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Saltpeter - The Mother of Gunpowder (Hardcover)
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Saltpeter - The Mother of Gunpowder (Hardcover)
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This is the story of saltpeter, the vital but mysterious substance
craved by governments from the Tudors to the Victorians as an
'inestimable treasure.' National security depended on control of
this organic material - that had both mystical and mineral
properties. Derived from soil enriched with dung and urine, it
provided the heart or 'mother' of gunpowder, without which no
musket or cannon could be fired. Its acquisition involved
alchemical knowledge, exotic technology, intrusions into people's
lives, and eventual dominance of the world's oceans. The quest for
saltpeter caused widespread 'vexation' in Tudor and Stuart England,
as crown agents dug in homes and barns and even churches.
Governments hungry for it purchased supplies from overseas
merchants, transferred skills from foreign experts, and extended
patronage to ingenious schemers, while the hated 'saltpetermen'
intruded on private ground. Eventually, huge saltpeter imports from
India relieved this social pressure, and by the eighteenth century
positioned Britain as a global imperial power; the governments of
revolutionary America and ancien regime France, on the other hand,
were forced to find alternative sources of this treasured
substance. In the end, it was only with the development of chemical
explosives in the late Victorian period that dependency on
saltpeter finally declined. Saltpeter, the Mother of Gunpowder
tells this fascinating story for the first time. Lively and
entertaining in its own right, it is also a tale with far-reaching
implications. As David Cressy's engaging narrative makes clear, the
story of saltpeter is vital not only in explaining the
inter-connected military, scientific, and political 'revolutions'
of the seventeenth century; it also played a key role in the
formation of the centralized British nation state - and that
state's subsequent dominance of the waves in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries.
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