Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Pages: 300
•
Trim: 6⅜ x 9¼
978-1-4422-5176-2 • Hardback • August 2018 • $45.00 • (£35.00)
978-1-4422-5177-9 • eBook • August 2018 • $42.50 • (£35.00)
David Ringrose (1938–2020) was 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. 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 held Guggenheim and ACLS fellowships and was 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.
List of Figures, Maps, and Tables
Acknowledgments
Introduction Perspectives on European Expansion
Chapter 1 Europe Crosses the Threshold
Chapter 2 Ambiguous Identity and Cultural Opportunism?
Chapter 3 An Era of Empires
Chapter 4 Three American Empires
Chapter 5 Africa, Portugal, Brazil, and the Atlantic
Chapter 6 Atlantic North America: No Empires to Conquer
Chapter 7 An Era of World Trade
Chapter 8 Europeans and the World: Spices, Silk, and Silver
Chapter 9 Europeans and Asian Trade in the Seventeenth Century
Chapter 10 Disappearing Colonists: Death, Assimilation, and Desertion
Chapter 11 Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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