The technical reason Britain won was the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution started in Britain. Guns and ships require lots of iron. The Industrial Revolution gave Britain the best guns and the best ships.
See also the post “Why Europe” where historian Bret Deveraux possible factors other than just the industrial revolution that affected Europe having better guns than Asia, e.g.:
Chase notes, very persuasively, that firearms just weren’t a very good answer if your major threat was steppe nomad horsemen. Sure, firearms c. 1800 would do the job, but no one directing resources in 1550 could know that. So societies where the major threat was other agrarian states with big infantry armies invest heavily in firearms while states whose major threats are nomads do so to a lesser degree. Since – in a way no one could realize in 1550 – firearms had the potential for much greater power in the long run, Western Europe (one of the few areas of the belt of complex agrarian societies running over Eurasia that did not have major steppe nomad threats due to Eastern Europe being in the way) found itself, by mostly dumb geographic luck with the ‘killer app’ of the 1600s and following. In short then, Chase argues that Europe’s military advantage (and thus its dominant position) was a consequence of environment – being relatively shielded from regions of Steppe which would give rise to dangerous nomads – which in turn motivated European to embrace the new technology (guns) with greater long-term growth potential. The weakness of the thesis is that other places similarly insulated (namely Japan) didn’t have an indigenous military revolution (though they adopted it enthusiastically when it showed up), while Mamluk Egypt, which in this formulation ought to have been as eager on firearms as the Ottomans very clearly wasn’t for what seem pretty clearly to be cultural reasons (Chase anticipates and attempts to fend off this argument, but it is one of his weaker arguments in an overall excellent book).
His overall view:
my own view of the evidence is something of a hybrid of most of these models explaining the rise of Europe. The rapid European development of firearms-based warfare created a feedback loop in terms of state centralization (cannon and muskets broke the power of the rural nobility, enabling centralization, which enabled more cannon and muskets, repeat until state-building complete then let dry; see Lee, Waging War (2016), ch. 7&9), while the fragmented agrarian state-on-state warfare in Europe encouraged firearm development particularly leading to an uncommonly effective military package (though not an unbeatable one in the 1600s and early 1700s) corresponding fairly substantially to the elements of Parker’s military revolution. That package enabled European states to set up and hold on to port-and-fort toeholds on other continents they might otherwise have lost (though early on, often only at the sufferance of local rulers, a balance of power that shifts almost imperceptibly until it shifts all at once). 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:
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.
See also the post “Why Europe” where historian Bret Deveraux possible factors other than just the industrial revolution that affected Europe having better guns than Asia, e.g.:
His overall view:
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.