A fresh conceptualization of ‘European Expansion’ outside of Eurocentrism.The author’s polycentric enumeration of many empires (not excluding native American) is refreshing and innovative.

Geoff Gunn, University of Macau

David Ringrose has 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 fabric 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 Institute for Advanced Study

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 Fernández-Armesto, William P. Reynolds Professor of History,University of Notre Dame

David Ringrose demonstrates the inherent flaws in the traditional, triumphalist story of the ‘Expansion of Europe’ from 1450 to 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

In writing Europeans Abroad, 1450–1750, Ringrose has produced a wide-ranging account of the voyages of discovery and conquest that took place in Europe's Age of Exploration. Arguing against more traditional interpretations of European expansion and conquest, Ringrose offers instead a persuasive portrayal of this period, contending that prior to the Industrial Revolution, the countries that participated in the expansion abroad (particularly Portugal, Spain, England, and Holland) did not, in fact, possess major military and technological advantages over the countries they explored (Africa and Asia). The result is Ringrose's largely revisionist view that early European expansion was defined more by mutual cultural exchange and assimilation, rather than by the modes of conquest and exploitation that arose later in the 18th century. An insightful take on early modern European history that is well suited for undergraduate study. Maps and illustrations, as well as a curated bibliography, enhance the book's utility to students. Recommended.

Choice Reviews