To anyone versed in the “Great Divergence” debate, the framing question of Tonio Andrade's new book rings familiar—“how did the once marginal states of Europe surge to global power and predominance after 1500?” (p. 1). But whereas approaches to this well-worn question have hitherto focused principally on economic dynamics, Andrade offers a new analytical framework: global military history—or what he calls “a global warring states perspective” (p. 10). In particular, Andrade trains his analytical lens on the evolution of gunpowder warfare, a topic that has long garnered scattered attention but has yet to be systematically integrated into global history.
By tracing “the full sweep” of the gunpowder age—from its inception in China in the ninth century through the industrialization of warfare in the nineteenth—Andrade seeks to “bring Asian and European military history into conversation, asking not just how China diverged from the West but also how the West diverged from East Asia” (p. 2). In so doing, he aims to dispel two longstanding myths: that gunpowder warfare and its attendant technologies were a source of Western strength and dynamism; and that, conversely, China's inability to continually develop gunpowder technologies was cause and consequence of its “stagnation.” To the contrary, Andrade argues, gunpowder weaponry was a fixture of Chinese warfare and energetically developed, adapted, and deployed by different Chinese states to different ends.
The Gunpowder Age is comprised of eighteen chapters organized into four parts. Part one tracks the evolution of the earliest gunpowder technologies in China: from bomb-strapped firebirds and fire lances through the proliferation of more familiar guns in the Ming period. Andrade proceeds in part two to show how the efflorescence of gunpowder technologies in the Song and Ming dynasties eventually resulted in the first, “little” military divergence: the rapid advancement in European gunpowder weaponry between 1450 and 1550. The reason, according to Andrade, was not so much Chinese inertia as it was an expansion and intensification of hostilities in Europe—a warring states period that did much to nurture technological and tactical innovations in gunpowder warfare. Whatever the gap between Europe and China, it was quickly closed. As Andrade argues in part three, the Chinese (and indeed their Asian neighbors) were quick to develop musket technologies of their own such that by the mid-sixteenth century East Asia was on equal military footing with Western nations.
The ensuing “Age of Parity” (1550–1700), however, eventually gave way to a gap in gunpowder warfare that yawned over the course of the eighteenth century—the “Great Military Divergence.” Fueling this divergence were many of the forces that scholars have routinely used to explain Europe's rise: the onset of industrialization, the spirit of scientific inquiry, and access to new markets and resources. But Andrade also calls attention to a critical but often overlooked dynamic: the military implications of “the Great Qing Peace,” the centuries-long period of relative stability achieved under the Qing imperium. With a decrease in warfare and “interstate competition” came a slowdown in the military and scientific innovation that had long been sustained by China's often-tumultuous dynastic transitions and internal pacification campaigns. As a consequence, weapons rusted, tactics became outmoded, and gunpowder technologies languished. One need look no further than the decisive defeat of the Qing dynasty at the hands of Western gunboats in the early nineteenth-century Opium Wars to grasp the implications of this military divergence.
Covering no less than a thousand years of history, marshaling a staggering array of evidence from multiple languages and disciplines, and offering sustained comparative analysis with other parts of the Western world, this is a big book in every sense of the word. While one can quibble with issues of regional variation and questions of causality, Andrade makes a compelling case for the centrality of gunpowder in the making of the modern world. What ultimately emerges from this fast-paced, if at times dizzying, narrative is a sense that gunpowder is so much more than just a chemical explosive. Holding implications for science, statecraft, architecture, and labor, among other things, gunpowder had far-reaching and often under-appreciated implications for state and society alike. In this sense, gunpowder and its attendant technologies offer something of an analytical prism through which multiple sectors of society—be they military officials, bureaucrats, scientists, or foot soldiers—simultaneously come into view.
But perhaps the signal contribution of the book lies in its creative fusion of military and world history. At a time when military history is contracting as a discipline, The Gunpowder Age suggests a number of new paths forward. Not only does Andrade significantly expand the geographical boundaries of conventional military histories to attend to global patterns, but he also offers a powerful reminder that the study of war offers insight into so much more than battles won and lost. Through his meticulous treatment of gunpowder in its many forms, he shows his readers how warfare mobilizes various forms of knowledge, entangles different stakeholders, and shapes the material conditions of everyday life. Anyone interested in the long view of the co-evolution of war and society—and what this means for the big questions of world history—would do well to pick up this book.
