For a recent study of C. J. Sharp (not C. K. Sharpe, who was a quite different person) and Sword dances, I'd recommend you read E. C. Cawte's article Watching Cecil Sharp at Work: A Study of his Records of Sword Dances Using his Field Notebooks (Folk Music Journal vol.8 no.3 2003; Manchester Library will have it). You'll have to look elsewhere for commentary on Sharp's work on Morris; there are useful bibliographies on the EFDSS website:

An Introductory Bibliography on Morris Dancing

Sword Dancing in Britain

Do bear in mind that an awful lot of guff is talked about him by some people. Look at the facts and make your own assessment. Morris and Sword have traditionally used country dance tunes, popular music of the day, whatever the musicians happened to know; and it is true that, when publishing dances, Sharp sometimes replaced tunes which he felt were modern or boring (in some cases I can see his point. There is a limit to the number of times it is worth printing The Girl I Left Behind Me in a book aimed at the interested reader rather than the serious scholar). We would certainly not do that sort of thing today, I hope; but we have the advantage of nearly a century's hindsight, and Sharp was a pioneer, feeling his way without much guidance in a completely new field of exploration. He made both mistakes and errors of judgement, as anyone else would have, but at least he did it. Cawte goes into all that in depth.

That "ritual" tag is left over from the old "pagan origins" school of thought. A less loaded term is "ceremonial", which is generally preferred nowadays. There are plenty of examples outside the UK, of course, but again, "ceremonial" is usually a better term to use than "ritual"; that way there is a distinct word available for the occasional dance which may actually have a ritual function. These are vanishingly rare in Europe, but not in other parts of the world.

You'll find analogous dance forms, and tunes, throughout Europe (the Northern French Bacchu Ber comes to mind, and there are sword dances in the Basque country too, if I remember right). The practice of lifting a dancer on the knot is a recent import from European sword dance, for instance. Further afield, I'd guess that most countries in the world have dances which involve broadly similar procedures, though that doesn't mean that they are related, or that you can draw conclusions about a dance in one country from a superficially similar one in another (which is the root of at least part of the confusion many people encounter).