Book review: The Gunpowder Age challenges traditional explanations of the West's military dominance
Tonio Andrade’s history of military innovation seeks to explain why technology sometimes surged and sometimes stagnated in China and the West
by Tonio Andrade
Princeton University Press
In Tonio Andrade’s well-researched, balanced and comparative history of military innovation in Asia and the West, he challenges the traditional notion – compellingly set forth by Victor Davis Hanson in Carnage and Culture and Niall Ferguson in Civilization – that Western culture largely explains Western global predominance in the post-medieval world.
Although Andrade frames The Gunpowder Age around the invention of gunpowder by the Chinese and its subsequent employment in warfare by both Chinese and Western powers, his principal focus is to explain why in certain periods Chinese and Western military innovation surged or remained static, and more specifically why there developed a “Great Military Divergence” between China and the Western powers during the mid 18th century into the 19th century. The key factor, he concludes, is not culture but the Toynbeean phenomenon of “challenge and response”.