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Gunpowder War and Western Supremacy: Circa 1450–Circa 1770

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Abstract

The dominant picture is that Gunpowder War became prevalent in Europe from fifteenth century onwards. This resulted in the replacement of knightly armoured cavalry with firearms-equipped infantry supported by mobile field artillery. The argument goes that since siege cannons were costly pieces of weapon technology which required large financial outlay and massive technical inputs, only the kings were able to manufacture and deploy them. Further, siege artillery enabled the royals to destroy the autonomous power bases of the feudal lords centred on castles. Strong centralised states started emerging in sixteenth-century Europe. These polities developed bureaucratic tentacles to extract increasing amount of resources from their host societies.

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  1. Department of History, Jadavpur University, Kolkata , West Bengal, India

    Kaushik Roy

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Roy, K. (2022). Gunpowder War and Western Supremacy: Circa 1450–Circa 1770. In: A Global History of Warfare and Technology. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-3478-0_8

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