Firearms: A Global History to 1700 (review)

Chase describes the dissemination of firearms from China to Europe, from Europe to the Ottoman Turkish Empire, from the Ottoman Turkish Empire and Europe back to China and elsewhere in East Asia. Trained as a lawyer, he argues his case, namely that geography (that is, the weather) and technology (that is, the availability and proper use of saltpeter) were the only factors promoting and preventing this dissemination. According to Chase, firearms were invented in China but Chinese warriors refrained from developing the technology because they found it useless against Mongol nomads who, Chase thinks, were China's main enemies. Mongols who, according to Chase, had no interest in firearms, nevertheless transmitted the technology to Europe. In Europe, the technology fell on fertile ground because the climate favored agriculture and kept nomads out. European agriculturalists fought wars merely among themselves, found the technology useful and developed it, slowly but steadily. So did Turkish warriors. Although nomads in their early history, they converted into agriculturalists in time before firearms reached them. Other Muslim warriors in North Africa, West and Central Asia followed different paths. According to Chase, Ottoman firearms technology traveled back to China mainly on the Silk Road, when the nomad menace was less severe, whereas European firearms technology took the sea route to East Asia. In East Asia, Chinese warriors remained wary of the technology they knew already, while Japanese warriors used it eagerly because there were no nomads in the archipelago. Japanese agriculturalists used firearms in struggles among themselves and in two failed attempts to conquer Korea at the end of the sixteenth century. In the seventeenth century, they stopped fighting and immediately lost interest in firearms. Elsewhere in the world, Chase thinks, firearms spread through European colonists or through European traders.

So goes Chase's plea. The argument is interesting but tends to simplify a more complicated story. Chase is justified in attributing the invention of firearms technology to Chinese warriors. Yet it is far from obvious why, once the technology had been invented, Chinese soldiers had to have a specific reason not to continue using it. Chase himself makes it abundantly clear that throughout the entire period under his review, most firearms were clumsy, imprecise, and difficult to handle. Thus, warriors, wherever they used firearms, had little reason to praise them as precisely targeting, that is, deadly, weapons. Chase fails to appreciate that this implication has a fatal consequence for his plea, which is that, without cogent reasons for the development of firearms, cultural preferences are more likely to have influenced the dissemination process than apparently objective factors, such as geography and availability of natural resources. But Chase does not consider the significance of war cultures even though some of his evidence supports a reasoning that runs contrary to his own intentions. Thus the decision to use the gun was often more strongly informed by norms, patterns of behavior and subjective perceptions than geography and technology. Chase neglects the plethora of sources, both from East Asia and from Europe, that link the dissemination of firearms technology to war cultures, namely drill manuals, rules for the conduct of war and military theory. Among the sources that Chase chose to disregard is the Japanese Inatomi teppô densho of 1595, the oldest extant drill manual for firearms worldwide. The gun manufacturer Inatomi produced the text as an advertising device and gave detailed instructions for handling guns. The manual advertises the usefulness of the gun as a weapon that must be loaded slowly with care and in safe places. The clumsiness of the technology measured against the context of Japanese war culture rather than the failed conquest of Korea convinced Japanese warriors of the uselessness of firearms in war. The manufacturers understood the logic well. They advertised the firearms for hunting and did not emphasize their value as...