AN APPROACH TO EXPLANATION

This book links history and comparative social science in an attempt to account for broad patterns shaping the modem world. It responds to Gabriel Almond’s appeal to social scientists to “take the historical cure...

TABLE 2.2.

CRITICAL EVENTS

tinctness, of failing to identify patterns of human behavior that recur across bound­aries of time, geography, and culture.

1. Identifying the necessary conditions, if any, of a phenomenon. If we want to explain B, are there any factors (such as Ai) whose absence precludes the occurrence of B?

2. Identifying the sufficient conditions, if any, of a phenomenon. Are there any factors (such as Az) whose presence ensures the occurrence of B?

3. Identifying contributing or conducive conditions. Are there factors (such as At) whose presence increases the likelihood that B will occur?

It takes only limited knowledge and rudimentary logic to identify necessary, or Ai, conditions for overseas empire. A colony cannot be created without the prior existence of the metropole to which it is subordinate. A metropole, in turn, cannot be a stateless society. It requires home-based governing institutions that are capable of extracting, organizing, and deploying enough material and human resources to govern territories beyond its boundaries. A metropole’s ruler should command sufficient obedience from people sent out as explorers, soldiers, and overseas admin­istrators that they will not use authority delegated to them as imperial agents to seize power and govern in their own name.¹¹

Over and above political and institutional prerequisites are scientific and tech­nological ones.

If necessary, or Ai, conditions are easy to identify, the search for sufficient, or A2, conditions takes one into a cul-de-sac and should be abandoned. There is no factor ensuring the existence of empire, in the sense that it is found everywhere empires exist and only in such settings. This conclusion is not disheartening. If anything, it helps one avoid what Reinhard Bendix calls “the fallacy of retrospective determinism.” Bendix insists that we “conceive of the future as uncertain in the past as well as the present.”¹² I view history as possibilities that become probabilities under certain circumstances, including unexpected situations best described as acci­dental or random. Probabilities do not, however, become certainties; what is likely does not become inevitable. This is so because human beings possess—and con­tinually act as if they possessed—modest degrees of freedom to chart future courses of action. Outcomes are especially uncertain in situations considered here, in which people interact with those from other cultures who have very different understand­ings of how the world works and what norms should govern behavior. Cross-cultural interaction frequently leads to outcomes none of the participants wants or expects.

The real challenge is to identify and assign causal weight to factors whose presence, alone or in conjunction with others, substantially increases the likelihood that a pattern of events will occur.

Social life is extraordinarily complex, with many factors operating at any one time and place and interacting with each other in various ways. When one tries to explain not a singular event but a swath of world history encompassing multiple events, one encounters layers of interconnected complexity. It is not plausible that a broad class of events, considered as an effect, could have one and only one cause. A single-factor theory has the virtue of parsimony: a little goes a long way. But it is unlikely to account for all the events one wants to explain. If one goes to the other extreme and generates a long list of factors that each contributed in some measure to some instances of a class of events, then one abandons parsimony. Laundry lists do not manageable theories make. A good theory about social reality should steer between implausibility and unmanageability by specifying more than one yet fewer than, say, eighty-three causal factors.

But how sort through myriad candidates for inclusion in a theory, identifying some as having more explanatory weight than others and eliminating still others altogether? A sensible way to proceed is to apply the standard of appropriate com­prehensiveness. A powerful theory should be neither too narrow nor too broad in scope. It should encompass the class of events it is supposed to explain. But it should not extend its reach beyond those events if in so doing it blurs or obliterates the boundary line defining what is distinctive about those events. If a theory’s causal factors apply to some instances of a class of events but not to others, the theory risks mistaking a part of the whole for the whole and is insufficiently comprehensive. On the other hand, if a theory’s causal factors apply to all instances of the class of events and to instances of a very different class with different causal properties, then the theory overshoots the mark.

When one applies these tests to a theory of European imperialism, the theory is strengthened if it (1) applies to the five-century period during which expansion occurred; (2) applies to more than one European empire—ideally to all; (3) helps account for why overseas empires were formed from early phase 1 onward but not before the fifteenth century; and (4) helps account for why Europeans dominated the world while others did not.

My five-phase classification scheme provides a way to assess whether explana­tions advanced here meet the temporal comprehensiveness test. Phases 1 and 3 share an expansionist direction. Factors clearly at work in the first phase and the third are candidates for inclusion in a theory of European imperialism.¹⁴ Factors found in one phase but not the other fail the test, unless they are present in the earlier phase and can be shown to make expansion in the subsequent phase easier or more likely.¹⁵ Phases 2 and 5 share a pattern of imperial contraction. A factor at work in the second phase and the fifth is a candidate for inclusion in a theory of imperial decline. A factor present in one phase but not the other fails to pass the test, unless its impact on phase 2 makes subsequent decolonization easier or more likely.

The best-known theories of European imperialism focus on scrambles for territory in Africa, Asia, and Oceania during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. J.

Phases that share a direction—whether expansion or contraction—may differ in many other respects, and do. Identifying these differences is important for theo­retical purposes because it enables one to rule out factors that sound plausible but fail the “both phases” test. There are so many potential candidates for inclusion in a theory of empire that any procedure eliminating candidates or casting doubt on their explanatory power makes a valuable contribution. More scrutiny can be given what remains after many alternatives have been discarded. For this reason the chapters on phases 1 and 3 take care to show how the expansionist periods are unalike; likewise the chapters on contractionist phases 2 and 5. Chapter 8 uses differences between phases 1 and 3 to discard a number of plausible sounding propositions about Eu­rope’s rise to dominance. The spatial breadth criterion can be satisfied by identifying features widely shared throughout western Europe, hence capable of influencing overseas initiatives of most—ideally all—empire-acquiring states. Chapters 8-10 focus on these features while acknowledging that variations on a theme are played by metropoles. Such variations account for dissimilarities in the size, location, demo­graphic composition, and duration of empires.

A theory of European imperialism is strengthened if its temporal scope is not too broad. Suppose factors identified as contributing to expansion in phases 1 and 3 were prominent prior to phase 1 as well. The power of these factors to explain imperialism would be weakened because they were present when the thrust for over­seas empire was absent.¹⁷ This observation suggests the importance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries for theory-building purposes. To be sure, many changes in European history occurred slowly over centuries; no sharp break separates what happened before and after the conquest of Ceuta. But if patterns present in early phase 1 were less prominent or absent in preceding centuries, a theory highlighting them could explain in part why people from the same region behaved differently at various times.

A theory is likewise strengthened if its geographic scope is not too comprehen­sive. Suppose factors said to contribute to European expansion were prominent in societies elsewhere in the world that did not produce overseas empires. The explana­tory power of these factors would be weakened because they were present in lands where the push for overseas possessions was absent. This observation suggests the importance of comparing European countries with other parts of the world. Deserv­ing special attention would be societies that had the maritime capacity to establish overseas empires but did not use ships for that purpose. Factors prominent in Europe but absent or weakly present in such societies could help explain why over­seas empires were formed by Europeans but not others.

Two societies satisfying the maritime capacity condition are the Arabs and Chi­nese. A question posed in chapters 8-10 is whether certain features widely found in western Europe were present in the Arab-speaking world and China, particularly in the early years of phase i, when all three could have taken initiatives ensuring overseas dominance. The answer is that factors conducive to European expansion were not present to the same degree elsewhere. Broad observations about Europe, the Arab­speaking world, and China are reinforced by a case study of what happened when people from all three areas interacted. Malacca, a port located on the Malacca Strait in what is now Malaysia, was a leading emporium five centuries ago, linking mer­chant vessels plying the Indian Ocean with ships from the Spice Islands and China Sea. As such it brought together Arabs and other Muslims, Chinese merchants, and, in the early sixteenth century, the Portuguese. Having the leading candidates for global dominance present at the same time and place, Malacca comes as close as one can get to a laboratory test of why Europeans came to dominate the world while its potential rivals did not. Analysis of the resources each actor deployed when Por­tuguese soldiers arrived in 1511, intent on conquest, lends support to my theory.