This is a well-written and well-edited book. Its author evidently is familiar with the specifics of his topic as well as with the broader debates for which it can be made relevant. He provides a balanced mix of small facts and large issues and has clear theses without being too combative or dismissive. He himself suggests that the book's “unifying theme” would be “gunpowder warfare” (p. 2), but its scope actually is broader.
The book consists of four parts. In Part I Andrade shows that the Chinese not only invented gunpowder, as is widely known, but also successfully used it for warfare, which is often ignored. In Part II he shows how Europe got the gun and why and how Western Europe and not China developed gunpowder artillery. This led to a brief “small divergence” to the advantage of Europe over the fifteenth century and the first two decades of the sixteenth century, after which China quickly caught up in its conflicts with Portuguese forces.
I have no comments with regard to the content of the first two parts of the book, which deal with topics far outside my expertise. The focus of my review is on its second half in which the link between military innovation and the rise of the West is explicitly discussed. In Part III, which focuses on the seventeenth century, Andrade presents his thesis that Chinese military forces were on a par with forces from the West, and he substantiates it by pointing at the outcomes of direct confrontations between them. Actually, he only discusses Chinese and Korean confrontations with Dutch and Russian military forces, which he then describes as “Sino-European infantry battles” (p. 195) or even “Sino-Dutch” and “Russo-Qing’ wars (p. 311). In fact they were just skirmishes in which the number of “Europeans” involved never surpassed a couple hundred, and who, in all but one of the four cases discussed, confronted a larger number of Chinese and Koreans. I doubt whether analysing such skirmishes provides a good basis for general conclusions about Chinese or Western military power and efficiency. Even more so as on two occasions it was Korean musketeers who played a central role in defeating the Western opponent, not the Chinese. What Andrade does show is that the Chinese had an unbroken tradition of drilling, including the volley technique applied to gunpowder weapons, since at least the 1300s. This technique in the early modern era thus was not typically and exclusively Western.
What in any case is hard to square with Andrade's parity thesis is the fact that all exchange between the West and China, from the seventeenth century onwards, was one-directional, that is, from the West to China. Andrade's claim that “Everyone was adopting and adapting from everyone” (p. 301) in this case simply doesn't seem to apply. He moreover admits certain Western advantages: for the Dutch in shipbuilding techniques and sailing against the wind, and for the Dutch and the Russians in the way they constructed fortifications.
As do many China scholars, Andrade regards Qing China till the 1760s as militarily very successful. Here too some qualification is in order. Their successful campaigns against the Zunghars (1755–1759) are usually regarded as the major feat illustrating Qing China's military strength. The entire Zunghar population, however, numbered an estimated 600,000 people and their weapons were not very advanced. It would have been very strange if the Qing hadn't won. The logistics involved in the campaigns were certainly not beyond Western capabilities. According to Andrade a military gap between China and the West only opened from the mid-1700s. By the First Opium War Britain's military edge was overwhelming. That gap and what China's rulers did or did not do against it, is the subject of Part IV of the book.
China's backwardness clearly showed in military hardware. Here Andrade attributes a key role to developments in Western science that had no equivalent in China, in particular in the field of ballistics. But China's disadvantage was not confined to hardware. According to Andrade, the country also wasn't prepared for any serious conflict for lack of practice. There simply were no conflicts threatening enough to trigger major innovation. Here again some qualification is in order. There were some real wars in this period that did not go well for the Qing. Emperor Qianlong's four expeditions into Burma (1765–1769) were a disaster, and his Vietnam expeditions (1788–1789) were not exactly successful. The results of the second invasion in Nepal (1791–1792) militarily speaking were also unimpressive. None of this led to any reforms. In 1809–1810, the Qing government had to ask the British and the Portuguese to help them supress piracy in the Southern China Seas. Over the entire period from the 1760s until the 1840s, government hardly did anything to modernise their army or navy. It was not just a matter of money. Military expenditure in China over the first half of the nineteenth century de creased and was only a fraction, in real terms per capita and as a percentage of GDP, of that of Great Britain. Negligence, arrogance, and unwillingness also played their part.
Even the First Opium War, at least initially, failed to function as a wake-up call. By the second half of the century though, a broader movement of self-strengthening emerged. As Andrade shows, that movement was certainly not unsuccessful when it came to military hardware. The Chinese lost the war against Japan because they fought poorly and had no unified military command. Their fundamental problem was not technical or ideological but institutional. Resources often were scarce but I would want to emphasize, more than Andrade does, that this was not because China's government spent so much but because it had so little revenue, much less as a percentage of GDP than Western states or Japan. The Qing state had always been weak in terms of revenue, number of officials, or soldiers. As long as it had no strong opponent that was not a big problem: now it was. Andrade shows that efforts at reform became increasingly ad-hoc and de-centered, and that policies were often changed. No fundamental transformation took place. Of its army, for example, hundreds of thousands banner troops had become nearly useless but China's government kept on paying or at least supporting them. When at the end of the nineteenth century the Gunpowder Era was over, Qing China still was not reformed but had, as the New York Times claimed, become “an anachronism” (p. 296).
Andrade's book may at some instances be somewhat too revisionist in discussing China's military innovations and strength, but it will certainly and deservedly become a landmark in debates about military divergence and convergence in world history.
