Gunpowder studies are still in their infancy despite the
long-standing civil and military importance of this explosive since
its discovery in China in the mid-ninth century AD. In this second
volume by contributors who meet regularly at symposia of the
International Committee for the History of Technology (ICOHTEC),
the research is again rooted in the investigation of the technology
of explosives manufacture, but the fact that the chapters range in
scope from the Old World to the New, from sources of raw materials
in south-east Asia to the complications of manufacture in the West,
shows that the story is more than the simple one of how an
intriguing product was made. This volume is the first to develop
the implications of the subject, not just in the sense of relating
it to changing military technologies, but in that of seeing the
securing of gunpowder supplies as fundamental to the power of the
state and imperial pretensions.The search for saltpetre, for
example, an essential ingredient of gunpowder, became a powerful
engine of sea-going European trade from the early seventeenth
century. Smaller states like Venice were unable to form these
distant connections, and so to sustain a gunpowder army. Stronger
states like France and Britain were able to do so, and became even
more powerful as the demand for improved explosives fostered
national strengths - leading to a development of the sciences,
especially chemistry, in the former case, and of manufacturing
techniques in the latter.
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