Guns, sails and empires

Carlo M. Cipolla was one of the earlier historians trying to grapple with how specific European powers (chiefly, in his case, the Portuguese, Dutch, and Spanish) became global powerhouses by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He also completed this volume before Geoffrey Parker's The Military Revolution offered a more complex view of technological innovation and military change on the continent. Cipolla's thesis is fairly straightforward: the Europeans achieved hegemony on the world's oceans because they were the first to harness cannon effectively for ocean warfare and that, combined with the transition from the oar to the sail in ocean-going vessels, allowed European ships to harness inanimate energy and reserve human energy more exclusively for offensive capabilities.

Cipolla divides his short volume into two parts. First, he discusses, in great detail, the gradual development of guns (that is, cannon) for field artillery and naval artillery. This includes a discussion of the various bottlenecks that confounded European engineers for centuries—for example, how to cast cheaper iron guns in ways that matched the efficiency and reliability of more expensive bronze cannon. There is much excellent detail here, although it will likely bore most readers who aren't enthusiastic about the intricacies of developing the earliest cannon. The second part of his volume, and more problematic in a twenty-first century context, endeavors to trace the proliferation of gunpowder technology from Europe to the Muslim and Asian worlds.

Cipolla's narrative of how non-Western powers "failed" to mimic European ocean-going vessels and cannon relies extensively on various cultural arguments that are now mostly debunked. For example, Confucian China disparaged skilled artisans, were apprehensive of foreign influence, and possessed "prevailing cultural traits that were not favourable to innovation." These explanations for why China did not develop European-styled navies or cannon are too simplistic and are is now replaced by Kenneth Chase's nuanced argument about Chinese steppe warfare in his book Firearms. Cipolla's attempts to grapple with Ottoman, Mamluk, Indian, Japanese, and Korean warfare are also very brief and therefore simplistic.

For 1966, however, Cipolla's book was quite innovative because it practically targets all the major components of what military historians now call the "military revolution" some two decades before Geoffrey Parker developed the concept in his lectures.

3 stars primarily because this book is dated, although the section on gunpowder development still offers excellent details for military historians.