Shock and awe

Gunpowder By Clive Ponting,
Chatto & Windus, ? 11

The emergence of gunpowder weaponry gave birth to modern warfare which in turn accelerated the rise of centralized states. According to military historians, gunpowder warfare started in late medieval Europe. The dominant scholarly analysis asserts that the early modern era witnessed the distribution of gunpowder hardware from the West to the rest of the world. In this book, Clive Ponting attempts to steer away from the Euro-centric analysis and throws new light on this issue.

Ponting challenges the idea that the development of rationality in west Europe enabled Europeans to conduct scientific and technological progress in a sustained manner. The author belongs to that school of thought which believes that everything which is associated with the modern civilization first emerged in China. The Middle Kingdom had developed black powder about 700 years ago, much before Francis Bacon penned his essay on gunpowder.

Ironically, Taoist alchemists, while searching for the elixir of life, discovered the formula capable of destroying human lives. Taoism was not based on abstract theorizing but on experimentation and observation. The assertion of ?Culturalist? historians that the Chinese failed to realize the importance of gunpowder in warfare and confined its use to harmless firecrackers is flawed. Ponting argues that the Sung dynasty in medieval China maintained factories for large-scale production of gunpowder which was used for military purposes.

There are problems in Ponting?s arguments though. He fails to answer the question as to why, despite having a long tradition of the use of gunpowder, Muslim, Hindu and Chinese civilizations lagged behind the West, especially in the field of military technology. Ponting tries to answer this by saying that continuous warfare among west European states forced them to further upgrade the use of gunpowder weapons. This argument, however, is not foolproof as there is enough evidence to show that there were similar violent episodes in China, India and Persia at the same time. The Chinese were fighting the steppe nomads along their northern border, there were threats along India?s north-west frontiers and Persia was at loggerheads with the Ottoman sultanate.

The failure of the great agrarian states of Asia to conduct further research and develop gunpowder weapons could probably be attributed to the nature of the terrain and their military cultures. In Europe, the armies fought in a confined space as a result of which, artillery and infantry equipped with firearms could be deployed in fighting set-piece battles. In Asia, by contrast, the enemy could penetrate through any corridor and retreat after launching scathing raids.

The Safavid and Mughal monarchies were established by Turkish aristocrats, for whom horses constituted a way of life. Hence, they preferred cavalry warfare to battles fought with gunpowder. West Europe, on the other hand, was rooted in the tradition of infantry warfare from Greco-Roman times. Thus, foot musketeers were easily integrated with the military legacies of the Classical age.

Ponting?s book is well written and thought provoking. His analysis of the development of gunpowder in ancient China offers valuable insights.This book would interest those who want to know more about the elixir of death.