguments for “why Europe won” don’t hold water--either Europe didn’t win there, or they did but lost elsewhere, or they did but it didn’t have the necessary consequences for today’s world structure--and Sharman, in short, points out that Europe did win...later. Unmatched European expansion didn’t happen until the late 1700s, continued through the 1920s, and since then has been collapsing.

Instead, what happened in the 1500s and 1600s was a series of piecemeal attacks, attempts to take over existing, more powerful polities by ambush or trickery, clever use of alliances, and a temporarily-unmatched prowess on the ocean. The result was Europeans everywhere--but in power almost nowhere.

Deeply, deeply interesting, but not for the faint of heart.