European Empires

The harder question is not why Europeans went but how so few of them stayed in charge. Kiernan is unromantic about the answer. Technology mattered — firearms, disciplined infantry, and above all ocean-going ships that could carry force anywhere with a coastline — but it was never the whole story. In the Americas, disease did more killing than any musket, as smallpox and measles swept through populations with no immunity and emptied whole regions ahead of the conquerors. Cortés and Pizarro toppled large states with tiny bands partly because those states were already reeling.

Where disease did not clear the ground, collaboration did. Kiernan insists that empire was rarely a simple matter of white men against everyone else. It ran on local allies: rival kingdoms glad to see an enemy humbled, merchants who prospered under the new order, princes who kept their thrones by taking European pay. In India the British spent generations exploiting the quarrels of a fragmenting Mughal world, arriving as one contender among many and ending as the arbiter of all. An empire held together by a thin European layer sitting atop a much larger structure of indigenous cooperation and indigenous soldiers.

The consequences fell first, and heaviest, on the colonized. Kiernan tallies them without melodrama, which makes the tally more damning. Populations collapsed; old political orders were dismantled or hollowed into puppets; economies were bent to serve distant markets, so that a region might grow cotton or cocoa it could not eat while importing the manufactured goods it had once made itself. Land was seized, labor coerced, and social hierarchies rearranged to suit the convenience of rule. Whole ways of life were treated as obstacles to be cleared or curiosities to be catalogued.

Yet Kiernan is careful not to paint the colonized as merely passive. Empire provoked resistance from the start — revolts, refusals, the slow sabotage of the ruled — and it also produced, unintentionally, the tools of its own future undoing. Colonial rule created new elites educated in European ideas, new networks of railway and print and administration, new grievances shared across old divisions. The very languages and institutions imposed to control subject peoples became, in time, the vocabulary of their independence.

What is most striking, standing back, is the speed of the collapse. Empires that had taken four centuries to assemble were gone within a single generation after 1945. Kiernan's larger argument is that this was not an aberration but the logic of empire playing out. The forces that had built European dominance — economic competition, military rivalry, the restless energy of a divided continent — were the same forces that eventually consumed it. The two world wars were, in part, the imperial powers turning their weapons on each other, and they left the victors bankrupt and the defeated stripped bare.

This is why Kiernan resists the story of empire as the spread of civilization, gracefully handed over once its work was done. Decolonization was rarely a gift; it was extracted, through war in some places and through the sheer impossibility of holding on in others. The European powers let go because the arithmetic no longer worked: colonies had become expensive to police, the colonized had organized, and rising powers outside Europe had no interest in propping up the old order. What had once paid for itself now bled money and men.

The picture Kiernan leaves us with is neither a pageant of European enterprise nor a simple indictment, though it leans far closer to indictment than the older histories did. It is an attempt to see empire whole: as something that grew out of the ordinary workings of a competitive, hungry continent, ran on profit and collaboration and coercion, enriched a few and ruined many, and then fell apart because the conditions that produced it could not last. The Portuguese caravels edging down the African coast and the hurried retreats from Asia and Africa four centuries later belong to the same long story.