Eurasia through the lens of Western European experience

Disciplined infantry equipped with increasingly advanced guns was thought to have been a key ingredient in the rise of the West starting in the sixteenth century, a view which is still influential among modern scholars (See, for example: Vries Reference Vries2015, 302–304). This notion was first systematically articulated in 1955 by Michael Roberts in his “military revolution”-thesis. It famously posited that hand-held firearms, because of their drawbacks in accuracy and reloading speed, could only be profitably employed by drilled masses of soldiers capable of disciplined firing by ranks, ensuring a steady and continuous rate of fire lest they be overrun by the enemy. This in turn necessitated a bureaucratized state with sufficient fiscal reach, which could support larger and more permanent professional formations capable of retaining the necessary skillsets and collective discipline. Roberts’ military revolution thus drove state formation, a process originating in the period 1560–1660 (Roberts Reference Roberts and Rogers1995).

Geoffrey Parker revised and enlarged the scope of this thesis in 1988, bringing it more firmly into the domain of global history. The emergence of infantry gunners and their volley fire tactics was now the last link in a cascading series of innovations, starting with the development of siege artillery in the late fifteenth century, continuing with the invention of larger artillery-resistant fortresses and broad-side firing sailing warships, and culminating in the enlarged infantry forces necessary to supply the manpower for the demands the new siege warfare posed. The key difference with Roberts, besides a revised chronology, was that Parker posited that all these interlinked changes unlocked the door to world domination for European states (Parker Reference Parker1996, 4). Two connected issues which Parker posited also affected firearms developments in early modern Europe had to do with the geopolitical environment. First of all, Europe consisted of a system of mutually competing states, which drove technological innovation at a speed unmatched anywhere else in the world at this time. Moreover, the existence of multiple states was both a pre-condition and a facilitator of innovation and its quick diffusion across the region because technological innovation was both capital-intensive and intellectually complex. These twin challenges could usually not be met by a single state. Innovators and their innovations were relatively free to move from state to state in such a system, unhindered by a central overarching authority stifling these agents of change and their innovations (Parker Reference Parker2007, 366–372).

Historians of East and South-East Asia have struggled to apply Parker’s model foregrounding these cascading changes to their areas. Particularly in East Asia, artillery-resistant fortifications seem to have predated the invention of heavy siege guns, rendering Parker’s sequence moot, although the evidence for South-East Asia is more ambiguous, as shall be seen later. Debates surrounding the military revolution in these regions have thus gravitated mostly towards considering the impact of hand-held firearms, foremost the harquebus, on warfare. A counter-model proposed for European history by the revisionist Jeremy Black has also found much resonance among the area specialists, possibly because Parker’s teleology did not fit. Black suggested that state formation necessarily preceded the military changes associated with the revolution, instead of the other way around. He also argued that the true revolution only occurred from the late seventeenth century onwards in Europe, as state power and military institutions evolved sufficiently to adopt firearms effectively (Black Reference Black1991). Subsequently, much debate among area specialists has grappled with determining the priority of state formation or military innovation. The invention of gunpowder in China has also led some of these scholars, particularly those concerned with China itself, to posit that a military revolution first happened in Asia.

Another Eurocentric model of import is the notion of the “gunpowder empire,” which usually referred to Eurasian land empires, particularly the Turco-Persian polities of the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals. This concept, articulated by Marshall Hodgson and Michael McNeill, referred to empires whose rulers centralized their realms by virtue of relying on firearms, because they were too expensive for their competitors to wield. In military terms, especially the possession of heavy artillery was considered to be a boon, because it allowed rulers to destroy the fortified strongholds of their competitors. The inherent advantages hand-held firearms provided to these rulers in purely military terms were less well articulated by both Hodgson and McNeill. That this dynamic did not lead to the military revolution’s cascading changes in these gunpowder empires was thought to be the result of the absence of the kind of peer competition endemic in the Western European state system (Hodgson Reference Hodgson1974, 17–18, 26; McNeill Reference McNeill1982, 95–99, 148). This model thus explained the more limited advantages gunpowder technologies seemed to have given certain polities outside of Western Europe. This model found much resonance recently among historians of China, often resulting from an appreciation of the importance of the handgun to early Ming warfare.

A third major model further addressed the different experiences of the Western European states and the Eurasian land empires with firearms from a geographical angle and was put forward by Kenneth Chase. According to him, sedentary societies bordering the Eurasian arid zone were less incentivized to experiment with firearms because of the nature of the primary military threat they faced (Chase Reference Chase2003, 197–198). Especially pertinent to the theme of this special issue, Chase argued that drilled and slow infantry formations wielding inaccurate hand-held firearms were to be of little use against the nimble and mobile horse archers of their (semi-)nomadic adversaries (Chase Reference Chase2003, 27, 147–148). Chase’s thesis has to date received a mixed reception by historians of China and Korea, the only areas under consideration here that border the Eurasian arid zone.

Philip Hoffman felt Parker and Chase’s models to be complementary and combined (parts of) them. He believed, first, that the early modern Europeans possessed a superiority in hand-held firearms and artillery, because the circulation of innovations happened more easily in their system of closely spaced competitive states. The comparatively small scale of these states and the short distances between them made warfare cheaper, further aided by a deeper fiscal reach and the availability of less expensive firearms. Furthermore, the higher frequency of warfare among peer territorial states in Europe and the absence of nomadic threats further incentivized the development of gunpowder technologies (Andrade Reference Andrade2016a, 60–62; Hoffman Reference Hoffman2015). Hoffman’s model handily presents the geopolitical and geographical exceptionality believed to have driven Western European military technology, including the development of hand-held firearms, as one unified package.

Although not constituting a separate coherent model, another tendency of Western scholars is to approach the theme from a socio-cultural angle. Representatives often allude to certain social costs incurred by adopting firearms, a cost usually manifesting as a threat to the established social order. In the European context, there are a few hints surviving in contemporary writings that some among the late medieval nobility were disgruntled that their warrior skills, lifestyle, and socio-political status were threatened by low-born foot soldiers armed with firearms that required comparatively little time and skill to master. Nevertheless, large-scale aristocratic resistance to firearms was largely a myth constructed later (Capwell Reference Capwell2019, 29–30). David Hall has also pointed to the deskilling inherent in the development of early modern European warfare. The increasing scale of warfare at this time meant that states took recourse to recruiting cheaper, unskilled men in lieu of relying on their martial nobilities or highly skilled commoners serving as archers (Hall Reference Hall1997, 234–235). Noel Perrin took a newly reunified early modern Japan as an example of a polity which had voluntarily given up the harquebus, or at least allowed the technology to atrophy, for cultural reasons. After centuries of civil war it reverted to the sword, inter alia because of the threat the massed use of harquebusiers would have posed to samurai political power and martial culture (Perrin Reference Perrin1979, 25–26, 33–36). Kleinschmidt, on the contrary, thought that the effective use of infantry firearms required instilling a European aristocratic ethic of self-constraint in the soldiers. However, imposing “rigorous government-controlled disciplining” entailed a social cost Chinese and Japanese governments were apparently unwilling to pay. Hence, Japan gave up the gun, and hand-held firearms ostensibly failed to achieve tactical significance in China (Kleinschmidt Reference Kleinschmidt1999). Few area specialists have grappled with this scholarship, and Perrin’s hypothesis has been universally discarded by them.

The usage of the earliest hand-held firearms has thus stood at the center of debates about the relationship between state building and warfare, technology as a driver of change, and the influence of geography and socio-cultural factors on facilitating or hindering their proliferation. The resulting explanatory models have tended to promote the Western European developmental path as a kind of gold standard against which the development of firearms technology and associated infantry tactics in the rest of the world was to be judged and more often than not was found wanting, especially with an eye towards later geopolitical developments (For example: Goldstone Reference Goldstone, Bentley, Subrahmanyam and Wiesner-Hanks2015, 456; Hoffman Reference Hoffman2015, 67–103; Lieberman Reference Lieberman2009, 626; see Peter Lorge’s criticism here: P. A. Lorge Reference Lorge2008, 6). Only Japan survived this deficit analysis, because its trajectory resembled that of Europe. It had seen the rise of disciplined armies of harquebusiers capable of volley fire and fortresses not unlike the trace italienne at a time when the country was divided into competing polities. These phenomena provided further support for Chase’s thesis, because they occurred in a geography free of nomadic challengers. (Chase Reference Chase2003, 192–193, 206; Parker Reference Parker1996, 140–145). Apart from Kenneth Chase, who is well-read in several Asian languages, most of the participants in these debates have been Western historians by training. In the past few decades, this has started to change with an increasing number of area specialists adding fresh insights gleaned increasingly from non-European primary sources. For East and South-East Asian history, this has meant a significantly increased knowledge base regarding hand-held firearms usage in the early modern period, and this has closed many gaps in our knowledge, but also posed challenges to the abovementioned Eurocentric models.

A notable gap that remains concerns the usage of the harquebus by the first Europeans who were active in East and South-East Asia and introduced the weapon there, namely the Portuguese. The first contributors to this special issue, Roger Lee de Jesus and André Murteira, point out that traditional historiography, represented foremost by Geoffrey Parker, has tended to focus on the successful Portuguese use of cannons, fortresses, and ships as the pillars buttressing their maritime empire in Asia. In contrast, the harquebus has received little attention as a result of this focus on other military technologies. According to the two authors, part of the reason lies in a negative contemporaneous self-appraisal of the Portuguese themselves, which manifested as a belief they lagged behind other Western European states in the practice of infantry warfare, where the harquebus had started to reign supreme. In this appraisal we can already discern the origin of modern views of non-European warfare, which would take Western European models as the gold standard. The Portuguese mainly confronted non-European enemies overseas, against whom they could usually rely on the aforementioned three pillars. Hand-held firearms were usually only deemed useful during highly mobile amphibious raids in which harquebusiers mainly performed as skirmishers. The social system of the Estado da Índia also did not lend itself to the emergence of professional standing armies with more permanent units of harquebusiers, because soldiers were personal clients of their noble patron-officers.

Nevertheless, De Jesus and Murteira reveal that in some cases the overseas Portuguese did rely on land warfare featuring large numbers of harquebusiers in regular formations, especially in Northwestern India and Ceylon against inter alia the local population and (later) the Dutch, albeit with mixed results. The authors also point to the existence of an intriguing military manual written in the 1570s by a Portuguese soldier with experience overseas, which seems to depict a kind of volley fire technique, indicating that in this non-European theater these innovations could be conceived. Despite its usage differing from Western European patterns, the harquebus enjoyed much popularity in the Estado da Índia, as testified by frequent requests for new shipments and the emergence of a burgeoning local gun industry on Ceylon. To explain this phenomenon, De Jesus and Murteira invoke Jeremy Black’s idea of “fitness-for-purpose” to argue for the harquebus’ military effectiveness in Portuguese hands beyond that assumed by any Eurocentric model.

Both authors also take care to discern a division between the Estado and the “colonies of self-organized Portuguese communities” that sprang up over Asia as well, which at one time also included Macao. These communities consisted of merchants, missionaries, mercenaries, and pirates which probably were the main vectors in the dissemination of Portuguese firearms, like the harquebus, and associated expertise across East and (mainland) South-East Asia. Especially in the latter region they would experience much competition from Ottoman peers. Yet, as the authors argue, the fates of the harquebus, and that of Portuguese firearms in general, in both regions would diverge dramatically. In mainland South-East Asia, the Portuguese mercenaries would use their firearms expertise to gain important political positions in local states and their militaries, but their weapons, including the harquebus, would not meaningfully transform local warfare. In East Asia, by contrast, Portuguese firearms, as well as local designs based on them, would mostly be disseminated by non-Portuguese intermediaries and significantly impact local warfare, albeit divorced from Portuguese tactics. We will start with the latter region to see how modern historiography has reflected on the impact of the harquebus.

China

Many historians of China now hold that the introduction and effective use of hand-held firearms made the early Ming the world’s first “gunpowder empire,” which had even undergone a “military revolution,” although earlier claimants could have been the Song (960–1278) and Yuan (1271–1368) (Haw Reference Haw2013; Sun Reference Sun2000, 5–7, 28–33; Swope Reference Swope2001, 460–470; Yates Reference Yates, Tetlock, Lebow and Parker2006). Weicong Duan in particular argued that early Ming firearms, despite lacking the power to breach walls, were yet indispensable enough to the first few Ming emperors in a variety of tactical settings, including ship-to-ship warfare, sieges, and pitched battles. The Yongle emperor (r. 1402–1424) devised combined arms tactics emphasizing the coordination between these early firearms and cavalry, which was to become the backbone of Ming military power against enemies as diverse as the sedentary Vietnamese in the southwest and the nomadic Mongols in the north. Early Ming emperors monopolized them under their control through an inner court bureaucracy staffed by eunuchs who were responsible for their production and fiscal support, and who were solely loyal to them. The preexisting outer court bureaucracy staffed by Confucian officials was thus excluded from military affairs to the benefit of imperial monarchical control (Duan Reference Duan2018, 1–82). Although a bureaucracy already existed, the adoption of gunpowder weapons simply made the early Ming emperors create another bureaucracy entrusted with the technology and staffed with personnel loyal only to the ruler.

Nevertheless, the consensus seems to be that revolutionary changes in gunpowder warfare followed state formation instead of the other way around, mirroring Jeremy Black’s view on the military revolution. Many scholars held that China had already enjoyed the fruits commonly associated with the military revolution before the invention of gunpowder (Lo Reference Lo1997, 1; Sun Reference Sun2000, 5–7, 28–33; Swope Reference Swope2001, 460–470). This line of thought was later systematically fleshed out by Peter Lorge. According to Lorge, during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Chinese Song dynasty and its adversaries used a variety of gunpowder weaponry, eventually including guns. These were used by bureaucratized standing armies in naval and field warfare but were largely useless against the large and thick sloped walls many Chinese cities were already surrounded with. Moreover, Lorge posits that many of these accomplishments, hallmarks of Parker’s military revolution, had already been in place for a millennium, implying the occurrence of revolutionary changes independent of the appearance of gunpowder. Lorge believed (military) technology not to have been a driver of change in China (and Asia as a whole), but an indicator of it (Lorge Reference Lorge2008, 1, 5). Moreover, he believed that gunpowder technology could only be fully exploited by non-Chinese cultures once their warfare started to function like Chinese warfare, which occurred in Europe in the sixteenth century (Lorge Reference Lorge2008, 9; Reference Lorge2024).

Li Bozhong also recalled Jeremy Black’s model and posited that a global military revolution took place in multiple distinct steps, which went furthest in Europe and China. China was a trailblazer in this regard, as a gunpowder revolution already started there during the Song dynasty. It was, however, followed by a more profound revolution characterized by military organizational changes, which was largely confined to early modern Europe from the seventeenth century onwards. Key to this organizational revolution was foremost the establishment of new means of education and training, which allowed armies to make full use of the potential the new weapons offered them. But this professionalization came at a high cost, which the Ming dynasty struggled to pay as it fought both the Manchu and peasant rebels in the seventeenth century. Hence, the organizational revolution was only partially completed in China, although Li Bozhong held that the succeeding Qing dynasty benefitted from its fruits without developing them further until the late nineteenth century (Li Reference Li2012, 458–459, 483–488; Reference Li2023, 93–94).

Tonio Andrade produced the most systematic example of this current but allowed for some concessions to Parker’s model. He agreed that competitive states drove military innovation faster, which explained the rapid development of gunpowder weaponry during the Song dynasty as it faced several isomorphic competitors (Andrade Reference Andrade2016b, 15–28). Nevertheless, the later replacement of this type of threat by northern nomads did not hinder the development and spread of hand-held firearms, and Chase’s model received pushback from Andrade. Whereas Lorge largely agreed with Chase’s thesis that guns developed very slowly in areas where nomads constituted the main military threat, Andrade and many other scholars highlighted the utility of hand-held firearms and light artillery against nomads and the continuous attempts to improve these weapons (Filipiak Reference Filipiak, Roy and Lorge2015; Haw Reference Haw2013, 454–456; Li Reference Li2023, 135–138; Lorge Reference Lorge2008, 16). Andrade noted a divergence in gun designs based on the different kinds of threat the Chinese faced on the steppe as compared to the Western Europeans. The Chinese needed designs that facilitated rapid fire, and thus, there was a tendency towards multi-barrelled designs that were easy to reload at the expense of accuracy. (Andrade Reference Andrade2016b, 158–159; Reference Andrade, Andrade and Swope2018). Barend Noordam later extended Andrade’s thesis by arguing that it was the proximity of successive Chinese empires to the steppe which first led to disciplined infantry volley fire, first with crossbows and later with firearms, an innovation which was afterwards periodically reinvented. As such, Noordam even assigned primacy to the presence of a persistent cavalry threat to explain the development of key infantry technologies and tactics (Noordam Reference Noordam2023a).

Prior state formation is thought to have facilitated the adoption of hand-held firearms. Andrade contended that Chinese military praxis with hand-held firearms, whether indigenous handgun designs or European designs like the harquebus, simply followed precedents established with the crossbow. The Chinese had a long and continuous experience with using drilled infantry formations of crossbowmen capable of disciplined firing by ranks and even continuous volley fire, tactics which were easily transferred to handguns and harquebuses. The latter was appropriated in the late 1540s when a Chinese official captured members of a multiethnic pirate band on the southeastern coasts of the empire, who then divulged the necessary knowledge about their manufacture. Afterwards, famous Ming military commander Qi Jiguang 戚繼光 (1528–1588) played an instrumental role in adapting the harquebus to preexisting volley fire tactics and prescribing these in his drilling manuals. Nevertheless, a divergence in the Chinese use of the harquebus from Western Europe was constituted by the fact that Ming gunners trained with their harquebuses to achieve accuracy (Andrade Reference Andrade2015; Reference Andrade2016b, 144–187).

China specialists have not systematically touched upon the socio-cultural consequences of the adoption of hand-held firearms. The notion that Confucianism disinclined Chinese elites from innovating militarily because of its supposedly pacifist bias was criticized by both Tonio Andrade and Barend Noordam. They pointed to examples of innovative Ming Neo-Confucian scholars who proactively appropriated the harquebus and Portuguese cannons (Andrade Reference Andrade2016b, 137–143; Noordam Reference Noordam2023b, 650–657). Beyond the Ming, the evolution of hand-held firearms during the Qing dynasty (1636–1911) has not been the topic of a specialized study that addresses these Eurocentric models in detail.

Barend Noordam’s contribution to this special issue goes beyond Parker and Chase’s models to argue that Chinese geopolitical and geographic differences from early modern Europe did not hinder the development of hand-held firearms. Noordam suggests that the development of hand-held firearms during the Ming was headed in the same direction as Europe – entailing further improvement of the harquebus and augmenting it with a bayonet – though stimulated by different pressures. Following scholars like Tonio Andrade and Li Bozhong, he argues that the continued vitality of the handgun in Ming China was not caused by irrational conservatism, but by the fact that it provided for many specifically local needs which the harquebus could not meet. These expressed themselves in desires for high rates of fire and for a dual-use functionality as a melee weapon. Like Murteira and De Jesus’ contribution, Noordam stresses the importance of local conditions for understanding the developmental path of hand-held firearms. He suggests that the handgun and the harquebus in Ming China evolved side-by-side while being entangled in a dialectical challenge-and-response relationship with each other, the local environment, and the nature of the enemy threat. Moreover, timing, not geopolitics or geography, is one of the keys to understanding the difference between China and Europe. Many tactical innovations, like volley fire, had already been implemented in Chinese warfare using handguns prior to the arrival of the harquebus. This explains why the latter was valued so much for its accuracy in China (like in Japan), as it came to occupy a new niche as the provider of long-range accurate fire. Here, Noordam builds further on Hyeok Hweon Kang’s research on the different emphases in East Asia and Europe on achieving accuracy and high rates of fire respectively, with the harquebus. According to Kang, European armies focused on massed firepower at the expense of accuracy, and the designs of the hand-held firearms reflected this development. Sights were eventually abandoned, barring specialized versions optimized for hunting, and bullets often did not fit the barrels exactly, which facilitated quick reloading at the expense of accuracy. In East Asia, the sights were kept, and harquebusiers were trained to carefully ram the tight-fitting bullets into place, which took more time but preserved accuracy (Kang Reference Kang and Fissel2022a, 44–45, 51–58; Reference Kang2025).Footnote ²

This emphasis on accuracy had consequences, which partially explain the resistance the harquebus faced in some quarters in Ming China. The need to achieve accuracy with the harquebus put greater training demands on gunners, who were forced to resort to more precise reloading and aiming techniques than they were used to with the handgun. Especially along the northern frontier with the steppe where the rate of fire was especially valued for fighting nomad cavalry, the harquebus therefore seems to have experienced an ambivalent reception. This was not caused by cultural inhibitions, however. As a result, late Ming civil and military officials looked for a single universal design which could supersede both the handgun and the harquebus. In the absence of this design, late Ming armies continued to rely on a complementary mixture of harquebuses and handguns, as they fulfilled different tactical roles. At the time of the Manchu conquest, a universal solution had not been found yet, but the desire to provide harquebusiers with the ability to defend themselves had probably led to the invention of the bayonet independent from European influences.

Japan

Scholars of Japanese history have predominantly engaged with the military revolution thesis as articulated by Michael Roberts and Geoffrey Parker, but no consensus seems to exist on whether military innovation was pushed by either firearms or prior state formation. Delmer Brown’s views even anticipated much of Roberts’ later military revolution thesis. In the Sengoku (“Warring States”) period (1467 – c. 1615), Japan experienced a long civil war between different regional warlords. According to Brown, the introduction of the harquebus by Portuguese smugglers in Japan in the early 1540s decisively aided Japanese warlords Oda Nobunaga 織田 信長 (1534–1582) and Toyotomi Hideyoshi 豊臣 秀吉 (1537–1598) in unifying the country. Brown suggested in his conclusion that the introduction of the weapon stimulated great industrial and commercial enterprises through its manufacture, as well as the maintenance of standing armies at growing castle towns. Their professionalization manifested as an increasing differentiation between soldiers and peasants (Brown Reference Brown1948, 253). The harquebus was credited by Brown for causing a tactical revolution. The harquebusiers were placed at the front, but needed to be supported by archers, spearmen, and swordsmen once the fighting took place at closer ranges. The resulting need to coordinate combined arms tactics played to the advantage of larger warlord armies under centralized command, which by extension led to unification and the establishment of “Japan’s first strong central government (Brown Reference Brown1948, 244–245).”

More recently, contributions by Paul Varley and Matthew Stavros also readily embraced Roberts’ model of the military revolution. Stavros specifically highlighted two types of documents that first appeared in the 1580s, the “Troop Register” and the “Troop Deployment Schematic,” to argue that Toyotomi expected the separate units under the command of his individual subordinate warlords to merge during battle. The resulting centralization of command was necessary in order to make the best use of the long-range firepower of the harquebuses, which were placed in the vanguard together with the archers, while swordsmen and spearmen were held back. Harquebuses thus pushed the political centralization of armies according to Stavros, mirroring early modern European developments (Stavros Reference Stavros2013, 254–259; Varley Reference Varley, Baxter and Fogel2007).

Other modern scholars like Stephen Morillo and Michael Birt have argued that prior state formation in the competing warlord domains drove the later adoption of the harquebus instead (Birt Reference Birt1983, 191; Lorge Reference Lorge2008, 54, 62–64; Morillo Reference Morillo1995). This conclusion was further buttressed by Thomas Conlan, who, based on a statistical overview of wounds received by Japanese warriors, concluded that the harquebus had only gradually replaced the bow, whereas the pike had more rapidly replaced the sword. The true revolutionary change towards more permanent infantry formations thus took place before the introduction of hand-held firearms (Conlan Reference Conlan, Ferejohn and McCall Rosenbluth2010, 145–151). Meanwhile, Japanese scholars like Ikegami Eiko, Suzuki Masaya, Taniguchi Shinko, and Tatsuo Fujita also commented on the military revolution model, but often did not show a clear predilection for the priority of either state formation or military innovation with hand-held firearms (Ikegami Reference Ikegami1995, 138–141; Taniguchi Reference Taniguchi, Deist and Kleinschmidt2003, 192; Fujita Reference Fujita, Leupp and Tao2022, 8–9; Varley Reference Varley, Baxter and Fogel2007, 110).

A recent consensus holds that significant tactical innovations with the harquebus were only implemented in the last decades of the sixteenth century. It is now commonly accepted that the Japanese warlord Oda Nobunaga did not have his harquebusiers deployed in three rotating ranks during the Battle of Nagashino (1575), because this depiction was based on a later romanticized and fictionalized account of the battle (Ledbetter Reference Ledbetter2018, 168–169). Stephen Turnbull deemed Nobunaga’s usage of harquebusiers on the field behind obstacles to be merely an outgrowth of this defensive use of hand-held firearms during siege warfare. Consequently, the real revolutionary changes still had to occur after 1575 (Turnbull Reference Turnbull2020). This conclusion was further supported by Turnbull’s study of the use of the harquebus by the eastern Hōjō daimyō family, which showed that it was at first mostly used for hunting and only later utilized by dedicated tactical units on the battlefield (Turnbull Reference Turnbull2024). Chang Hsiu-Ming drove the point further home by demonstrating that the percentage of harquebusiers in individual Japanese daimyō armies only increased dramatically from a pre-war maximum of ten percent to a new ceiling of thirty percent during the Imjin War (1592–1598). After the return of the Japanese armies to their home islands, these percentages were maintained (Chang Reference Chang2016, 91–94).

Arthur Galindo’s contribution to this special issue takes another look at the fate of the harquebus in Japan after the tumult of the Sengoku period died down and the country experienced centuries of peace under the rule of the Tokugawa bakufu 幕府 or shogunate (1603–1868). First of all, the bakufu did try to limit the dissemination of the weapon and confined legal gunsmithing to Nagahama – any sale of harquebuses had to be reported to Tokugawa officials. Nevertheless, Galindo’s contribution acknowledges that Japan never gave up the gun according to Noel Perrin’s original conceptualization, but that the weapon came to occupy different niches in peacetime. Following David Howell, Galindo sees the harquebus as a social object embedded in its own “social life” – their functions and significance were continuously (re-)defined by the social groups that used them. The harquebus would be used by both elite and non-elite circles during the Tokugawa bakufu for different purposes, although access became more exclusive. For the samurai warrior elite, both the possession of the weapon and proficiency in its use, especially when manifested as marksmanship (now a legitimate martial art), became markers of elite status. Far from posing a threat to the martial status and lifestyle of the warrior elite, the harquebus was thus appropriated by them, although individual skills instead of collective tactics were now celebrated.

At the same time, the pragmatic military significance of firearms shifted towards a more ceremonial one centered on displays of military skills during inter alia hunting expeditions, which also served as demonstrations of political legitimacy. Longlasting peacetime conditions thus made the harquebus transition from being a weapon of the rank-and-file masses to serving as a more exclusive attribute of the hereditary warrior elite. Galindo concedes to the military revolution model that a lack of conflict, interstate or other, in the case of Japan led to a stagnation in innovation, excepting the decorations applied to firearms for ritual purposes.

In the hands of commoners, the weapon transformed from an implement of war into a farm tool. Farmers were allowed to use the harquebus to defend their crops from animal pests while other commoners were allowed to use them to hunt in areas where alternative sources of food were scarce. The bakufu did try to control this usage of firearms by commoners, and thus, they increasingly had to be provided and licensed for use by the daimyō under restricted terms. Commoners did not see their firearms as weapons and consequently also did not use them against their rulers during riots, and this helped make their broad dissemination palatable and acceptable to the ruling classes. According to Galindo, a kind of social contract existed between the two groups according to which neither was to use their firearms against the other at the risk of losing the legitimacy of handling them. This social and military status quo would remain until the nineteenth century, when Japan would see itself forced to adopt far-reaching military reforms in response to Western imperialism.

Korea

The Korean Koryŏ dynasty (918–1392) requested and received firearms from the Ming dynasty in order to combat Japanese pirates in the 1370s and 1380s (Chase Reference Chase2003, 172–175). Despite Korea therefore being one of the earliest beneficiaries of gunpowder technology, there is a lack of research on the early use of gunpowder weapons by Korean armies and how this might have facilitated or obstructed the reception of the harquebus later. Modern scholarship has disproportionally concentrated on the later adoption by the Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1897) of the harquebus in the wake of the Imjin War. The various changes this caused have as a result been assessed as significant or even revolutionary, even if only manifesting as an infantry revolution.

Korean historian No Yŏnggu saw the military revolution as a universal historical phenomenon driven by interstate competition. In Korea, military expansion and innovation were justified by the enduring threat posed by the Japanese and the Manchus after the Imjin War and the conquest of China respectively. These geopolitical conditions stimulated the adoption of the harquebus, which necessitated military professionalization and centralization of state power, including more intrusive taxation. The harquebus thus seems to have driven state formation (No Reference No2007). In 2013, the trio of Tonio Andrade, Hyeok Hweon Kang and Kirsten Cooper similarly argued that Koreans were inspired by Chinese and Japanese models witnessed during the Imjin War to move away from a traditional cavalry-heavy army to an infantry-based one formed around a core of harquebusiers. In contrast to Japan where the militarization of the commoners was eventually partially undone after the political unification, in Korea the mass use of the weapon led to increasing army sizes and the enrollment of ever larger numbers of lower social classes into its ranks. Kang in particular held the resulting changes to be revolutionary, because they were permanent in nature. Moreover, they were characterized by accelerating changes in commerce, conscription, census-taking, and taxation, although the elite landowning yangban-class was able to block more thorough fiscal reforms. Nevertheless, the changes were also incomplete compared to Europe, because they were limited to hand-held firearms (Andrade et al. Reference Andrade, Kang and Cooper2014, 62–71; Kang Reference Kang2013, 144–148, 174–175).

Other contributions by Kim Kunha, Yun Dukhee, and Felix Siegmund were more skeptical about the revolutionary changes provoked by the adoption of the harquebus. The quick expansion of harquebusier units did not automatically equate to a more effective army, especially since it was not tested in practice. Professionalization in the form of full-time salaried troops already predated the adoption of the harquebus and the military continued to rely on farmers serving part-time as militia even afterwards. In addition, fiscal reforms did not go far enough in Korea to support them. Last, but not least, the assumption that a military revolution took place in Korea rests too much on evidence for the implementation of infantry volley fire, a characteristic of the revolution which is increasingly downplayed by revisionist Western scholarship in favor of stressing combined arms integration between firearms and melee weapons. Beyond the harquebus, Kim and Yun also argued that a focus on hand-held firearms obscures the continued importance of large artillery installed in fortresses, which better served Korea’s defensive military posture (Kim and Yun Reference Kim and Yun2025, 163–170; Siegmund Reference Siegmund2018, 34–41). Like in Ming China, promising developments with infantry firearms were thought to have been curtailed in Korea as well by the expansion of Manchu power in East Asia. Diplomatic pressure of this powerful neighbor made thorough military reforms impossible, which nullified the positive incentives offered by participation in a truly competitive system of states (Kang Reference Kang2013, 172–173; Kim and Yun Reference Kim and Yun2025, 168–169).

Chase’s model has up till now been rejected as not fitting the Korean case. Siegmund argued that Koreans found hand-held firearms useful against nomadic warriors along the northern frontier. Kang agreed, stating that the confrontations with Manchu cavalry in the seventeenth century and the losses they sustained against them did not deter the Koreans from using and improving their harquebusier-centered forces (Kang Reference Kang2013, 149–150, 172; Siegmund Reference Siegmund2018, 145–146, 149). A consensus exists that the exalted position enjoyed by archery in Korean Confucian culture initially formed a socio-cultural obstruction vis-à-vis the widespread adoption of the harquebus, as the archers were recruited from a higher social class than the harquebusiers and resented them. This hesitation also had more practical grounds, however, as frequent precipitation made firearms unreliable, and it was initially impossible to supply sufficient good-quality harquebuses soon after the Imjin War (Andrade et al. Reference Andrade, Kang and Cooper2014, 66–67; Siegmund Reference Siegmund2018, 155–158).

The contribution by Namgung Seungwon betrays a skepticism that the mass adoption of the harquebus in the wake of the Imjin War caused revolutionary changes in Korea. He locks horns with the notion that a professional standing army centered around this weapon played an important role in Korea’s postwar military establishment. Namgung shows that this standing army, the Military Training Agency, was indeed founded and enlarged as a direct consequence of the war, but that its role in subsequent conflicts was mostly restricted to guarding the king. Most of the heavy lifting was done, as before, by militia units staffed by part-time farmers-cum-soldiers serving in rotation, albeit now heavily reliant on the harquebus. The potential mobilizable manpower was considerable, as the number of men assigned to these militias increased significantly in the course of the seventeenth century, although they had an inferior ability to operate as a collective on the battlefield. Namgung argues that this reliance on militias equipped with the harquebus runs counter to the military revolution model posited by Michael Roberts cum suis, which predicted the rise of more permanent formations staffed by increasingly professionalized personnel. Postwar fiscal reforms were also insufficient in scope to support these innovations. Namgung forwards the hypothesis that Korea’s particular geopolitical context, characterized by long stretches of peace and no meaningful scope for aggressive military adventurism, meant that a reliance on a large reservoir of part-time soldiers which could be mobilized in case of an emergency constituted a pragmatic and realistic solution.

Namgung’s contribution further reveals that there was an ideological angle to this preference for militias over professional permanent units as well. An adherence to Confucian ideals and the importance accorded to Chinese historical precedents meant that professional armies were regarded with distrust, as they had played instrumental roles in the demise of the Chinese Han (202 BCE–220 CE) and Tang (618–907) empires. Confucian values disinclined elites towards opting for military institutions separating farmers from soldiers, because this ran counter to the military institutions characterizing the golden age of the early Zhou dynasty (1046–256 BCE) in China. Cultural inclinations could thus be said to have hindered military professionalization. Chosŏn Korea would only abandon its militias in the early nineteenth century as a cost-saving measure. Its members were converted into taxpayers, while a small standing establishment remained as the military muscle.

South-East Asia

The early modern political history of South-East Asia is much more fluid than that of East Asia, and this is reflected in the more fractured nature of modern scholarship dealing with the region. In contrast with East Asia, South-East Asia also did not have a single literary language dominating the textual transmission, and some societies in the region did not leave any written evidence at all (Charney and Wellen Reference Charney, Wellen, Charney and Wellen2018, 11–12). The military history of the region remains underexplored, because the thinly populated field features an eclectic mix of scholars who are often only occasionally interested in warfare (Charney and Wellen Reference Charney, Wellen, Charney and Wellen2018, 9–10). Traditionally, early modern South-East Asia was characterized as sparsely populated and lacking in political centralization. The topography played a part in this: fragmentation into islands, mountains, jungles, and other sorts of impassable terrain made the consolidation of larger political units largely impossible, except for mainland South-East Asia, where a number of larger polities eventually emerged along river valleys. Island South-East Asia tended to be politically fragmented at the village or tribal level, although a number of more centralized Islamic polities arose centered around cosmopolitan port cities with international trade connections, bucking the trend (Knaap Reference Knaap, Charney and Wellen2018, 198–200; Lieberman Reference Lieberman2003a, 216–222; Lorge Reference Lorge2008, 93–94). Conventional historical views have promoted a view of South-East Asian warfare as centered around raiding and ritual headhunting. Headhunting was practiced for the spiritual potency it supposedly bequeathed (Charney and Wellen Reference Charney, Wellen, Charney and Wellen2018, 10–11; Lieberman Reference Lieberman2003a, 217). Nevertheless, warfare was generally thought not to have been very bloody, because, besides headhunting, its other main goals were the capture of population and the display of superior spiritual power, rather than the conquest of land. This view was echoed by Geoffrey Parker as well (Parker Reference Parker1996, 118; Reid Reference Reid1982, 1–3). People were in short supply, while land was in abundance, in contrast to East Asia and Europe. This seems to have constituted the major divergence between these regions in terms of warfare. Nevertheless, in recent decades new generations of scholars have provided revisionist insights and nuanced this picture (Lorge Reference Lorge2008, 95–100).

Michael Vickery pointed to many instances of island and mainland South-East Asian polities looking for land to settle their expanding populations on. Moreover, Vietnam’s early modern southward expansion was motivated, not by the search for additional population, but by the desire to gain access to the international trading ports present there. These instances were often missed or misinterpreted by scholars because of their preconceived notions about South-East Asia (Vickery Reference Vickery, Goscha and Ivarsson2003). The headhunting model of warfare seems to have been mostly restricted to island South-East Asia (Knaap Reference Knaap, Charney and Wellen2018, 185, 187, 192, 196; Lieberman Reference Lieberman2003a, 217–218, 221). Michael Charney also exploded another preconceived notion that held South-East Asian warfare was hardly bloody at all. He blamed this modern perception on the cherry-picking of primary source material, as he was able to find ample evidence of the destructive nature of war in the region (Charney Reference Charney2004a, 19–21). Gerrit Knaap found that even before the arrival of the Europeans in island South-East Asia, full-scale wars revolving around the accumulation of power and tribute were waged as well (Knaap Reference Knaap2003, 172).

The importance of siege warfare in the region has also been the topic of revisionist insights. Parker cum suis for example held that this type of warfare was largely absent in South-East Asia because of a lack of permanent fortified urban centers. Among other reasons, cities supposedly possessed little intrinsic value as they were built of cheap, impermanent materials. Local rulers were also fearful of not being able to retake fortified ones once they lost them. Even when South-East Asian rulers built fortifications, these were thought to have been heavily influenced by European examples, like the port city of Makassar’s Sombaopu fortress. (Reid Reference Reid1982, 1, 4; Subrahmanyam and Parker Reference Subrahmanyam and Parker2008, 24–26). Research by Victor Lieberman and Tristan Mostert has uncovered much that contradicts this. Lieberman, who studied the political unification of present-day Myanmar in the period 1540–1620, noted many instances when heavy artillery was brought to bear against city fortifications in order to bring them down (Lieberman Reference Lieberman1980, 211–212, 215). Similarly, Mostert stresses the importance of brick fortifications in island South-East Asia and highlights the fact that the practice of constructing them predated European influences. Earlier Western scholars were once again to blame for cherry-picking primary sources based on preconceived notions, as contemporary Dutch sources testified to the widespread use of fortifications in the region. These were also adapted to siege warfare with heavy cannon and made more resistant to heavy artillery fire without recourse to European trace italienne influences (Mostert Reference Mostert, Carvalhal, Murteira and De Jesus2021, 187–193). In some ways then, South-East Asia conformed more to Parker’s military revolution model than East Asia in that there existed an incentive to use heavy siege artillery and develop new artillery-resistant fortifications.

While we have to await further research on siege warfare in the region, we can turn to the scholarship on the use of hand-held firearms in South-East Asia and the impact of the harquebus on established patterns of warfare and state formation. Mainland South-East Asia has received the bulk of recent attention in this regard, especially those polities regarded as the predecessors of present-day Myanmar (Burma), Thailand (Siam), and Vietnam. A few scholars working on these areas brought the adoption of firearms in relation to processes of political centralization, which forms an apt thematic continuity with the work done on East Asia. For this reason and reasons of space, the rest of this introduction will confine itself to this research on the mainland.

In general, two separate waves of firearms diffusion in the region have been detected, both co-occurring with significant developments in state formation as well. The two waves closely entangle South-East Asia with developments taking place in East Asia as well and correspond with the appearance of Chinese handguns and Portuguese-derived harquebuses in the region respectively. This first Chinese wave has gained more recognition in the last few decades, and it is now generally recognized that northern mainland South-East Asia was an early recipient of Chinese firearms along with Korea, long before any harquebus reached the region. This has compensated for an earlier bias, which only scantily accounted for any changes wrought by Chinese firearms prior to the arrival of the harquebus. The early introduction of Chinese firearms in Vietnam has even been accorded more importance than the contemporaneous introduction of those same weapons in Korea, as shall be seen below.

Victor Lieberman has detected three periods of political consolidation in mainland South-East Asia interspersed with periods of partial collapse, affecting the territories now belonging to the modern states of Myanmar (Burma), Thailand (Siam), and Vietnam. The first one began in the 10^th or 11^th centuries, the second one in the mid-to-late 15^th century, and the last one in the early-to-mid 17^th century (V. Lieberman Reference Lieberman2003b, 2). The last two periods correspond with the large-scale influx of Chinese and European firearms respectively, including hand-held types. Lieberman favored the third wave of political consolidations initiated from the southern lowland coastal areas in his analysis. Sun Laichen, on the other hand, directed his gaze to the northern uplands of mainland South-East Asia and the impact of Chinese overland trade as well as the transmission of Chinese firearms starting in the late fourteenth century, which coincided with the second wave. Many mainland South-East Asian polities gained access here to Chinese firearms, including handguns, through illegal trade, Ming army deserters, or the capture of weapons from invading Ming armies. Especially Vietnam benefitted from its experience fighting invading Ming armies in the early fifteenth century, which furnished it with captives and their knowledge to start producing its own firearms. Together with its Chinese-style bureaucracy, the firearms-equipped army of the northern state of Đại Việt was able to defeat and annex its southern neighbor Champa and dominate its competitors elsewhere on the subcontinent. Vietnam is even dubbed South-East Asia’s “first gunpowder empire” by Sun (Reference Sun2003, 501–504, 507–514).

According to Kenneth Swope, Peter Lorge’s thesis that states had to become more “Chinese” in order to utilize gunpowder weapons was validated by the example of Vietnam. The latter was able to use firearms so successfully because they adopted Chinese forms of governance along with them. Other scholars similarly attributed Vietnamese conquests and political consolidation to the successful adoption of Chinese bureaucratic forms in the fifteenth century, an advantage other mainland South-East Asian polities lacked (Lieberman Reference Lieberman2003b, 61; Swope Reference Swope, Anderson and Whitmore2015, 158, 165–166; Whitmore Reference Whitmore2004). As state formation and military innovation thus happened simultaneously, priority seems hard to establish. The impulse towards political consolidation from the north can be correlated with the influx of firearms from China and military competition between neighboring states. However, this consolidation co-occurred with agricultural expansion, demographic growth, and overland trade with China. Sun withholds himself from explicitly positing a unidirectional causal link between the adoption of firearms and state formation in northern mainland South-East Asia (Sun Reference Sun, Tran and Reid2006, 73–74). The history of the other mainland South-East Asian polities concerning the relationship between firearms and state formation during this second wave has not been sufficiently interrogated, but this fortunately does not hold true for the third wave.

By the mid-sixteenth century, the main focus of military technological transmission shifted to the southern lowland maritime regions, which had access to the Portuguese-derived harquebus during the third wave. According to Lieberman, lowland port cities enjoyed an advantage in pursuing political consolidation vis-à-vis their inland rivals from the early sixteenth century onwards, although the agriculturally rich upland areas of present-day Myanmar were able to reassert a measure of political influence from the early seventeenth century onwards (Lieberman Reference Lieberman2003b, 48, 258). In the early seventeenth century, around fourteen to eighteen percent of the Burmese royal armies consisted of Chinese, European, and Muslim troops equipped with firearms of various origins. Many of these had been mercenaries in the sixteenth century, including the Portuguese and (mostly Indian) Muslims, and their descendants later formed a hereditary labor pool. By the seventeenth century, they were replaced by local troops deemed more politically reliable, however. The usage of firearms had not led to any imposition of drill and coordinated tactics utilized by larger units by this time, indicating a lack of state building (Andaya Reference Andaya and Tarling1993, 381, 393; Charney Reference Charney2004a, 64–67; Lieberman Reference Lieberman2003b, 165–166). Sven Trakulhun’s treatments of Siamese military developments up to the early seventeenth century largely mirror Lieberman’s account of the Burmese (Trakulhun Reference Trakulhun, Fuchs and Trakulhun2003; Reference Trakulhun and Grabowsky2011).

Vietnam once again constituted an exception. Sun Laichen suggested that the Vietnamese were able to use European firearms, including the harquebus, more effectively than their South-East Asian peers because they were already familiar with Chinese types. Like in Ming China, prior state formation and preserved institutional memory ensured a smooth transition. The Vietnamese gunners also did not belong to a separate hereditary or mercenary class but were recruited from among the population and might have equipped up to 38% of the armies by the late fifteenth century (Sun Reference Sun, Tran and Reid2006, 108; Reference Sun2008, 56). The Vietnamese were praised for their firearms skills by European observers. Interestingly, in the eighteenth century these observers also noted that the Vietnamese were excellent marksmen and military examinations rewarded Vietnamese gunners for their accuracy, hinting at firearms usage priorities similar to those set by East Asian polities (Andaya Reference Andaya and Tarling1993, 391–392; Charney Reference Charney2004a, 69–71; Sun Reference Sun2000, 74; Reference Sun, Tran and Reid2006, 106–108).

The appearance of firearms co-occurred with maritime commercial expansion and agricultural extension, making any clear causal chain between warfare with firearms and state formation hard to establish. Like Sun Laichen, Lieberman believed firearms, presumably including hand-held guns and harquebuses, aided centralization, but he did not explicitly state that these weapons kickstarted it. Lieberman conceded that the weapons did make warfare more expensive and exerted more pressure on administrative systems (Lieberman Reference Lieberman2003b, 60–61, 161, 256–258, 454).

In mainland South-East Asia, socio-cultural factors did seem to have played a significant role in the reception of hand-held firearms. The latter were seen as a source of spiritual power, making it imperative for the rulers to monopolize them, providing an incentive towards state centralization. This might also have motivated rulers to keep the skills associated with these weapons restricted to mercenary groups like the Portuguese, instead of allowing them to disseminate among their subjects. The perception that firearms possessed spiritual power made them the foremost objects of elite desire in South-East Asia instead of being perceived as threats to martial codes of honor and elite lifestyles, which contradicts the views of Kleinschmidt and like-minded scholars (Charney Reference Charney2004b, 9; Trakulhun Reference Trakulhun, Fuchs and Trakulhun2003; Reference Trakulhun and Grabowsky2011). In addition, Chinese and European influences are often mentioned as having redirected South-East Asian warfare from its emphasis on ritualized headhunting and population capture towards much bloodier contests featuring a more prominent role for firearms (Charney Reference Charney2004a, 19–21; Reid Reference Reid1982, 5; Trakulhun Reference Trakulhun and Grabowsky2011, 197). The Chinese Confucian influence on Vietnam is also speculated to have made Vietnamese elites perceive South-East Asia in terms of a Manichean distinction between civilized and barbarian, creating a moral imperative to civilize neighboring peoples and legitimating their conquest (Sun Reference Sun, Tran and Reid2006, 74, 99, 109; Whitmore Reference Whitmore2004, 120–123). Firearms, which facilitated destruction on a much larger scale, are subtly hinted by these scholars as being entangled with this change, but this connection has to date not been theoretically elaborated on. Certainly, the Vietnamese seem to have dealt with firearms in a way similar to East Asian polities. They did not confine their use to specific foreign mercenary groups, segregating them from their own population, but instead allowed them to be integrated in their own culture. A measure of this integration is the fact that the Vietnamese even actively innovated. They developed the Chinese handguns and the Portuguese-derived harquebus designs further, whereas a similar proactive approach seems to have been largely absent in its mainland South-East Asian neighbors (Li Reference Li2023, 125, 127; Sun Reference Sun, Tran and Reid2006, 89–95, 108).

The final contribution to this special issue by Philipp Huber focuses on the late Ayutthaya Thai polity (1351–1767) and puts the use of firearms during internal conflicts center stage. Huber privileges primary sources produced by the Dutch East India Company (VOC), and he uses them to map the deliveries of firearms to the Ayutthaya court. Firearms were often supplied by Europeans as gifts during diplomatic exchanges, and their numbers were usually not high. However, during periods of conflict, rulers were known to increase the numbers demanded as diplomatic gifts. Huber’s findings in this regard challenge, or at least problematize, several of the assumptions earlier scholars like Victor Lieberman labored under, and they also run counter to the military revolution model. For one, he finds that King Narai (r. 1656–1688) showed little interest in acquiring foreign firearms, despite being involved in several interstate wars against his inland neighbors. Instead, firearms like Dutch muskets were very useful in putting down internal uprisings against the rule of the succeeding King Phetracha (r. 1688–1703), who had usurped the throne, sparking popular revolts in the process. This usefulness was reflected in the high number of firearms the king requested from the VOC at this time.

For Huber, these internal political dynamics provide a compelling pragmatic explanation for the maintenance of a royal monopoly on firearms, as it prevented their use against the king. Furthermore, based on his mapping of the VOC weapons trade with Ayutthaya and correlation with both domestic uprisings and external wars, Huber concludes that hand-held firearms were in demand when facing the former, which usually entailed confrontations with antagonistic masses of peasants. External wars, by contrast, were dominated by heavier shipborne artillery, which was not usually provided by the VOC as gifts. There were other factors at work too that limited the Siamese demand for foreign firearms. Those that were provided as gifts to the rulers by Europeans still needed to be compensated with counter gifts. Therefore, there were also limits to the numbers of firearms the rulers could request, limits that were heavily dependent on their access to desirable goods they could offer in return. Firearms also needed to compete with inter alia Indian textiles as tools for consolidating the rule of the kings. The latter were distributed as gifts to the nobility and Buddhist clergy to strengthen the political cohesion of the ruling class. All in all, Huber’s innovative approach with European sources thus provides us with many surprising insights about the reception of the harquebus in South-East Asia.

Taken together, the contributions in this special issue demonstrate the value of turning to local case studies using local sources to understand the global impact of hand-held firearms like the harquebus. In addition, the innovative use of European primary sources can yield fruitful new insights as well. The case studies gathered here show that the reception of the harquebus in East and South-East Asia took many forms, enriching our knowledge of the histories of these regions. They furthermore problematize and complement our understanding of military changes in early modern Europe, especially since these have frequently been held up as a universal gold standard of development. The five contributions gathered in this special issue both fill gaps in our knowledge and point to fruitful avenues worthy of exploration.