Anthropologist David Graeber had this to say about the expansion of the "West" in his pamphlet "Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology",
There has long been a related debate over what
particular advantage “the West,” as Western
Europe and its settler colonies have liked to call
themselves, had over the rest of the world that
allowed them to conquer so much of it in the four
hundred years between 1500 and 1900. Was it a
more efficient economic system? A superior military
tradition? Did it have to do with Christianity,
or Protestantism, or a spirit of rationalistic inquiry?
Was it simply a matter of technology? Or did it
have to do with more individualistic family
arrangements? Some combination of all these
factors? To a large extent, Western historical sociology
has been dedicated to solving this problem. It
is a sign of how deeply embedded the assumptions
are that it is only quite recently that scholars have
come to even suggest that perhaps, Western
Europe didn’t really have any fundamental advantage
at all. That European technology, economic
and social arrangements, state organization, and the
rest in 1450 were in no way more “advanced” than
what prevailed in Egypt, or Bengal, or Fujian, or
most any other urbanized part of the Old World at
the time. Europe might have been ahead in some
areas (e.g., techniques of naval warfare, certain
forms of banking), but lagged significantly behind
in others (astronomy, jurisprudence, agricultural
technology, techniques of land warfare). Perhaps
there was no mysterious advantage. Perhaps what
happened was just a coincidence. Western Europe
happened to be located in that part of the Old
World where it was easiest to sail to the New; those
who first did so had the incredible luck to discover
lands full of enormous wealth, populated by
defenseless stone-age peoples who conveniently
began dying almost the moment they arrived; the
resultant windfall, and the demographic advantage
from having lands to siphon off excess population
was more than enough to account for the European
powers’ later successes. It was then possible to shut
down the (far more efficient) Indian cloth industry
and create the space for an industrial revolution,
and generally ravage and dominate Asia to such an
extent that in technological terms—particularly
industrial and military technology—it fell increasingly
behind.
A number of authors (Blaut, Goody,
Pommeranz, Gunder Frank) have been making
some variation of this argument in recent years. It
is at root a moral argument, an attack on Western
arrogance. As such it is extremely important. The
only problem with it, in moral terms, is that it
tends to confuse means and inclination. That is, it
rests on the assumption that Western historians
were right to assume that whatever it was that
made it possible for Europeans to dispossess,
abduct, enslave, and exterminate millions of other
human beings, it was a mark of superiority and that
therefore, whatever it was, it would be insulting to
non-Europeans to suggest they didn’t have it too. It
seems to me that it is far more insulting to suggest
anyone would ever have behaved like Europeans of
the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries—e.g.,
depopulating large portions of the Andes or central
Mexico by working millions to death in the mines,
or kidnapping a significant chunk of the population
of Africa to work to death on sugar plantations—
unless one has some actual evidence to suggest they
were so genocidally inclined. In fact there appear to
have been plenty of examples of people in a position
to wreak similar havoc on a world scale—say,
the Ming dynasty in the fifteenth century—but
who didn’t, not so much because they scrupled to,
so much as because it would never have occurred to
them to act this way to begin with.
In the end it all turns, oddly enough, on how
one chooses to define capitalism. Almost all the
authors cited above tend to see capitalism as yet
another accomplishment which Westerners arrogantly
assume they invented themselves, and therefore
define it (as capitalists do) as largely a matter
of commerce and financial instruments. But that
willingness to put considerations of profit above
any human concern which drove Europeans to
depopulate whole regions of the world in order to
place the maximum amount of silver or sugar on
the market was certainly something else. It seems
to me it deserves a name of its own. For this reason
it seems better to me to continue to define capitalism
as its opponents prefer, as founded on the
connection between a wage system and a principle
of the never-ending pursuit of profit for its own
sake. This in turn makes it possible to argue this
was a strange perversion of normal commercial
logic which happened to take hold in one, previously
rather barbarous, corner of the world and
encouraged the inhabitants to engage in what
might otherwise have been considered unspeakable
forms of behavior. Again, all this does not necessarily
mean that one has to agree with the premise
that once capitalism came into existence, it
instantly became a totalizing system and that from
that moment, everything else that happened can
only be understood in relation to it. But it suggests
one of the axes on which one can begin to think
about what really is different nowadays.
Graeber blames the expansion of the West not on its military might or technological prowess but simply on its bloodlust which he claims was fuelled by capitalism, which to Graeber is no different than pure, unadulterated greed.
First, though I agree with Graeber on many things, I have to take issue with the definition of capitalism he chooses to use. One cannot define capitalism as simply a social structure that values the acquisition of material wealth more than you can define socialism simply as a social structure that values fried chicken. In any economic system, people value different things and certainly there are people in capitalist societies that value wealth above all else but I don't think I would be wrong to say that those people are in the minority. Graeber rightly identifies that capitalism is not determined as a matter of law or technology but is wrong in asserting it is the social acceptance of greed. Rather, I maintain, that it is defined by the social acceptance of capital and free-trade (I use the term loosely) and the ability of individuals to use their own subjective judgement in determining what is of value to them. Early forms of Western capitalism were, of course, more structural and take on a structural, rather than cultural, definition. When speaking of history, it makes the most sense simply to define capitalism as private property and trade which don't of themselves imply freedom.
Second, I think he is wrong to place the rise of the West as a world power solely on our adaptation of "capitalism", variations of which have existed as long as trade has throughout the world. The rise of the "West" (if you can call the horrific effects it had on the rest of the world a "rise") was caused by more than a multitude of factors, cultural and structural. To take the emotionally anti-west view that we were simply less moral than other powers at the time ignores the fact that China, India and the Islamic world were, at the time, looking inward, so to speak. China, which was isolationist to the point of xenophobia for most of its existence, had just ended its brief experiment in expansion with the close of the exploratory voyages under the Admiral Zheng-He and India, which had never really been expansionist in the first place, was still splintered from the fall of the Gupta Empire. The Islamic world was experiencing the opposite of an Enlightenment as people turned to Sufi mystics and Islamic piety rather than the natural sciences. In essence the West simply caught the rest of the world asleep at a time when truly devastating expansion was the most possible.
I think of the West as something of the kid who gets picked last on the soccer field when it comes to the realm of world trade. Western powers had taken a very long time to recover from the fall of the Roman Empire at the end of the Classical period which left Europeans pretty much the least powerful and least wealthy continent out of Europe, Africa, and Asia throughout the Post-Classical period. Europeans had wanted to engage in the luxury goods trade but had little to offer the rest of the world except depleting supplies of gold. With the beginning of exploration and the dawn of the truly global marketplace--America and Oceania were in contact with the rest of the world for the first time-- Europeans began to see the riches around the world for the taking but with little economic power, political power would have to do. After colonisation, economic power followed political power and the West emerged as the world's hegemony. I think of this as the kid on the soccer field who has little to offer the rest of the players feeling so left out and wanting to play on the field so bad that one day, while all the other players are relaxing in the shade, he brings a gun to the fields and shoots them all, claiming the field as his own. A grotesque metaphor perhaps, but one that I think strikes closer to the heart of the matter (and the heart of darkness) than simply blaming the White man's greed.
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