Tonio Andrade. The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History.

Abstract

Over the past three decades, the production of historical scholarship on non-European world regions has shown that history’s global turn allows us to place the histories of Europe and its white settler societies into a revised frame of reference. We no longer privilege the traits distinctive to those countries as the sole indicators for what to expect to happen in other places as cultural, economic, political, and social connections become thicker and more entwined across the world. The importance of Europeans teaching others all that is needed to become modern has also been qualified by the discovery in other world regions of practices and sensibilities once thought to be unique to Europeans. Chinese history has been one site where efforts at reframing Europe’s economic rise have been mounted through what Kenneth Pomeranz famously labeled the “Great Divergence” (The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy [2000]). Tonio Andrade’s The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History is an engaging recent contribution to this literature. Andrade’s focus is on China’s military history. His book is organized into four parts framed by an introduction and a conclusion. The four chapters of part I, “Chinese Beginnings,” situate the development and uses of gunpowder in Chinese history; the five chapters of part II, “Europe Gets the Gun,” shift the focus to Europe and the development of gunpowder technologies, ending with the confrontations between Chinese and Portuguese forces in 1521–1522. Part III, “An Age of Parity,” moves in six chapters from the developments of European cannon and military organization through drill and discipline to the use of muskets in East Asia. Part IV, “The Great Military Divergence,” opens with a chapter on the Opium War, which is followed by separate chapters considering different nineteenth-century periods of Chinese military modernization. This richly researched analysis begins with a discussion of early modern Chinese military history with key contrasts to European practices. This prepares the reader for the author’s account of China’s nineteenth-century military reform efforts, his assessment of their successes and limitations, and his concluding ruminations on the possible future of military conflict between China and the West.