The technology of gunpowder weapons has long fascinated historians. Although it originated in China, gunpowder has been invoked to explain why Europe—so weak and so backward in the early Middle Ages—ended up dominating the world in 1914, with colonies, influence, or possessions in every inhabited continent. And the conquests that the technology made possible have in turn been linked to the Industrial Revolution, to enduring poverty in Africa and Latin America, and—last but not least—to the great divergence between Europe and China.

Historians of all stripes—world, military, economic, European, and Asian historians in particular—will therefore welcome Tonio Andrade's Gunpowder Age. Andrade gives us a new history of gunpowder, of early guns, and of the military use of gunpowder weapons in China from the Song dynasty on. But he does not limit himself to writing the early history of the gunpowder technology in China. He pushes on to the end of the Qing dynasty, includes naval warfare and fortifications, and extends his research to Korea and Japan, and to Europe as well, which he covers in considerable detail. With lucid prose, a bold argument, and research based on Asian and European sources in multiple languages (I counted nine), all historians should congratulate him on a wonderful book.

Andrade tells a fascinating story about gunpowder weapons in both Europe and East Asia, but what does his book bring to the broader debates about the rise of European power and about the great divergence? The gunpowder technology figures in these debates because it allowed small numbers of European soldiers and sailors to prey upon seaborne trade and conquer territory or at least gain a toe hold in foreign lands via forts that resisted sieges. It also helped small numbers of Europeans attract native allies, and it allowed them to occupy territory by using the threat of force to keep the native populations under control. European ventures of this sort were doomed to failure against China and Japan—at least before the nineteenth century—but they did succeed in the Americas, Australia and the Pacific, South and Southeast Asia, and Africa. And although other forces were certainly at work—notably disease in the Americas and the Pacific—it is clear that mastery of gunpowder weapons played a big role in explaining Europe's rise to power, as did continued advances in the gunpowder technology itself, from better guns and warships to improved forts and siege tactics.

Being at the forefront of this technology was therefore important, and Andrade aims to tell the story of who led its development from the very origins of gunpowder weapons in Song Dynasty China. In his story, which I greatly simplify here, the leader is either Europe or China, and at the outset China held the lead. But China fell behind after about 1450, as the Ming dynasty was stabilized and fought fewer wars. In Europe, by contrast, war did not abate, and having acquired the gunpowder technology from China, the Europeans used it heavily and pushed it further, by developing matchlock muskets and the first artillery. When these improved gunpowder weapons arrived in East Asia with the Europeans in the sixteenth century, China copied them, and as warfare picked up again in East Asia later in the century, the Chinese caught up with the Europeans, leading to an age of technological parity between Europe and China (and East Asia in general) between roughly 1550 and roughly 1700. Thereafter, Europe took the lead as fighting again subsided in East Asia and as the Europeans learned how to apply science (specifically the ballistics of air resistance) and industrial engineering to military technology.

This story raises two questions. The first involves Andrade's way of determining who had the lead in developing the gunpowder technology. Andrade's method (apart from looking at the remarks of contemporary observers) is to examine different battles between European and Chinese forces and then ask who won. For him, the victor is the leader, at least in the technology that was used in the particular battle. The battles, though, are all in East Asia, and that raises the question whether East Asian battles really are a fair comparison for the Europeans. As for the second question, it concerns his explanation behind the lead. For Andrade, the lead in improving gunpowder weapons is ultimately explained by the frequency of war, at least until science is applied to military technology in the eighteenth century. In a nutshell, when warfare wanes in East Asia, China falls behind; otherwise it catches up until science becomes important. But are there not other factors at work?

The obvious concern with fairness of Andrade's method is that the Europeans were far from home or did not have all the resources available to the Chinese. And to judge from Andrade's account, the European leaders in Andrade's battles were not the best that Europe had to offer. In short, the comparisons may be stacked against the Europeans, and they may exaggerate the speed with which China caught up in the late Ming Dynasty or underestimate the size of any remaining technological gap in the period 1550–1700. Andrade acknowledges that in this age of parity Europe did still hold the lead in certain areas—in warships, fortification design, and siege tactics. But the Europeans may have still been ahead in other parts of the gunpowder technology too, if Andrade's method is misleading.

Ideally, one would like to correct for the bias of his method. Andrade could have done so by asking what would have happened if both sides in the battles had the same resources and leadership and were equidistant from home—in other words, by engaging in counterfactual analysis, something that is quite common in economic history. He might have also tried other ways of determining who was at the forefront of the gunpowder technology, such as examining the direction of intercontinental trade in military expertise and technology. From the beginning of the sixteenth century on, that trade nearly all went in one direction, from Europe to Asia, with the only exception being rockets from late eighteenth-century India. The flow of expertise, nearly all of it from west to east, raises some doubt about whether 1550–1700 really was an age of parity. And the European lead might have yawned open even wider if Andrade had considered still other factors that play into military domination, such as the ability to finance wars by borrowing. There Europe had a clear lead by the seventeenth century.

What about Andrade's singling out the frequency of war as the chief factor that determines who has the lead? It clearly plays an important role in explaining military advances, particularly before science starts to affect innovation, and it does seem to match Andrade's chronology of improved gunpowder weapons, provided we trust his method of measuring the lead. The problem, though, is that there were other forces affecting the pace of the advances with the gunpowder technology.

Among these other forces was the sort of enemies a country faced. In Firearms: A Global History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), Kenneth Chase (whose work Andrade does acknowledge) has argued that gunpowder weapons were less effective against the sort of steppe nomads that China often faced. The nomads had no cities to besiege, and they could ride away from infantry, who would usually run out of supplies on the steppe. The best tactic was to dispatch cavalry against the nomads and arm the cavalry with bows, because it was difficult to fire a matchlock musket on horseback. Not that guns were useless against nomads—far from it. They could target nomads from fortifications, and the nomads themselves began using guns in the seventeenth century. But even in the final campaigns against the nomads in the eighteenth century, archers on horseback proved important. So to some extent China continued to depend on archers. It therefore waged less gunpowder warfare and thus had less of a chance to practice with guns, artillery, and fortifications, and less of chance to improve them. In western Europe, by contrast, nomads posed no threat whatsoever, and so nothing diverted attention from the gunpowder technology. The result would be a faster pace of improvements to the gunpowder technology in Europe.

The geography of power in East Asia had a similar effect, once the Qing Dynasty was firmly in power. As an East Asian hegemon, its size and military might would discourage rivals from attacking. The result would be the reduced frequency of war that Andrade notices, but not just for China. There would be less war throughout East Asia, and hence less innovation with gunpowder weapons everywhere in East Asia. Europe, of course, had no hegemon, so its wars continued unabated.

There was one other force that spurred on innovation with gunpowder weapons as well: spending on war. It was critical, as we can see by looking at the Ottoman Empire and South Asia in the eighteenth century. In both places, war was frequent, but improving the gunpowder technology was rare. The reason, as I have argued in Why Did Europe Conquer the World, is that the Ottomans, and the polities that battled in South Asia as the Mughal Empire disintegrated, lacked fiscal systems that could mobilize large amounts of revenue for war. If recurrent war is all that matters, they should have innovated, but by and large they did not. Andrade might object that the Ottomans and South Asians lacked the science needed for further improvements, but there were many military innovations in eighteenth-century Europe that preceded scientific progress by decades or had nothing to do with it at all—for instance, cannon boring machines or copper sheathing that increased the speed and useful life of warships.

In any case, spending was essential for innovation. Even in the nineteenth century, when the role of science was clear, spending played a key role. In fact, the Europeans actually fought much less between 1815 and 1914, but their military expenditures actually rose. They were in something like the cold war, and without all the tax revenue spent on the military, they too would not have innovated. Andrade himself seems to acknowledge the importance of military spending, particularly when he discusses how a lack of funds contributed to the Qing's military decline and hampered nineteenth-century efforts to modernize China's armed forces.

One reason why military spending may have been limited in Qing China is that per-capita tax revenues seem to have been low, far lower than in western Europe, if we can trust the figures gathered by Loren Brandt, Debin Ma, and Thomas Rawski.Footnote ⁸ And the imperial authorities may have devoted more tax revenue to public goods such as famine relief than their counterparts in Europe, whose sole task was to raise money for war. The result again would be less military innovation in China and more innovation in western Europe, simply as a result of the Europeans’ profligate spending on war.

All great books raise questions, but posing them should not detract from Andrade's achievement, for The Gunpowder Age certainly is a great book. It raises other questions as well. One might for instance ask what it says about global history beyond military technology. Does it have implications for the great divergence? It is hard to say that improved gunpowder weapons made anyone better off, either in China or Europe. The average European, for example, was taxed mercilessly by monarchs, who, for the most part, were pursuing their own glory. True, some Europeans may have benefitted (wage earners in eighteenth-century London if we believe Robert Allen), but overall Europeans were worse off.Footnote ⁹ The same was true for British taxpayers in the heyday of the British Empire. Perhaps colonial trade contributed to industrialization (although many economic historians would disagree), and warfare may have facilitated the development of the iron industry or the creation of financial markets. But it is hard to argue that guns ushered in economic growth.

Tonio Andrade has written a comparative history of the invention, development, and impact of gunpowder weapons, focusing on China (his academic area of specialization) and western Europe. This direct comparison sheds considerable light on several major debates in military and world history, particularly the so-called “Military Revolution” of early modern Europe and the origins of the “Great Divergence” between China and Europe in the nineteenth century. The Gunpowder Age should become a central piece in the “canon” of these issues.

Andrade plays the key card in his hand early. On page six, he presents a chart showing the number of wars fought in Europe and China between 1340 and 1910. As he points out, while the numbers do not match up exactly, they are remarkably similar between 1340 and about 1680. At that point, a “great divergence” sets in. In China, the successes of the Qing dynasty in establishing a “great peace” are clearly visible: except for a brief and moderate uptick in the 1740s, China saw minimal levels of conflict between 1680 and 1840s. Europe, meanwhile, witnessed during the long eighteenth century significant numbers of wars almost every year, including four of the top five years for numbers of wars on the entire chart. Andrade sees in this eighteenth century difference the cause of the vast disparity in military capability between China and (specifically) Britain that the First Opium War exposed starting in 1839. Simply put, after centuries of development of military capability—including especially the invention and improvement of gunpowder weaponry—that tracked closely in the two regions based in roughly equivalent challenges posed by war, China fell victim to its own success and got “out of practice” at technological development and conducting major wars during its eighteenth-century lull.

We should note several things about this thesis. First, Andrade applies a social science methodology—simply counting things!—to a question whose answers have recently come to be dominated by cultural analysis. In addition, the thesis fits into the materialist “challenge and response” dynamic often used by military historians to account for military innovation, whether technological or doctrinal. A clear and globally applied version of this sort of analysis is Wayne Lee's recent book Waging War, though Lee is careful to weave the role of culture into his analysis of how polities perceive challenges or threats.Footnote ¹⁰ Thus, Andrade returns a distinctly social science perspective back to the “Military Revolution” debate, where it is much needed, and adds a different materialist perspective to the Great Divergence debate that began with the essentially economic analyses of Kenneth Pomeranz, though Pomeranz too rightly acknowledges some role for cultural differences in the ways that Chinese and European states responded to economic conditions.

This materialist, social science-oriented approach to comparative history allows Andrade to compare like things, avoiding the problem that can plague comparative cultural analysis of comparing apples and oranges (sometimes one culture's word for “apples” is oranges in translation, inviting misleading comparisons). Like Lee and Pomeranz, Andrade does not neglect culture, acknowledging that counting conflicts depends in part on how each culture defined and recorded them. But he considers this a minor problem, rendering his analysis more like Political Science than Comparative Literature. In this reviewer's view, his argument works. The “number of wars” comparison also allows Andrade to avoid the teleological traps that tend to emerge from cultural analyses, because the metric emphasizes the similarities between China and Europe up to a very late date, preventing the sort of “deep cultural difference from early on” argument that makes eventual European success appear inevitable. He further explicitly argues against such teleology by pointing out that the resurgence of Chinese military power in the later twentieth century is simply a recent instance of a series of Chinese modernizing responses to external challenges that date back to the fourteenth century, never mind that China sometimes led innovation in the first place. In addition, his comparative analysis works, as it should, in both directions, casting as much light on European developments as it does on China.

There is, however, more culture than meets the eye in Andrade's comparisons. His materialist frame, the “challenge and response” dynamic in military innovation, reveals the deep cultural assumptions that undergird his analysis. To begin with, I think he finds comparisons between China and Europe within this “challenge and response” frame fairly straightforward because he assumes (correctly) some basic similarities between the two military cultures. Many of these similarities are also materially grounded, but in ways that we need to specify. Most fundamentally, both regions created cultures of war that were characteristic of their relatively rich sedentary, agrarian economies—in contrast to the military cultures of, for example, pastoralist nomadic economies such as Central Asia or less productive agricultural economies such as West Africa. Compare, for example, John Thornton's analyses of Atlantic African warfare, which demonstrate the materially and thus culturally contingent reception of gunpowder in different economies.Footnote ¹¹ The fundamental similarity of the Chinese and European geographic-economic regimes from early on can be seen in the basic similarities in strategic advice offered by the Chinese Warring States-era military literature represented by the Sunzi and the late-Roman military handbook authored by Vegetius.

Within that broad geographic-economic similarity, by the gunpowder age of Andrade's study China and Europe shared further similarities in the “scientific” and manufacturing sectors of economic activity that facilitated similar responses to military challenges, especially in terms of the development of military technology. The “scientific” resemblance was basic enough in terms of theoretical understandings of nature that cultural differences in what we would call applied physics and chemistry were still negligible. Indeed, Andrade argues that such differences remained effectively non-existent into the eighteenth century, explicitly countering interpretations of Chinese culture as “anti-technological.”

Finally, to the extent that there were differences in the underlying political and economic contexts of military innovation, Andrade's analysis shows that Europe, over the course of the later Middle Ages and early modern period, was becoming more like China. This is centrally true of the role of the state and state power in military innovation, as European states became gradually more “Chinese” over the time period of the book. There remained differences, of course, mostly in terms of the interaction between the state and private enterprise in each region, but Andrade takes account of these differences and argues that they were less significant than is sometimes portrayed, along lines similar to those investigated by Pomeranz. Andrade's analysis of the role of state power implicitly argues that such power was in fact a precondition to the effective employment of gunpowder weaponry in war, an argument I have made about sixteenth-century Japanese warfare.Footnote ¹² His argument therefore modifies the central thesis of the conclusion of Geoffrey Parker's Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), that “Warring States” eras—in China very early on and in Europe as well as Japan during this period—constitute crucial moments in the global history of warfare and state power. The modification, of course, is that for Adrade the growth of state power precedes military revolution, a position with which I fully agree, whereas the central point of Parker's book and much of the European “Military Revolution” literature is to show that changes in military technology caused (or at least stimulated) political change.

Thus, in terms of the Big Questions I noted at the beginning of this review, Andrade's book constitutes another nail in the coffin of the “Military Revolution of Early Modern Europe” thesis, which traces both the rise of the “modern state” and the origins of European imperial dominance in the nineteenth century to the results of the introduction of gunpowder weaponry in Europe from the fourteenth century. (This may suggest more finality than is warranted for the theory, given its zombie-like ability to rise from the dead. But the more specialists in non-European military history such as Andrade and Peter Lorge weigh in, the fewer lives it has left, I hope.)Footnote ¹³

In addition, Andrade's focus on war fighting capacity and the role of being “out of practice” in a “challenge and response” military dynamic highlights the complexity of causation in explaining the “Great Divergence” between Europe and China (and indeed the rest of the world) in the nineteenth century. The divergence was not just an economic phenomenon, although Industrialization is centrally important and is inextricably tied up with military technology and capability. Furthermore, as noted above, the focus on military capability makes it even easier to see what a temporary phenomenon “western dominance” is in world history.

In sum, this is a very valuable book of world history because it takes China not just as a central topic, but because it uses the Chinese experience of gunpowder as a lens through which to view the rest of the world during this time, including Europe—which is too often the standard lens. The resulting picture is different and revealing in its difference.

Tonio Andrade has over the last decade become a key player in the development of a global perspective on the relationship between military change, technology transfer, and interstate competition. His work, based on direct knowledge of Chinese sources and scholarship, has challenged a range of assumptions about the respective military development of China and the European powers from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Andrade deconstructs a traditional, Europe-focused interpretation of the impact of gunpowder on warfare. The lineaments of this story are familiar. Gunpowder was made in Asia as early as the ninth century CE but was not originally used in warfare by the Chinese. Whether because they lacked the military stimulus of inter-state competition, or whether a Confucian-inspired contempt for the practical application of technology held them back, the Chinese placed themselves on a trajectory which consistently lagged behind European states in the application of gunpowder to warfare. If the military consequences of this backwardness only emerged in the Opium wars of 1839–42, the gap between military potential had been widening since at least the sixteenth century, when Europeans had started combining technology, organization, and resource mobilization in what has been described as a military revolution.

Andrade calls into question much of this story about the evolving superiority of European military capacity. A touchstone of the original military revolution thesis was the combination of infantry firearms, linear formations, and systematic drill to make possible the practice of counter-march and volley fire. To its most enthusiastic adherents, this turned European infantry formations into “production-lines of death,” and transformed the early modern battlefield from one shaped by the brute clash of edged weapons into a competition to maximize firepower, in which drill and discipline would prevail. Andrade's account provides sources—down to carefully drawn diagrams dating from the eighth century—to show how the Chinese had centuries before developed and refined counter-march drills and volley fire for their crossbowmen. He adds some suggestive, though not entirely unambiguous, evidence that this had been adapted to Chinese handguns by the early fifteenth century, and both written and visual evidence that they were applied to troops equipped with European-style muskets by the 1560s.

Chinese, and indeed more widely Asian, traditions of military drill and discipline were autonomous, extended far back into the past, and were effective: Andrade's accounts of clashes between European forces and professional, drilled Chinese troops indicate that the Chinese were capable of the forbearance under fire that has been identified as the hallmark of European armies’ success both on the European battlefield and in combat with numerically superior forces elsewhere in the world. Previous historians, most notably Jeremy Black, have ranged widely over early modern warfare on a global scale to demonstrate that European military technology, drill and organization was by no means guaranteed success in encounters with non-European forces.Footnote ¹⁴ In general, however, the conclusion has been that other combat traditions had prevailed against European over-reliance on technology or rigid tactics. Andrade's case is that Europeans could be defeated on their own terms, by drilled, tightly-disciplined armies using the same repertoire of tactics and operational approaches to warfare.

These parallels were enhanced by technology transfers, and again, Andrade stresses, there was nothing in Chinese culture or the attitudes of governmental and military elites to impede the acquiring and deployment of European weaponry if this seemed to offer clear military advantages whether against Europeans, or more usually, against traditional Asiatic enemies. Both the arquebus and musket, and, on two separate occasions, different types of European cannon, were acquired, copied, and, in some cases, improved by better Chinese metallurgy. As in Europe, Chinese military innovation was driven by extensive and continuous warfare: Andrade shows how the patterns of intensive warfare from 1350 through into the 1700s are remarkably similar between China and Europe.

Yet this argument for military parity throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is presented with some significant caveats. In certain areas, Andrade argues, European technology stole a march on China, and this permitted the Europeans some crucial advantages. The first of these was the broadside-gunned sailing ship, and the second the “Renaissance fortress”—the bastioned, low-walled artillery-emplacements that had sprung up across Europe since the early sixteenth century and spread to extra-European colonies. The third, which became far more significant in the nineteenth-century as China faced the full onslaught of Western colonial powers, was experimental science and its impact in developing whole new levels of military technology.

What of the first two: the heavy gunned sailing ship and the Renaissance fortress? There seems some support from contemporaries for such a view: the superiority of European warships was acknowledged by the Chinese themselves, who in the early 1630s began to build a fleet “in the Dutch style.” This was destroyed by a Dutch pre-emptive strike in 1633. Andrade speculates about why the Chinese made no further attempts to build Western-style vessels until the mid-nineteenth century: Qing China had no intention of contesting the Dutch presence in the Far East in general, and the European presence in China itself was contained and controlled; meanwhile far more pressing domestic threats and the strategy of pacification and annexation in Central Asia occupied military attention and resources. In Andrade's account, the superiority of the bastioned artillery fortress is equally clear: a means for Europeans to maintain a military presence while massively outnumbered by hostile local populations. A classic test-case of the utility of bastioned fortifications, the siege of Fort Zeelandia on Taiwan in 1661–62, which Andrade considered in detail in his earlier work Lost Colony, is central to the present account. It presents potentially ambiguous evidence: a Dutch artillery fortress that held out against a vastly larger Chinese army during a first siege, and only succumbed after nine months as the Chinese developed more sophisticated siege techniques. Similar accounts are provided of Chinese military encounters with Russian bastioned fortresses in the later seventeenth century: the cost of taking them was high and would tie down armies that might be pursuing other objectives against an intrusive Russian presence. Yet taken they eventually were.

To a professed skeptic about the tendency to technological determinism in early modern military historiography, the case for the Renaissance fortress raises small but nagging questions about what in all other respects seems a convincing, and overdue, revisionist thesis about the nature of the military “great divergence.” Paradoxically, the skepticism might even serve to reinforce the broader outlines of Andrade's thesis. Here, as in the work of other early modern military historians, there is a tendency to over-estimate the lethality of gunpowder weaponry and to underestimate the logistical difficulties of maintaining its supply and functioning. The Réveries of the Maréchal de Saxe, and other writings by eighteenth-century military memoirists and theorists, precisely at the point when European musketry drill was at its apogee, are a salutary warning for those tempted to write about devastating hails of musket fire, and musket volleys sweeping away advancing forces. Of the Imperial defeat by Ottoman troops at the battle of Belgrade in 1717, Saxe wrote: “I had curiosity enough to count the dead: I found only 32 Turks killed by the general discharge of the two battalions (around 1500 men, who had fired when the enemy was 30 paces from them)—which has not increased my regard for infantry fire.” The Chinese professional troops who stood their ground against volley-fire by Dutch musketeers, were courageous in addition to being well-drilled; but they were not suicidal. Focusing on musketry, counter-march, and volley has always threatened to distort the bigger picture of early modern battles: European troops would ultimately need to engage, as they did in Europe, in direct hand-to-hand combat; this was where most casualties would occur, and where the advantages of gunpowder technology were minimal.

If the alternative might be to take refuge in the Renaissance fortress, a second problem arises: the defensive capacity of such fortresses was intimately linked to artillery, and the covering fire that bastion-mounted artillery could provide. From a European perspective the besetting weakness of such defensive systems was the substantial gap between the number of artillery pieces required to provide full covering fire, and the number of guns actually available in a given fortress. Demand for cannon meant competition with burgeoning navies and with field armies’ need for siege trains; bronze-cast guns were extremely expensive, even by the standards of other military expenditure. Artillery in working order, well-supplied with powder and shot, and in a variety of different calibers and ranges, was certainly capable of deterring an assault on a fortified strongpoint like those built by the Portuguese, Dutch, and others in the Far East. Unlike infantry firearms, early modern artillery was unambiguously effective, both in terms of range and the variety of projectiles that could be used. But we have innumerable examples of European renaissance fortresses and state-of-art fortified towns which were chronically short of artillery, and especially artillery in working order. And we have further examples of those for whom inadequate stockpiles of munitions or the inability to resupply with powder and shot, rendered the entire defensive system untenable. Artillery supply and logistical support can be assumed to represent an even greater challenge in a colonial context: how well-provisioned with artillery and munitions was any given fortress, given the greater difficulties of purchase, transport, and constraining financial priorities? In the case of the Chinese siege of Fort Zeelandia in 1661, it would seem from Andrade's accounts here and in his previous work that we do not know how many artillery pieces the Dutch defenders actually possessed. Soon after the Chinese arrival on Taiwan, a smaller, dependent Dutch fort surrendered on terms, the commander maintaining that the place was unable to resist as it possessed no more than 200 pounds of gunpowder and equally limited ammunition.

In this context the question of whether the artillery fortress was an “engine of European expansion” might still be worth revisiting. As I have argued in a European context, the effectiveness of fortresses depended on factors other than the shape of bastions and the careful placing of outworks as facilitators of artillery firepower. Though it was tempting for minor European rulers to embrace the rhetoric of the invulnerable fortress and to savor the dynastic prestige of fortress building, the decision was highly political: it required both a recognition that there was a major opportunity-cost in allocating military resources to building and maintaining a fortress, and that the decision itself would have political consequences in the attitudes and responses of other, particularly larger, states. There were undoubtedly cases where the building of renaissance fortresses in locations in East Asia that were contested between local powers, or on territory where the local power was weak, may indeed have been a facilitator of European expansion. From the evidence in Andrade's account, when such fortresses were built in or within the sphere of influence of Ming and Qing China, the results were similar to examples in contemporary European contexts where secondary powers built fortresses: larger military and logistical factors would prevail, whether the fortress surrendered immediately or whether it took a siege to demonstrate the unsustainability of the wider military-political position in which that lesser power stood.

A central feature of Andrade's Gunpowder Age is the analysis of the period approximately 1660 to 1839, not benchmarks of the Chinese calendar but of the years between the military revolution in Europe and the British aggression against China in the so-called Opium Wars. Clearly bounded by military clashes, Andrade's thesis is that Chinese military power “atrophied” just as western military power was revolutionized through “increase in size, organization, and technological sophistication.” Following Parker, Pomeranz, and Wong, Andrade thus issues in a Great Military Divergence at the center of analysis, which allows the focus of Chinese problems to lie in the relatively short term, not so much as a result of some general Chinese cultural failure or regress or of the general industrial transformation of the west, as of its very much more specific military technological rise.

In this sweep, Andrade frees his argument from any obvious Marxian, Weberian, or Toynbeean European long-term perspective, and even from the longish-term of Gunder Frank's silver flows and “American” windfall gains.Footnote ¹⁵ Thus, the addition of the combined Americas to form an Atlantic system might well have loaded things in favor of European commercial and industrial forwardness from the sixteenth century, and this may have been an indirect result of an independent rise in the Chinese demand for silver. But, the addition of such windfall gains, the accumulative, overwhelming new world resources, could not as such determine the direction or regime of technological progress in Europe that actually evolved during the years from the late eighteenth century, nor could it generate the undernourishment of Chinese military assets which emerged at the same time. Indeed, the latter occurred independently of global commercial developments, lying much more with an earlier Chinese (high equilibrium) success, which meant that the “Qing's unprecedented hegemony removed the stimulus for military innovation,” something that can only be starkly contrasted with the European arms race that occurred during the Napoleonic wars. Globally neither cultures nor gross national products ever did clash, but navies and armies surely did! It was war that did it.

Although Gunder Frank, Ken Pomeranz, and R. Bin Wong are acknowledged positively and fully, the global comparisons and analyses that they and others have developed are touched upon only very lightly. Perhaps as importantly, fundamental work by Norman Jacobs in 1958 and the astute work of Daniel Headrick since the late 1970s is omitted from discussion.Footnote ¹⁶ This is not to be pedantic but rather to suggest that critical discussion of such authors might well have served to further enhance the comparative military-technological perspective developed here, and to expose more clearly the knotty problems of distinguishing between economic, political, and cultural processes within the overall framework. As one exemplar, Jacobs asked the now well-worn comparative question: “Why did modern industrial capitalism arise in one East Asian society (Japan), and not in another (China)?” and answered it in terms of socio-economic organization rather than in terms of technological capacities, whilst also adamantly maintaining that social systems “which do not develop capitalism are distinctly and positively different in kind even in their pre-capitalist stage from social systems which do develop capitalism.”Footnote ¹⁷ That is, the values of industrial capitalist societies are not only distinct from those of failed systems, but were so long prior to the inception of capitalism itself. The systems that do not develop capitalist industry are those in which there was or is an utter absence of such “positive” values or propensities. The only logical conclusion to all this for Jacobs was that Japan succeeded because its pre-industrial feudal guild system secured rights which rising capitalism then assumed or took over, and thus “capitalism fitted into the traditional social structure.”Footnote ¹⁸ In contrast, Chinese guilds never developed such rights nor did their successor commercial organizations. This is an interesting break with the Weberian approaches of that time, in that it stresses the continuities rather than dualism between feudalist organizations and capitalist development, but remains fundamentally part of the liberal conventionalist corpus, as it stresses the decisive importance of underlying historical traits derived from euro-history.

Andrade does show that “cultural” factors might be enlisted not so much to explain lack of innovation but rather a tendency in China for induced innovations to follow patterns that were less likely to be mechanical and metallic and more likely to be institutional and procedural. An older but always problematic thesis did argue that the institutional innovations in the rural economy that allowed China to mobilize its labor resources for economic surplus from the latter half of the nineteenth century were induced by an economic stagnation and a search for more effective control over local and regional resources.Footnote ¹⁹

Innovation without disruption was perhaps a far more ingrained world view of Chinese governance than was any search for technological change, but this might have been of little importance in determining the historical outcomes if such governance had not been imperial, or if physical reality had been closer to that of the west—the ubiquitous bamboo so readily substituted for most needs that were met by iron and coal in Europe, short but many-sided and contested borders between European states constantly invoked searches for competitive advantage, whether from extended foreign markets, improved weaponry or utilization of a wider range of natural materials, especially minerals. Securing any one of these desiderata induced changes in technology—market frontiers could only be broken through efficient transport, increasingly by sea; any revolution in weaponry required a cultural jump from wood and man-force to metal and gunpowder. In contrast, a bamboo economy could feed a growing population without much pressure upon mechanical contrivances, expansion of markets by sea or even imperial governance, and none of this demanded a populous, bustling world of metal-using artisans whose workshops could through time develop as the production sites of a new industrial manufacturing.Footnote ²⁰

Furthermore, the Andrade perspective does not require any argument that such Chinese governance was either a sole determinant of failure in the face of the rise of the west from the 1660s, nor that it was forged deep within an unshifting Chinese literati culture that either knew nothing of or refuted the western alternative—Andrade makes nothing of the Macartney Embassy of 1793. Throughout his development of these themes, in the present absence of any grand theory, there is an astute maneuvering of arguments that resonate off a social constructivist view of technology, to approach at one time the cultural, at another the economic, at another the political. It seems to me that in present world history no one is succeeding in doing much more than this.

Andrade's work is very much in line with recent tendencies in history of science and technology that aim to free the western story, in particular, from claims of cultural—even racial—particularity. If we adhere strictly to the book, we no longer need to seek a Chinese cultural argument (of failure to keep up in technology or governance) to juxtapose with a western cultural argument (of success in thrusting forward into industrial capitalism, technological superiority, and colonialism), and thus need not conclude as did Kurt Mendelssohn (1906–1980, FRS and emeritus of Wolfson College, Oxford) in 1967 that

It is possible to draw some world analytical synthesis here from the history of technology if we are prepared to reflect back upon the core approach of the great Joseph Schumpeter.Footnote ²² If we acknowledge a version of the Schumpetarian model for technological change in history, then much of Chinese history not only becomes more “rational” in a western perspective, but may well be thought of as at least equally productive. Schumpeter always embraced within his notion of technological innovation those efficiency increases resulting from innovations in institutions, markets and governance. So, the fast growth of Japan in the 1960s and 1970s had much to do with technological change; but isolating that from the undoubted plethora of organizational innovations is no easy matter.Footnote ²³ This is clearly much more of a problem with any nation or region for say the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. It might be that imperial governance and the exigencies of huge, difficult, and very varied frontiers did direct the Chinese elite into institutional adaptation and social continuity, as against the more free-floating, discontinuous technological changes of Europe and then America. But measuring whether the one was more or less productive than the other is a difficult matter, and with recent work by O'Brien and Deng that casts doubts upon many of the statistical presumptions of the recent global accounts,Footnote ²⁴ we might conclude as a reasonable if temporary position, that in China economic growth and its welfare outcome stemmed more from institutional innovations within a continuing governance, than in the west where technological change (in the more direct sense of machines and structures) was far more prominent and ad hoc. That one was far more growth-inducing remains in doubt for the long years into the eighteenth century, but from thereafter the ascendency of the west arose from her early choice of metal-based machinofactures that gave her the military advantage when systems clashed. Birmingham produced both small toys and very big guns. And when civilizations clashed, cultural conflict on one hand and varying levels of per capita income on the other meant far less than the variations in military capacities and in the natural and man-made resources upon which they could draw.