A mufti sprinkling a cannon with rosewater – engraving by Hieronymus Löschenkohl, 1788 (public domain image)
(7) GUNPOWDER EMPIRE
A term that isn’t as broad as you might think – not any empire with firearms, but instead a term used for three specific empires by two specific historians, notably William McNeill in his 1993 book The Age of Gunpowder Empires.
“Gunpowder empires, or Islamic gunpowder empires, is a term coined by the American historians Marshall G.S Hodgson and William H. McNeill to describe three early modern Muslim empires: the Ottoman Empire, the Safavid Empire, and the Mughal Empire, which flourished between the mid-16th and early 18th centuries.”
As I said, you’d think it might be a term to connote any empire with firearms, of which the most famous are the European colonial empires from the early modern period. Indeed, the European colonial empires might well be called machine gun empires, at least from the nineteenth century onwards.
That is the point John Ellis makes in his book A Social History of the Machine Gun – caustically observing that while European states were reluctant to deploy machine guns against each other as predictably causing mass mechanized slaughter until the First World War, they were far less reluctant to deploy them in their colonial wars.
As Hillaire Belloc observed in a satirical verse:
“Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim gun, and they have not”
In McNeill’s usage, “the gunpowder empires conquered vast amounts of territory with the use and deployment of newly invented firearms, especially cannon and small arms; together they stretched from Southeast Europe and North Africa in the west to Bengal and Arakan in the east”.
The contrast between his gunpowder empires and European use of gunpowder is that no single European state was able to centralize or dominate power through gunpowder – “As a result, the three empires were among the most stable of the early modern period, leading to commercial expansion, cultural patronage, and the consolidation of political and legal institutions.”.
However, “more recently, the Hodgson–McNeill gunpowder empire hypothesis has been called into disfavour as a neither adequate [n]or accurate explanation, although the term remains in use”,
One of my favorite uses of the term was by Harry Turtledove for the title of his book Gunpowder Empire, an alternative history if the Roman Empire had survived to the use of gunpowder. The classical Roman Empire, that is, as the Roman Empire did actually survive to the use of gunpowder as the Eastern Roman Empire – albeit as a very vestigial empire essentially reduced to its imperial capital Constantinople, which famously fell to one of the gunpowder empires, the Ottoman Empire, using cannons to break the city walls. Ironically, the designer of the largest cannon – and one of the largest cannons ever built – was a Hungarian who originally offered his services to the Romans. So the title of Turtledove’s book seems something of a misnomer.