Guns, Sails, and Empires: Technological Innovation and the Early Phases of European Expansion, 1400- 1700 (1985) by Caro M. Cipolla

In the late eighteenth century, Adam Smith observed that “in ancient times the opulent and civilized found it difficult to defend themselves against the poor and barbarous nations; in modern times the poor and barbarous find it difficult to defend themselves against the opulent and civilized.”

In truth, the success of the “West against the Rest” was something of a recent phenomenon in Smith’s day. In 1453, European Christendom was shaken by the fall of Constantinople to the Turks. From the evident depths of that defeat, Spain and Portugal, and then England and the Dutch, would rebound to conquer the world by the end of the seventeenth century. In “Guns, Sails, and Empires: Technological Innovation and the Early Phases of European Expansion, 1400-1700,” first published in 1965, Carlo Cipolla seeks to understand why “Renaissance Europe [succeeded] where the Europeans of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries failed.”

It all starts with firearms, according to Cipolla. Guns were first adopted in the early fourteenth century. By 1350, gunpowder weapons were common across Europe. For centuries, however, Europeans wrestled with a basic challenge: How to make iron firearms lighter and more reliable? Artillery pieces could be made from either iron or bronze. Iron was cheap and plentiful and easy to manufacture, but brittle and prone to crack when fired. The only solution seemed to make the weapons thicker and thicker to prevent fractures. All else being equal, bronze weapons were much preferred as they were dramatically lighter and much more reliable. But the main ingredients in making bronze – copper and tin – were less available than iron and thus far more expensive. Cipolla estimates that the cost of a bronze cannon in fifteenth or sixteenth century Europe may have been four times more than that of iron.

Dutch wealth and demand were “the effective catalyst for the development of the European arms industry,” which ultimately solved the problem quality iron firearms. Advances in metallurgy, particularly in England and Sweden, resulted in progressively more robust iron cannon to meet the demand driven by the Dutch war of independence, Anglo-Dutch overseas expansion, and finally the Thirty Years War. Once established, “Europe never lost her formidable advantage in armaments production – neither quantitatively or qualitatively.”

International competitors did respond to the challenge posed by heavy and reliable artillery pieces. “It is truly remarkable, Cipolla writes, “how quickly the Moslems learned [to use artillery]. But no less remarkable is the fact that they never succeeded in going beyond the initial stage.” At first, heavy artillery seemed a godsend to the Turks, who were virtually invincible in land battle, but often frustrated by the high ramparts of European fortifications. Artillery was adopted swiftly and used to great effect in the capture of Constantinople in 1453.

However, mainly for social reasons, the Turks resisted the opportunity to adopt mobile field artillery after it was perfected by the Europeans in the mid-seventeenth century. Rather, they remained obsessed with huge siege pieces. “To admit the new role of field artillery in battles of movement and to adapt new strategies accordingly,” Cipolla writes, “the Mamluks had to sacrifice the role and prestige of their feudal cavalry, namely the social position and prestige of the dominating class.” Not for the last time in military history, culture would thwart technical and organizational innovation.

But effective artillery was only part of the story. Perhaps more important to European colonial ambitions was the development of sturdy, three-mast sailing vessels capable of withstanding the rigors of the open Atlantic. Such ships, incidentally enough, were capable of carrying dozens of cannon and strong enough of absorb the powerful reverberations unleashed when they fired. Thus, the man-of-war was born. Non-European powers would have no answer for centuries.

The Moslems were crushed when the Europeans moved away from manpowered gallies and a tactical focus on ramming and boarding, a style of naval warfare developed in the Mediterranean, to large, ocean-going vessels capable of unleashing massive firepower that could destroy an enemy fleet hundreds of yards away. “The era of human energy was over and the era of the machine was beginning to open up,” Cipolla writes.

The great naval battle of Lepanto in 1571 was no great victory for Christian Europe, after all, according to the author. Utilizing old style ships in old style tactics, it was a battle “where everybody lost.” Rather, it was the “less glamorous and less publicized” victories of the Portuguese navy against the Moslems in the Indian Ocean nearly a century earliers that established European sovereignty over the oceans. The Chinese, Turks and Indians “lagged hopelessly behind the times in understanding the true potentialities of naval artillery and in learning the new naval tactics that artillery was mercilessly imposing. When they eventually realized that the times had changed, it was too late.”

After combing the power of sail and artillery in the fifteenth century “the oceans belonged to Europe.” It wasn’t conquest in the traditional sense and Cipolla writes, it “can hardly be depicted as an extension of the Crusades.” Rather, it was a commercial endeavor. Intrepid sailors leveraged guns and sails to acquire silk, nutmeg, saltpeter, porcelain, and, of course, gold. “Opportunities were many, risks high but profits higher.” For nearly three centuries European predominance was confined to the seas and the vicinity immediately around heavily fortified port cities. Not until the Industrial Revolution would European powers be powerful enough to expand inland, the same Industrial Revolution that had been brought about, in large part, by European maritime expansion.

In all, a concise and compelling analysis of early European imperialism.