It is humbling and gratifying to read the responses in this forum. These distinguished scholars—whose work in many cases inspires and underlies my own—have made so many compelling points and critiques that as I read I often found myself exclaiming “Yes!” or “Great point!”

One thing I find particularly convincing is their emphasis on the role of the fiscal state, particularly in the responses by Kenneth Pomeranz and Phillip Hoffman. I'm persuaded now more than ever that the fiscal state is a key part of the Great Military Divergence. Western European states were able to raise revenues far more efficiently and flexibly than was China. Since money forms the sinews of war, the fiscal state provided a key advantage, allowing European states to compete militarily above their weight class. Peter Lorge has recently been exploring state finance during the Song dynasty, suggesting that the Song abandonment of a nascent fiscal state had grave consequences for subsequent Chinese dynasties. Certainly, the lack of a fiscal state became particularly salient in the nineteenth century, when China's great wealth was no longer enough to protect it from the numerous military challenges that cropped up one after another after 1839.

I also find convincing the reviewers’ point that one must pay careful attention to military contexts in the Chinese and European cases. As Kenneth Pomeranz and Ian Inkster note, China faced many more kinds of military challenges than did most western European states, and the multiplicity of challenges may have driven military adaption in different directions than it followed in Europe. China's “divided attention” may indeed, as Pomeranz suggests, be partly responsible for the Great Military Divergence.

I do think it's important to distinguish this position from a more specific argument, with which I do not agree, to wit that China fell behind Europe in gunpowder technology because Chinese leaders were preoccupied with the nomadic menace, against which, the argument goes, gunpowder weapons were not very useful, whereas Europeans, facing infantry-based armies, had a greater incentive to invest in and develop gunpowder weapons. This argument, advanced in Kenneth Chase's excellent book, Firearms: A Global History, is very influential, but available evidence seems to suggest that the situation is more complicated. For one thing, there are many indications that China's military leaders did indeed find guns of tremendous use against horse-borne enemies from the early Ming period through the Qing period, and there is much evidence about how warmakers adopted and adapted gun models to be effective against nomadic enemies, and not just defensively.Footnote ¹ Moreover, as scholars like Stephen Morillo and Kenneth Swope have pointed out, throughout the Ming and early Qing periods, Chinese military leaders were not solely concerned with nomads on the northern frontiers: they were also deeply involved with combating military threats from non-nomadic enemies, particularly in the south of China and during the Japanese Invasion of Korea of 1592. Although the northern frontiers were very important, we must keep in mind that threats in other areas were also quite significant, and southern Chinese warfare required different adaptations than northern warfare.

I also found fascinating David Parrot's point about the continuing significance of traditional weapons (or what Chinese scholars call “cold weapons”) in both Europe and in China. As he notes, “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 … in direct hand-to-hand combat; this was where most casualties would occur, and where the advantages of gunpowder technology were minimal.” This is a very important point. When, for example, I discussed the work of the great Ming general and tactician Qi Jiguang, I focused on muskets and cannons, whereas he actually devoted more attention to traditional weapons—lances, swords, and spears. The same was true of subsequent military leaders, such as the Chinese and Korean generals who adopted his tactics and techniques. Even the great Zheng Chenggong was more focused on swords than muskets.

Given the tremendous variation in military styles and challenges, how does one assess the effectiveness of China's military forces vis-à-vis those of the West? It's not an easy thing to do, and Phillip Hoffman suggests that my method is to examine different battles between European and Chinese forces and then ask who won. “For [Andrade],” he writes, “the victor is the leader, at least in the technology that was used in the particular battle.” Hoffman goes on to make a very significant point, with which I agree: that in battles between Europeans and East Asian forces, the Europeans were far from their bases and their soldiers were not the most effective of Europe, so one must be cautious when assessing the military balance.

But I do want to clarify something: I don't believe that one can simply declare the victor to be the leader in the technology in question. For instance, although Dutch musketeers, with their disciplined counter-march techniques, prevailed against some Chinese forces, they failed against forces armed with seemingly more primitive weapons when those forces had excellent training and strong leadership, and—as David Parrot would appreciate—many of the decisive moments came during close combat. Similarly, the forces of China ultimately prevailed over European-style renaissance fortresses in Taiwan and the Amur borderlands even though those fortresses provided a tremendous advantage to Europeans. To reach this conclusion, one can't simply look at victory or defeat. One must trace, through careful attention to accounts on both sides, the vagaries of the encounter, and what becomes clear is a process of adaptation, as the leaders on the side of China adjusted their tactics to capture the forts, eventually adopting techniques similar to those that had developed in Europe.

In some ways, my attempt at reconstructing battles is a return to an old-fashioned kind of battlefield history. The minute examination of battles based on available sources can teach us a great deal about technologies, techniques, and military practices, but it must be done carefully, and always with the understanding that not even the people who wrote the accounts that survive may have understood the full reasons for defeat or victory. I've become increasingly humble about battle reconstruction. Victory or defeat can be influenced by many seemingly random factors: which way the wind is blowing, whether it rained yesterday, the enemy's knowledge of terrain, how tired one's troops are, etc., etc., etc. Sources about battles must be examined carefully before general conclusions can be drawn.

I don't have space to touch on all of the excellent points made by the reviewers, but I do want to make a final note: I believe that the military revolution model—especially Geoffrey Parker's version, as outlined in The Military Revolution—may not fit all of the available data, but it has proven to be an extremely productive hypothesis, and I don't see my work as fundamentally discrediting it. To be sure, as Stephen Morillo has argued—and I entirely agree—state centralization is a prerequisite for the effective use of handheld guns on the battlefield (although not necessarily a prerequisite for the use of artillery). Yet that doesn't mean that the various phenomena associated with the Parkerian model of the military revolution—especially a sustained increase in army size and the development and spread of the expensive-to-build and expensive-to-capture renaissance fortress—do not in turn create selective pressures toward further state centralization. Although Parker's book gets certain things wrong, I feel that the model itself is still one of the most effective and productive of the various “warring states” models of European history. Indeed, The Gunpowder Age was itself inspired by the military revolution model. In a sense, it's an attempt to broaden that model's scope to other parts of Eurasia, even as it questions aspects of its applicability to Europe. A book should be, to paraphrase Claude Levi-Strauss, good to think with, and I feel that the Military Revolution certainly is, whether or not you agree with everything in it.

I hope that Gunpowder Age will also prove “good to think with.” Certainly, this forum has provided me a lot to consider, and I'm grateful to the reviewers for their insights and to the editors for the opportunity to offer these brief reflections.