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The Asian Military Revolution: From Gunpowder to the Bomb. By peter a. lorge. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 200 pp. $80.00 (cloth); $24.99 (paper).
The Asian Military Revolution is designed as an introductory text for undergraduate students considering the impact of gunpowder weapons upon Asian civilizations, and with it Peter Lorge largely succeeds in his goals to underscore the significance of gunpowder weapons in Asia and in his attempt to counter Western expectations that technological development fueled "modern" Asian historical development. To accomplish these objectives Lorge sets up his chapters examining the Asian military revolution with a superb introduction that presents the "Military Revolution debate" among Western scholars. As he highlights the military, economic, and technological reasons given by these scholars to explain the "slow" Asian response to gunpowder weapons, Lorge proceeds to undercut these arguments by asserting that Asia had already undergone its gunpowder revolution years before the technology made its way to the West and transformed European societies. As a result, Lorge defines the "Asian Military Revolution" as a pragmatic matter of how different Asian governments following contact with Europeans or their technology chose to make use of the new and improved gunpowder weapons to expand their political control. While most Asian governments were more than willing to accept and incorporate those elements of Western military technology appropriate to their needs, Lorge argues, the political leaders of those governments did not view acceptance of the new gunpowder weapons as an acknowledgment of Western cultural superiority. As his evidence, Lorge then undertakes over the course of several chapters a study of gunpowder weapons in premodern East Asian, Southeast Asian, and South Asian history leading to a final chapter on "modern" Asian history to support this thesis. Here is where Lorge's survey of the Asian military revolution at times suffers from its overdependence on secondary sources.
In depicting the emergence of gunpowder weaponry in early Asian history, Lorge's narrative works best when he draws...