博士 / 國立清華大學 / 歷史研究所 / 104 / Gunpowder was certainly one of the most important inventions of the medieval world. As Edward Gibbon ever said, "Cannon and fortifications now form an impregnable barrier against the Tartar horse." European expansion since the age of discoveries has largely been supported by weapons that use gunpowder. The spread of big guns inaugurated what may be called an era of gunpowder empires in various countries all over the world. During the first half of the seventeenth century, three gunpowder empires had also been established in Monsoon Asia, namely Akbar of Mughal India , Tokugawa Ieyasu of Shogunate Japan, and Abahai of Qing China. European-originated firearms and artillery facilitated them to found and maintain effective centralized state. The military strength of these Asian gunpowder empires soon reached a comparable level or sometimes even higher than their European counterparts after some merging of technology and innovation. Although this is just a small episode in the contemporary European maritime expansion history, such new weapons played an important role at the battlefields during the Ming-Qing cataclysm. However, many researches in the related field did not give a proper weight to the process and the effect of the import of European guns, and incorrect statements are not difficult to find in them. Furthermore, should the above-mentioned finding be genuine, the project would also like to study why these gunpowder empires in monsoon Asia were unable to face challenges from European Imperialism one or two centuries later. In addition, further analyses and comparisons will be also conducted in this project with the Ottoman and Safavid empires in the Near East , which too created a gunpowder-based military force to promote their centralization in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This study will focus on the powerful European firearmss introduced into China in the 16th-17th century. I would like to answer why such weapons were far superior to Chinese firearms and how far technology transfer could play in the making of Chinese history.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TW/104NTHU5493012 |
| Date | January 2016 |
| Creators | Chang, Hsiu-Ming, 常修銘 |
| Contributors | Huang, Yi-Long, 黃一農 |
| Source Sets | National Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations in Taiwan |
| Language | zh-TW |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | 學位論文 ; thesis |
| Format | 241 |
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