A devilish instrument of war

‘China is a sleeping lion,’ Napoleon reportedly remarked. ‘When it wakes, the world will tremble.’ There is no need to fear China, its current leaders are quick to stress — with President Xi Jinping claiming that the country’s rise will be ‘peaceful, pleasant and civilised’. Such words are of little comfort to hawks in the United States who watch the Asia-Pacific region with a growing sense of alarm — even if the Chinese economic slowdown of recent months has made it more likely that we will hear a growl rather than a blood-curdling roar as the lion awakes.

This interesting new book asks why it is that China has been sleeping for so long. The answer, according to Tonio Andrade, professor of history at Emory University, Alabama, lies in the history of gunpowder and above all in two periods of divergence — one spanning the period from c. 1450–1550, and more importantly in the century and a half after 1700.