The Great Military Divergence: The Gunpowder Revolutions of China and Advancement in the West

Abstract

Of all the inventions of ancient and imperial China, perhaps none is as famous or world-changing as gunpowder. The chemical mixture drastically changed the nature of warfare, albeit over the course of a thousand years. The formula began with Daoist alchemy during the Tang Dynasty, but was applied militarily in the succeeding Song Dynasty. Such an invention created new empires and changed warfare forever. This paper discusses its invention and early military uses in China then investigates how Europeans, among other peoples, were able to advance it far beyond that of the Chinese and other civilizations by the fourteenth century. The “Military Revolution” has been a popular topic of discussion among scholars for years, but a broader analysis of such a revolution requires a comparison of the military histories of China and the West. This thesis examines how and why it was the Europeans that advanced this military technology and supplanted China as the premier gunpowder superpower of the late Middle Ages. Multiple geopolitical, political, economic, and military factors and preconditions played a role in causing the increasingly widening technological gap in the following centuries. The paper also details how China’s position as the unchallenged cultural, economic, and military giant of East Asia for much of the last two thousand years even contributed to its overall decline in comparison to an ascending West. Meanwhile, existential warfare among the fledgling nation states of premodern Europe stimulated hyper intense competition in nearly every field and triggered rapid advancements in weapons technology.