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So, what are you reading?
Graeber and Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything has raised expectations, but it remains to be seen if it will fulfill them. So far they have tried to reconsider the Enlightenment in light of discussions missionaries had with the natives of the New World, on the assumption that the records of these discussions are sincere and not just European uses of "Indians" as characters to project their own subversive beliefs.
The topic of indigenous influence on what we call western culture has been on my radar ever since I read Felix Cohen's brilliant 1952 paper Americanizing the White Man. Normally I would consider these kinds of things to be proto-woke nonsense, but Cohen immediately struck me as a man of intelligence, dedication and nerve, so it has stayed with me. He posited that core American traits existed before the settlers ever came:
Cohen goes on to describe what he sees as native contributions in various domains including democracy, agriculture and sport. I have also found it amusing that he mentions " the golden tan of an Indian skin" given that arguably the most famous trait of Donald Trump is that he is orange.
Today I read The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History. I think it makes a very good case in favour of the idea that premodern China was not a stagnant, conservative, pacifistic Confucian state indifferent to warfare as it is usually imagined in popular conceptions, but was actually an exceptionally dynamic place receptive to new technologies and ideas both before and after the Renaissance hit Europe. In fact, even after the development of the musket and the Renaissance-style star fort, East Asia was no paper tiger; it adopted and modified European-style firearms quickly, and managed to maintain its military might against Europe until as late as the seventeenth century.
It's well known that while the Chinese developed gunpowder during the Tang and used it in increasingly creative ways during the Song Dynasty (with Europe having come across it relatively late), Europe was the first to refine it into the classical cannon style. What's less known is that guns in China were actually developing concurrently in a similar fashion to those in Europe, growing longer relative to muzzle bore, until the existential wars that rocked the Ming Dynasty ended around 1449 and the Ming enjoyed a long period of peace - meanwhile, warfare in Europe grew progressively more intense. What seems to have been a decisive early Chinese advantage was quickly eroded, and to a large amount of historians on the topic, this is viewed as the beginning of European hegemony.
In reality it's not nearly that simple. Once the Portuguese introduced their cannons to China in the 1510s, the Chinese learned rather quickly from it. During the first Sino-Portuguese war, Chinese artillery was inferior to that of the Portuguese, but the following year the Portuguese suffered a serious loss to the Chinese, with every account of the war suggesting that Chinese artillery had improved to the point that it was a decisive factor in their victory. As the Portuguese attempted to collect water, they were pinned down for an hour by heavy firepower, and after they made it back to their ships Chinese gunners blasted them so fiercely that Portuguese guns were incapable of answering. This marks the beginning of a rapid military modernisation in East Asia that brought them well into parity with Europeans during 1522 through the early 1700s.
The Chinese seem to have innovated not only in the design of artillery, but they also innovated in many serious aspects of how firearms were used, the most notable being their usage of drilling and coordination. Most historians seem to think that volley fire for firearms was developed twice; the first being in Japan during the 1570s, and the second being in the Netherlands in the 1590s. But Japan was in fact not the progenitor; volley formations have a long history in China, being described in texts as early as 801 (it initially used crossbows). After the introduction of muskets this strategy was applied very quickly - in 1560 there are already military texts that demonstrate the Ming Dynasty were firing arquebuses in volleys; it is likely this was a common strategy before then.
Possibly the East Asian state most affected by the musket, though, was none other than Korea, who developed advanced musket strategies after the Imjin War and ended up with one of the most effective musket armies during the seventeenth century. Their musketeers were exceptionally lethal in battle with extremely high levels of accuracy, and were feared by pretty much everyone participating in the East Asian sphere at the time. Two of the most expansionary European forces in this period took on East Asians on the battlefield - the Dutch against the Ming and the Russians against the Qing and Korea - and they both lost. When the Dutch actually ended up facing off against the Ming loyalists, of an initial army of 240 European soldiers only 80 escaped, with the remainder either hacked to death, drowned, or captured. European military advantage over East Asia was actually a very recent development in history.
While Europeans had big advantages in defensive fortifications and shipbuilding which the East couldn't quite emulate, Qing China in particular had far superior logistics, with the Kangxi Emperor's careful planning being instrumental in defeating the Russians during the 17th century. This advantage allowed the Qing to consolidate their power and establish an unprecedented period of dominance in East Asia during the high Qing period - which ended up being a double-edged sword. Without external threats, the Qing developed a gay and retarded bureaucracy incapable of responding in an effective centralised manner. Britain came back newly industrialised and pretty much wiped out the Chinese armies during the Opium War, and while Japan centralised and threw out their ancien regime (and, as an aside, destroyed a ton of traditional Japanese culture as a side effect of this culture shift, involving the iconoclastic destruction of many feudal castles and historical Buddhist temples), China was still funding armies that had been established in the seventeenth century which had metastasised into powerful interest groups in spite of their effective uselessness. Their shipbuilding and artillery was actually superior to Japan's, but their internal politics were so dysfunctional they were unable to mount a capable response during the Sino-Japanese war. The rotting corpse of the late Qing held on until 1911, and at that point China was a source of global entertainment and derision: an article from the NYT in 1895 claimed "China is an anachronism, and a filthy one on the face of the earth". Well, it certainly didn't remain that way for long. An anachronism today, it is not.
As an aside I'm quite stunned by how ridiculously advanced the Song Dynasty was for its time, to the point that I think it represents one of the most dizzying heights achieved by a premodern civilisation. More people lived in urban centres during the Song period than at any other time until the late eighteenth century, and 10% of the country was urbanised, a metric that Europe would not reach until 1800. Their production of iron around 1100 was equivalent to the output generated by the entire continent of Europe in 1700, using refined techniques that would only occur in Europe centuries later. The Song utilised automation in textile production to an extent that exceeded medieval and even early modern Europe, in fact it wasn't even until the eighteenth century that Europe achieved such devices.
There were significant advances in gunpowder, printing, anatomy, the discovery of tree dating, rain and snow gauges, rotary cutting discs, the knowledge of magnetic declination, thermoremanent magnetisation, magnetism in medicine, relief maps, all kinds of mathematical innovations and discoveries (including effective algebraic notation and the Pascal triangle of binomial coefficients), steam sterilisation, pasteurisation (of wine), artificial induction of pearls in oysters, effective underwater salvage techniques, all kinds of silk processing devices, including reeling machines, multiple-spindle twisting frames, and others, smallpox inoculation, the discovery of urinary steroids, the use of the toothbrush and toothpaste, a method for the precipitation of copper from iron, the chain drive, the understanding of the camera obscura phenomenon, and new types of clock mechanisms.
They may even have been the first people to become anatomically modern, developing the "modern overbite"; for context, throughout most of history people's top and bottom incisors met tooth to tooth instead of overlapping each other, once food started being cut into small pieces this changed. In Europe this shift only started occuring during the eighteenth century when the fork and knife came into common usage, during the Song Dynasty it was already common at least among the upper class.
Anyway, rather interesting book and something I would recommend to anyone interested in a comparative history of warfare.
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