Tonio Andrade

As with so many of these sorts of collectively authored books, some of the essays were fascinating and illuminating and others were skippable. I'd imagine that which ones are valuable to you depends on your particular interests going in; in my case, being interested mostly in Manila, the essays that stuck out were those by Shapinsky, Tremml-Werner, Lu, Busquets, Xing Hang, and Ho.

This volume ends up focusing on the Zheng family and on diplomatic history, so don't go into it expecting a particularly clear structural overview or overarching theoretical framework, but the introduction and first article do a good job laying the groundwork for the rest of the book.… (mehr)

Tonio Andrade has written a very important and lively book that on the surface is about the role of gunpowder in world history. But it’s also about “The Great Divergence”, the moment or moments when China’s economic or political development diverged from Europe’s. Andrade persuasively argues that for much of history, China was at least the military equal of European powers, if not superior to them. China always had scholars who created innovations in military techniques and when confronted with superior weapons, the Chinese quickly adapted.

So why then did Britain defeat China in the Opium War? Because peace in East Asia during the Qing dynasty removed the impetus for military innovation just as experimental science was giving a huge burst of useful information to the warring states of Europe. In the five or six generations of peace that ended in the 1830s, China’s military suffered a slow decline in technology and practice that left it unprepared to face the products of Europe’s science.

A fascinating history of gunpowder and armaments, this book was named a Distinguished Book for 2017 by the Society for Military History. But more than a catalog of battles, this book is a careful examination of the flow of power and technology during Europe’s Middle Ages and early modern period. Highly Recommended.… (mehr)

Others have described the historical point in China's and the Dutch East India's histories that the book focuses on, so let me focus on the question of style. The scholarship is very good; the author has done a huge amount of research and the notes and sources are excellent for follow-up, clarification, etc. Having heard of Koxinga and his role in Chinese history, I was looking for more facts about him, his drivers, his behaviour, etc. (what makes him obviously intriguing is his colourful personality and the fact that he did defeat the Dutch). The book answered all my questions about him and this particular incident in Chinese history.

However, I only awarded it 3-1/2 stars because I felt the book was 'bigger' than the story. The book's viewpoint is somewhat unique; the story clearly relates a historical 'freeze frame', and my book group (which reads Asian non-fiction) chose it for this reason, but the story was told using fiction-writing techniques--the use of rhetoric, for example, and dramatic build-ups, and turn-arounds--which I just found annoying by their too frequent use. It got to the point where whenever a chapter was ending on a "So here was a good plan" ending, you just knew the next chapter would open with a "But they decided not to follow it" opening. There is also too much repetition of facts that most readers will have remembered from their first appearance.

Am I glad I read Lost Colony? Yes, but I wish a good editor had helped Professor Andrade with the structure and style.… (mehr)

In this wide-ranging effort to write about the world gun-powder revolution in a way that meaningfully includes the Chinese experience, what the author does best is to illustrate how for most of the period the Song, Ming and Qing dynasties had as respectable a military effort as their European and Islamic competition; often representing the world's best practice. So what happened to allow Qing China to be overtaken? What Andrade firmly discounts is Confucianism as being any more of a road block to military effectiveness as, say, Christianity. Frankly, he adopts something of a challenge-and-response hypothesis, as the Qing Peace meant that there was less cause to further refine Chinese military art, to the point that when Britain fell on a Chinese polity in the throws of dynastic collapse, it was too late to do more than palliate the situation; it would be up to a new regime that took modern science seriously to regenerate Chinese military power.… (mehr)