Military Transition in Early Modern Asia, 1400–1750 by Kaushik Roy

Author:Kaushik Roy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: 2019-11-23T16:00:00+00:00

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Military Systems and Societies of Asia

Introduction

Historians more or less agree that West Europe had a unique culture that aided the West European polities in integrating gunpowder weapons successfully within their military systems. For instance, Jeremy Black writes: ‘European-style use of firearms depended on types of drill that relied on patterns of constrained behaviour that in part reflected an ethic of self-constraint and a mechanistic aesthetic that were particularly developed in European culture’.1 John A. Lynn II, in a similar vein, asserts that the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century West European monarchs, taking into account social prejudice and cultural predilections, crafted a culture of war that can be termed ‘battle culture of forbearance’.2 The issue here is not to debate on whether or not West Europe possessed a pro-gunpowder culture in the early modern era, but to see how the four different Asian cultures interacted with gunpowder technology. This point is related to the issue of monopoly of violence by the polities. This, in turn, also requires investigation of the social fabric and economic basis of the Asian polities. The dominant interpretation is that the West European polities, unlike their Asian counterparts, were able to obtain a monopoly in regard to the use of organized violence in the public sphere.3

David Ralston asserts that, at least from the eighteenth century onwards, the religious figures in the Ottoman Empire were opposed to copying of Western military and administrative techniques.4 Ralston’s book is partly concerned with modernization (or the lack of it) in the Ottoman armed forces from 1750. In contrast to Ralston, Gabor Agoston asserts that Islam played no key role in shaping the Muslim polities’ (Ottoman Empire and Safavid Persia) response to gunpowder technology.5 So, state structure was probably important. William R. Thompson claims that, along with military power, the availability of local allies, who functioned as military auxiliaries of the Western powers, and the fragile state system of the non-Europeans, aided in the rise of the West vis-à-vis the others between 1500 and 1800.6 Then the question that arises is, were the non-Western polities weak and fragile? One way to evaluate Thompson’s assertion is to study the state–society relationship of the four mainland Asian states by comparing their military capacity.

This in turn would require an analysis of the economic and social affairs of the four empires. William H. McNeill, in his global survey of the world since 1000 CE (published in 1983), asserts that the rise of the free-market economy encouraged continuous improvement in economic processes and in the field of the weaponry-industrial infrastructure of the West European powers since the turn of the last millennium. As a point of contrast to the market economy and open society of West Europe, McNeill posits the case of China. Despite massive progress in certain sectors, writes McNeill, a command economy and the dominance of the mandarins (instead of overseas merchants as in the West) stalled China’s progress, especially in matters of overseas commerce and shipbuilding.7

Brian M. Downing in an article suggests that pre-modern constitutional arrangements

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