Search results

Cover -- Contents -- List of Maps -- A Note to the Reader -- Prologue: A Clash of Cultures? -- Chapter 1. The Center -- Chapter 2. The Amateur -- Chapter 3. Man Proposes, God Disposes -- Chapter 4. The Delta -- Chapter 5. Canton -- Chapter 6. A Dreadful Prospect -- Chapter 7. The Imperial Way: By Boat through Southern China -- Chapter 8. A Walk into Winter -- Chapter 9. Beijing -- Chapter 10. Ice Games -- Chapter 11. Favored Guests of the Emperor -- Chapter 12. A New Year -- Chapter 13. The Purple Ray Pavilion, A Good Death, A Tour of Temples -- Chapter 14. Stately Pleasure Gardens: Yuanmingyuan -- Chapter 15. The Lantern Festival -- Chapter 16. Goodbye, Beijing -- Chapter 17. By Land through Beizhili and Shandong -- Chapter 18. Sailing into Spring: By Canal through the Lower Yangtze -- Chapter 19. Zhejiang and Jiangxi -- Chapter 20. An Uncertain Future -- Conclusions: A Contested Embassy and the History of Sino-Western Relations -- Acknowledgments -- A Note on Place Names, Transliterations, Terms, and Sources -- Abbreviations -- Notes -- Index.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- List of Maps -- A Note to the Reader -- Prologue: A Clash of Cultures? -- Chapter 1 The Center -- Chapter 2 The Amateur -- Chapter 3 Man Proposes, God Disposes -- Chapter 4 The Delta -- Chapter 5 Canton -- Chapter 6 A Dreadful Prospect -- chapter 7 The Imperial Way -- Chapter 8 A Walk into Winter -- Chapter 9 Beijing -- Chapter 10 Ice Games -- Chapter 11 Favored Guests of the Emperor -- Chapter 12 A New Year -- Chapter 13 The Purple Ray Pavilion, A Good Death, A Tour of Temples -- Chapter 14 Stately Pleasure Gardens -- Chapter 15 The Lantern Festival -- Chapter 16 Goodbye, Beijing -- Chapter 17 By Land through Beizhili and Shandong -- Chapter 18 Sailing into Spring -- Chapter 19 Zhejiang and Jiangxi -- Chapter 20 An Uncertain Future -- Conclusions: A Contested Embassy and the History of Sino-Western Relations -- Acknowledgments -- A Note on Place Names, Transliterations, Terms, and Sources -- Abbreviations -- Notes -- Index -- A note on the type

Cover -- Title -- Dedication -- Contents -- INTRODUCTION The Military Pattern of the Chinese Past -- PART I: CHINESE BEGINNINGS -- CHAPTER 1 The Crucible: The Song Warring States Period -- CHAPTER 2 Early Gunpowder Warfare -- CHAPTER 3 The Mongol Wars and the Evolution of the Gun -- CHAPTER 4 Great Martiality: The Gunpowder Emperor -- PART II: EUROPE GETS THE GUN -- CHAPTER 5 The Medieval Gun -- CHAPTER 6 Big Guns: Why Western Europe and Not China Developed Gunpowder Artillery -- CHAPTER 7 The Development of the Classic Gun in Europe -- CHAPTER 8 The Gunpowder Age in Europe -- CHAPTER 9 Cannibals with Cannons: The Sino-Portuguese Clashes of 1521-1522 -- PART III: AN AGE OF PARITY -- CHAPTER 10 The Frankish Cannon -- CHAPTER 11 Drill, Discipline, and the Rise of the West -- CHAPTER 12 The Musket in East Asia -- CHAPTER 13 The Seventeenth Century: An Age of Parity? -- CHAPTER 14 A European Naval Advantage -- CHAPTER 15 The Renaissance Fortress: An Agent of European Expansion? -- PART IV: THE GREAT MILITARY DIVERGENCE -- CHAPTER 16 The Opium War and the Great Divergence -- CHAPTER 17 A Modernizing Moment: Opium War Reforms -- CHAPTER 18 China's Modernization and the End of the Gunpowder Age -- CONCLUSIONS A New Warring States Period? -- Acknowledgments -- Appendix 1: Timeline -- Appendix 2: Datasets -- Abbreviations -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.

The Chinese invented gunpowder and began exploring its military uses as early as the 900s, four centuries before the technology passed to the West. But by the early 1800s, China had fallen so far behind the West in gunpowder warfare that it was easily defeated by Britain in the Opium War of 1839–42. What happened? In The Gunpowder Age, Tonio Andrade offers a compelling new answer, opening a fresh perspective on a key question of world history: why did the countries of western Europe surge to global importance starting in the 1500s while China slipped behind?Historians have long argued that gunpowder weapons helped Europeans establish global hegemony. Yet the inhabitants of what is today China not only invented guns and bombs but also, as Andrade shows, continued to innovate in gunpowder technology through the early 1700s—much longer than previously thought. Why, then, did China become so vulnerable? Andrade argues that one significant reason is that it was out of practice fighting wars, having enjoyed nearly a century of relative peace, since 1760. Indeed, he demonstrates that China—like Europe—was a powerful military innovator, particularly during times of great warfare, such as the violent century starting after the Opium War, when the Chinese once again quickly modernized their forces. Today, China is simply returning to its old position as one of the world's great military powers.By showing that China's military dynamism was deeper, longer lasting, and more quickly recovered than previously understood, The Gunpowder Age challenges long-standing explanations of the so-called Great Divergence between the West and Asia

This paper examines two prominent recent attempts to explain the phenomenon of the "rise of the West," Ian Morris's model of "Social Development" and Philipp Hoffman's model of military power (Morris 2010, Morris 2013, Hoffman 2012, Hoffman 2015). Whereas most recent scholarship on the rise of the West has focused on economics, Morris and Hoffman widen the scope of comparison to other areas, in particular focusing on the measurement and explanation of divergences in military effectiveness. By drawing on recent work in China's military history, the author shows that both models – but particularly that of Morris – are inadequate, falling back on older narratives of Western military superiority that have been challenged or disproven by recent scholarship in global military history. The article suggests, however, that the two models – and especially that of Hoffman – do raise significant new questions for future research, and it concludes by noting that what social scientists need more than new models at present is a closer attention to the rapid and ever increasing proliferation of scholarship in non-Western countries, and in particular that of the Sinophone world.

Military historians have argued that the emergence in Europe of the musketry volley fire technique and the concurrent development of systematic infantry drill was of epochal importance for world history, a key part of the famous "military revolution" that underlay Europeans' purported military advantage over other peoples. This article shows that the arquebus volley technique was described in the writings of the famous Chinese military thinker Qi Jiguang by 1560, well before the most commonly accepted date for the technique's introduction in Europe. Qi Jiguang's drilling techniques were part of a long and unbroken military tradition stretching back to China's Tang dynasty and beyond, in which drill—and the volley technique itself—played a central role. The implications for our understanding of global military history are profound. As we learn more about Asian military history we will increasingly question standard narratives of our global military past.

Over the past few years, this journal has hosted a debate central to world history and historical sociology: Joseph M. Bryant's bold assault on the revisionist model of global history and the revisionists' equally trenchant defense. A key point of disagreement concerns Europeans' relative military advantages vis-a-vis Asians. Both sides cite literature from historians' Military Revolution Model, but each takes different lessons from that literature. The revisionists see a slight military imbalance in favor of Europe but deny that it reflects a general European technological lead. Bryant believes that the European technological lead is significant and reflects a more general modernizing trend. This article tries to resolve the disagreement by appealing to data from East Asia. First, it argues that recent work in Asian history points to what we can call a Chinese Military Revolution, which compels us to place the European Military Revolution in a larger, Eurasian context: not just western European but also East Asian societies were undergoing rapid military change and modernization during the gunpowder age. Second, it adduces evidence from a new study of the Sino-Dutch War of 1661-1668 (a war that both Bryant and the revisionists cite, each, again, taking divergent lessons) to come to a more precise evaluation of the military balance between China and western Europe in the early modern period: western cannons and muskets didn't provide a discernible advantage, but western war ships and renaissance forts did. The article concludes that the revisionists are correct in their belief that Asian societies were undergoing rapid changes in military technology and practices along the lines of those taking place in western Europe and that the standard model Bryant defends is incorrect because it presumes that Asian societies are more stagnant than is warranted by the evidence. At the same time, the article argues that counter-revisionists like Bryant are correct in their belief that military modernization was proceeding more quickly in Europe than that in Asia, which may indicate that the counter-revisionists are correct on a basic point: there was an early divergence between the west and the rest of Eurasia. At first this divergence was slight – so slight, indeed, that it probably left little clear evidence in the noisy and poor early modern data we have available. But the divergence increased over time. Thus, we can speak of a small but accelerating divergence.

This study, based on Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, and Chinese sources, examines the
rise and fall of Dutch Taiwan in the light of a model of European expansion first
sketched (separately) by historians John E.Wills Jr. and Michael N. Pearson. According
to the Wills-Pearson model, Europeans were successful in colonization attempts
because they received support from European states, whereas Asian states were less
likely to support overseas adventurism. The case of Taiwan strongly supports the
model—not just the establishment of a Dutch colony on Taiwan, but also the loss of
that colony to the Chinese military leader Zheng Chenggong, who ousted the Dutch
in 1662, because Zheng's state was similar to many western European states in its
dependence upon revenue from seaborne commerce and its concomitant willingness to
undertake overseas expansion. The article concludes by urging scholars to learn more
about non-Western colonization, suggesting several possible avenues of research.