Overview

This innovative book looks beyond the traditional history of European expansion—which highlights European conquests, empire building, and hegemony—in order to explore the more human and realistic dimensions of European experiences abroad. David Ringrose argues that Early Modern Europe was relatively poor and that its industrial and military technology, while distinctive in some ways, was not obviously superior to that of Africa or Asia. As a result, the interaction between Europeans abroad and the peoples they met was vastly different from the relationship created by the economic and military imperialism of the post-1750 Industrial Revolution. Instead, the author depicts it as a process of cultural interaction, collaboration, and assimilation, masked by narratives of European conquest or assertion of control. Ringrose convincingly shows that Europeans who went abroad before 1700 engaged in an exchange of cross-cultural contact and has framed the process in its own time rather than as the precursor of what came later. Then, as now, historical actors knew nothing of the unexpected consequences of their actions.

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9781442251762

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David Ringrose had written a much-needed corrective to the standard history of European expansion before the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution. He shows how early European 'empires' were actually trade diasporas whose participants largely merged into the local societies of the much larger and wealthier societies of India, China, and Africa, whose economic demands were much more significant globally than those of a weak and divided Europe. Even in the Americas, where Spain and Portugal did create empires capable of extracting wealth through slave labor, they did so through collaboration with and accommodation to vastly more numerous indigenous populations. In this perspective, the imperial systems of the nineteenth century appear as a momentary anomaly in world history, and today as China, India, and other regions recover their places at the core of economic and political power, Ringrose's analysis is an important warning against the hubris of Eurocentric global thinking.--Patrick Geary, Princeton University David Ringrose demonstrates the inherent flaws in the traditional, triumphalist story of the 'Expansion of Europe' from 1450-1750, replacing it with a narrative that reveals a complex mosaic of cultural interchanges in a world that Europeans could not yet dominate, except for portions of the Americas. This is world history at its best.--Alfred Andrea, University of Vermont Distilling a lifetime of unsurpassed study, David Ringrose gives us a fresh, humanly convincing sense of what happened in Europeans' world-ranging early-modern outreach. By focusing on the small, hazard-fraught groups who operated overseas (without neglecting the big frameworks of institutions, economies, cultures, and empires), he shows how their weakness and willpower, poverty and ambition, and encounters and collaborations facilitated modest achievements, sparked new experiences, and sometimes shaped new relationships.--Felipe Fern�ndez-Armesto, University of Notre Dame

David Ringrose had written a much-needed corrective to the standard history of European expansion before the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution. He shows how early European `empires' were actually trade diasporas whose participants largely merged into the local societies of the much larger and wealthier societies of India, China, and Africa, whose economic demands were much more significant globally than those of a weak and divided Europe. Even in the Americas, where Spain and Portugal did create empires capable of extracting wealth through slave labor, they did so through collaboration with and accommodation to vastly more numerous indigenous populations. In this perspective, the imperial systems of the nineteenth century appear as a momentary anomaly in world history, and today as China, India, and other regions recover their places at the core of economic and political power, Ringrose's analysis is an important warning against the hubris of Eurocentric global thinking. -- Patrick Geary, Princeton University Distilling a lifetime of unsurpassed study, David Ringrose gives us a fresh, humanly convincing sense of what happened in Europeans' world-ranging early-modern outreach. By focusing on the small, hazard-fraught groups who operated overseas (without neglecting the big frameworks of institutions, economies, cultures, and empires), he shows how their weakness and willpower, poverty and ambition, and encounters and collaborations facilitated modest achievements, sparked new experiences, and sometimes shaped new relationships. -- Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, University of Notre Dame David Ringrose demonstrates the inherent flaws in the traditional, triumphalist story of the `Expansion of Europe' from 1450-1750, replacing it with a narrative that reveals a complex mosaic of cultural interchanges in a world that Europeans could not yet dominate, except for portions of the Americas. This is world history at its best. -- Alfred Andrea, University of Vermont

Author Information

David Ringrose is emeritus professor of history at the University of California, San Diego, where he was chair of the Department of History, dean of Arts and Humanities, and provost of Roosevelt College. He specializes in the history of Spain and world history. His books, published in Spanish and English, include The Spanish Miracle, 1700–1900, Madrid and the Spanish Economy, 1560–1850, Madrid, Historia de una Capital, and Expansion and Global Interaction, 1200–1700. Professor Ringrose has held Guggenheim and ACLS fellowships and has been a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the National Humanities Center. He was also visiting professor at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and the University of California, Berkeley. He lives in San Diego with his wife, Kathryn, and a Boston terrier named Lola. Since retiring, Professor Ringrose has been a docent and faculty member at the Maritime Museum of San Diego, where he holds the Kyle Endowed Chair in Maritime History.

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