How To Explain The Western Way Of War
Excerpt: At the start of the sixteenth century, Europe appeared the least impressive of the global civilizations, certainly the least likely to achieve a dominant position in the world. Europe was little more than a conglomeration of small, nasty states and cities, sharing a common religion and a common, ferocious desire to fight each other. Moreover, that common religion was about to be shattered by the Reformation. Despite their own penchant to slaughter each other, the Europeans were under constant pressure from the powerful Ottoman Empire, not only in the Balkans, but in the Mediterranean as well. Yet, within a period of less than three centuries, these quarreling European states would be well on the way to acquiring domination over the globe. By 1750, the Inca and Aztec civilizations in the Americas had collapsed; the Ottomans were in retreat; and throughout Asia, the Europeans seemed unbeatable. How to explain this sudden “rise of the West?” There appear to have been two major factors in the rise of the West: the continuing intensive competition among the European states and gunpowder. Well, one might argue, gunpowder had been invented by the Chinese and was certainly known to the Ottomans before the Europeans. After all, the latter had used great cannons to bring down the walls of Constantinople in 1453, hadn’t they? That is certainly true, but what it misses is the importance of the symbiosis between gunpowder and the constant, almost interminable wars among the Europeans. What the constant wars created was an interest in innovating to improve the capacity to destroy the enemy, and gunpowder weapons provided a unique ability to create new methods and means to smash up the landscape and slaughter the other. But the other was also innovating at the same time.
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