Gunpowder empires


Gunpowder Empires is a term used by some historians to describe the rise of early modern empires that were built or maintained by the use of gunpowder weapons through a central authority. William H. McNeill noted that by about the mid-15th century the advent of new, powerful guns upset the traditional balance of power between attackers and defenders "first in Western Europe, where these guns were developed, and then in the other parts of the civilized world". Wherever rulers were able to "monopolize the new artillery, they were able to unite large territories into new, or consolidated, empires." This hegemonic process occurred at the European periphery, including the oversea colonies, and across much of the Islamic world and Asia. In Western Europe itself military and political rivalry, driven by continuous improvements in warfare, was too intense to allow one power to dominate the others. William H. McNeill and Marshall G. S. Hodgson labelled three Islamic polities, the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal empires as "gunpowder empires" because they supposedly monopolized the manufacture of guns and artillery in their areas which aided in centralizing and consolidating their empires. However the concept of "gunpowder empires" as "empires created by gunpowder weapons" has been criticized by Douglas E. Streusand as neither accurate or appropriate explanation for the political success of the Islamic empires. According to Streusand, the gunpowder-empires hypothesis wrongly implies a fundamental similarity between the three empires.