Firearms: A Global History to 1700 (review)

In just 210 pages of text, polymath Chase surveys the world history of firearms, traversing more than six centuries and the entire Eurasian ecumene (he says oikoumene) as if the full range were his own backyard. This tour de force deploys at least eight languages, buttressed by a thorough familiarity with Eurasian geography and history. But Firearms: A Global History to 1700 is more than a showcase for Chase's erudition. The book engages the existing literature, offers a novel interpretation of the impact of firearms, and even suggests a model for understanding how and why firearms came to be used as they were before the modern era. Chase confirms the invention of firearms in China in the twelfth century, their transmission to the West in the fourteenth century, and their return to East Asia in the 1500s. He argues that their adoption across the ecumene depended, in large part, on the threat faced by different societies. Those threatened by nomads were less likely to assimilate firearms thoroughly and effectively than those threatened by infantry. Firearms flourished in the West in spite of cultural aversion to the instruments, because infantry combat was chronic. The Mamluks, often cited as culturally averse to firearms, embraced them to deal with the Ottoman threat. The Japanese never relinquished them, Perrin's popular misreading of the evidence notwithstanding.¹

Chase arrives at these conclusions by following the spread of firearms from East Asia to Europe and back again. China allowed its initiative in firearms technology to erode because these weapons were ineffective against the Mongol threat and potentially dangerous to the state. Europeans embraced firearms to defeat fortifications and to transform naval warfare. Then they developed them into effective small arms for fighting infantry. By the seventeenth century, the Europeans had combined superior training, discipline, and tactics with accelerating technological refinement to create the military juggernaut that imposed its will around the globe. Like the Europeans, the Ottomans took up firearms for siege and naval warfare, and used small arms to defeat such enemies as the Mamluks, who subordinated their use of firearms to a love of mounted combat against nomadic foes. In what Chase calls eastern Islamdom, from Iran to India, the tradition of light, mounted warfare proved incompatible with firearms. Not until the nineteenth century would firearms prove superior to bows and arrows and swords on horseback. The Mughals maintained a precarious balance between firearms and cavalry for most of two centuries before succumbing to light cavalry.

When European and Ottoman firearms began to penetrate China during the sixteenth century, China quickly took up the improved technology and added refinements of its own. Producing cast-iron guns and experimenting with other technical innovations, the Chinese proved far more open and innovative than many historians have suggested. Yet, neither their military organization and training nor their economic andpolitical systems could match those of the West. Chase believes that part of the failure may be attributed to the continuing nomadic threat on the northwest frontier, against which gunpowder weapons were ineffective. Nonetheless, China's gunpowder technology spread to Korea and thence to Japan, where it quickly flourished. Firearms accelerated theunification of Japan in the sixteenth century, but offered an insufficient advantage when Japan challenged Korea and China on the mainland. The Tokugawa shogunate turned inward and gave up war, not the gun.

Any attempt to summarize Chase's rich, dense survey necessarily adumbrates his complex, integrated analysis and omits numerous fascinating topics. He notes, for example, that the Russians used wagon laagers, like the Hussites, Poles, Hungarians, and Ottomans, and portable wooden walls, like the Mamluks, Mughals, and Chinese. Russia's connection with them was the nomadic threat. These innovations marked an attempt to mix firepower with mobility.

Readers familiar with Geoffrey Parker's The Military Revolution (New York, 1996; orig. pub. 1988) will detect many similarities. Chase does not directly challenge the thesis of an early modern military revolution in the West. Rather, he adds detail and nuance, corrects...