Asia Once Ruled the World, and May Do So Again in the 21st Century

World history focusing on the last 500 years tends to be a story of European or Western domination. The conventional wisdom is that Europeans triumphed because they had superior technology, and superior institutions, and won the military competition because they were more fit and strategic. But this may have been a temporary exception to the predominant world order. In the 21st century, the tide may have turned. Most of the European colonies and American satellites have broken away.

“Europeans didn’t win in the end: Their empires fell, and their military capacity shriveled. Even the United States has experienced more defeats than victories against non-Western forces over the last half-century,” observed Jason C. Sharman, a professor of international relations at Cambridge University in England.

His 2019 book was Empires of the Weak: The Real Story of European Expansion and the Creation of the New World Order.

In it, he contends