Download E-books The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History PDF

By Tonio Andrade

The chinese language invented gunpowder and started exploring its army makes use of as early because the 900s, 4 centuries earlier than the expertise handed to the West. yet by way of the early 1800s, China had fallen to this point in the back of the West in gunpowder struggle that it was once simply defeated through Britain within the Opium struggle of 1839-42. What occurred? In The Gunpowder Age, Tonio Andrade deals a compelling new resolution, beginning a clean viewpoint on a key query of worldwide historical past: why did the international locations of western Europe surge to worldwide value beginning within the 1500s whereas China slipped behind?

Historians have lengthy argued that gunpowder guns helped Europeans identify international hegemony. but the population of what's this day China not just invented weapons and bombs but additionally, as Andrade indicates, persevered to innovate in gunpowder expertise throughout the early 1700s--much longer than formerly notion. Why, then, did China turn into so weak? Andrade argues that one major cause is that it was once out of shape combating wars, having loved approximately a century of relative peace, given that 1760. certainly, he demonstrates that China--like Europe--was a robust army innovator, fairly in periods of significant conflict, comparable to the violent century beginning after the Opium struggle, while the chinese language once more fast modernized their forces. this day, China is just returning to its previous place as one of many world's nice army powers.

By exhibiting that China's army dynamism used to be deeper, longer lasting, and extra quick recovered than formerly understood, The Gunpowder Age demanding situations long-standing factors of the so-called nice Divergence among the West and Asia.