![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I recently finished reading "The Gunpowder Age" by Tonio Andrade. It's a book about the history of gunpowder as used in warfare in China (with bits about its use in Europe, provided mainly for context and comparison).
It's also a book about the racist, colonialist myth that guns are A European Thing, that China may have invented gunpowder but never used it in warfare, or that China may have invented guns but they never actually went very far with them and their gun tech was always hopelessly outmatched by superior Western guns. Andrade doesn't call these myths out as the racist/colonialist garbage that they are... but he does demolish them quite thoroughly, by going to both Chinese and European primary sources (and making it clear that secondary sources have long been and continue to be woefully poor when it comes to the history of gun technology. Even some Chinese historians have bought into the myth). In other words, by way of looking at gun tech, Andrade is attacking the orientalist idea of China being "stagnant," "decadent," or otherwise somehow innately inferior to Europe/backwards compared to Europe.
Andrade counters this myth with a counter-narrative that Chinese stagnation happened only during periods of (relative) peace and unity. The land that is populated by Chinese speaking people has sometimes been completely unified and at peace, but at other times (especially during dynastic succession, but also during dynasties that failed to achieve hegemony) it splintered into smaller but still quite powerful states, each more-or-less seriously interested in conquering the others. He argues that the existential threat of conquest drove R&D for new weapons, whereas periods of unity and peace led to military complacency and a significant slowdown of military research. Europe, in contrast, never had *any* periods of peace, so, once gun-having Europeans arrived in East Asia during the era of colonial expansion, from time to time China would lag behind Europe in gun technology, only to catch up once a new period of heightened warfare began.
The colonialist meme that China was decadent and weak solidified in the 19th century, during one of those long periods of peace and stability within China. When the threat from Europe began to prod China to resume military investment in the 19th century, they found themselves behind not just in the realm of weapons, but in a vast array of interlocking realms due to Europe's burgeoning industrial revolution. The Self-Strengthening Movement and the Tongzhi Restoration were able to bring China up to par with Europe and Japan for a time, but they did so only through the action of individual ministers, rather than a systematic, long-term government program - when the ministers died or ceased to be in favour, China began to fall behind again, and at a time when military technology was advancing faster than ever.
This was a good book, and I will now go on at some length into the details that I found most interesting. ( Read more... )
It's also a book about the racist, colonialist myth that guns are A European Thing, that China may have invented gunpowder but never used it in warfare, or that China may have invented guns but they never actually went very far with them and their gun tech was always hopelessly outmatched by superior Western guns. Andrade doesn't call these myths out as the racist/colonialist garbage that they are... but he does demolish them quite thoroughly, by going to both Chinese and European primary sources (and making it clear that secondary sources have long been and continue to be woefully poor when it comes to the history of gun technology. Even some Chinese historians have bought into the myth). In other words, by way of looking at gun tech, Andrade is attacking the orientalist idea of China being "stagnant," "decadent," or otherwise somehow innately inferior to Europe/backwards compared to Europe.
Andrade counters this myth with a counter-narrative that Chinese stagnation happened only during periods of (relative) peace and unity. The land that is populated by Chinese speaking people has sometimes been completely unified and at peace, but at other times (especially during dynastic succession, but also during dynasties that failed to achieve hegemony) it splintered into smaller but still quite powerful states, each more-or-less seriously interested in conquering the others. He argues that the existential threat of conquest drove R&D for new weapons, whereas periods of unity and peace led to military complacency and a significant slowdown of military research. Europe, in contrast, never had *any* periods of peace, so, once gun-having Europeans arrived in East Asia during the era of colonial expansion, from time to time China would lag behind Europe in gun technology, only to catch up once a new period of heightened warfare began.
The colonialist meme that China was decadent and weak solidified in the 19th century, during one of those long periods of peace and stability within China. When the threat from Europe began to prod China to resume military investment in the 19th century, they found themselves behind not just in the realm of weapons, but in a vast array of interlocking realms due to Europe's burgeoning industrial revolution. The Self-Strengthening Movement and the Tongzhi Restoration were able to bring China up to par with Europe and Japan for a time, but they did so only through the action of individual ministers, rather than a systematic, long-term government program - when the ministers died or ceased to be in favour, China began to fall behind again, and at a time when military technology was advancing faster than ever.
This was a good book, and I will now go on at some length into the details that I found most interesting. ( Read more... )
