I like Bret Deveraux’s series on Europa Universalis. I like his current series on fortifications even more. I like it so much I’m reading one of the sources he used The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History by Tonio Andrade. According to that book, “By the 1480s, all types of European guns had become better, so much so that when Portuguese mariners brought them to China in the early 1500s, China acknowledged their superiority and began copying them.”
European guns were better than Chinese guns for 200 years leading up to the Industrial Revolution. My argument is that those better guns weren’t superior enough for the European empires to overcome the great powers of India and China until after the Industrial Revolution.
I think Bret Deveraux and I agree on the following point:
The networks of global trade and exploitation that created – because empire must be a product of military strength first – in turn fed a second feedback loop, providing the resources for greater intensification of both state power and economic development which then fed into the industrial revolution. The products of that second cycle, emerging in the late 1700s and the early 1800s, at last proved sufficient to overwhelm the large, complex agrarian states of Eurasia which had, up until that point, generally been able to maintain rough parity with Europe.
I like Bret Deveraux’s series on Europa Universalis. I like his current series on fortifications even more. I like it so much I’m reading one of the sources he used The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History by Tonio Andrade. According to that book, “By the 1480s, all types of European guns had become better, so much so that when Portuguese mariners brought them to China in the early 1500s, China acknowledged their superiority and began copying them.”
European guns were better than Chinese guns for 200 years leading up to the Industrial Revolution. My argument is that those better guns weren’t superior enough for the European empires to overcome the great powers of India and China until after the Industrial Revolution.
I think Bret Deveraux and I agree on the following point:
Yeah, to be clear my comment was meant as an “here are some added details” rather than a strict counterargument.