Comment on Andrade

Tonio Andrade has written a superb rejoinder to both revisionists and anti-revisionists in the global history debate. In my mind, he accomplished the rare feat of actually carrying the debate forward, and pointing to a new direction for progress. This paper is scrupulously fair to both sides of the debate, and the discussion of my own views is as reasonable and balanced as I could ask for. Andrade comes across as a careful, thoughtful scholar, who has weighed new evidence and found to his own surprise that it leads in unexpected directions. While we are waiting for Andrade's book, this article provides genuinely new insights, in regard to Chinese vs. Dutch use of troop drill and discipline, and the nature of naval and fortification construction. I found these insights to be illuminating. The overall argument leads, I believe, in exactly the right direction. It is not a matter of Europe being wholly ahead of Asia, or of the two being wholly equal; rather there were slight differences, but these had important consequences in specific areas of East-West confrontations. That said, I would still express a bit of concern over some evaluations of relative progress. First, I would suggest eliminating the words advanced when talking about Dutch techniques, emphasizing instead significant differences in naval and fortification technologies. This is because, as the essay itself says, the Dutch were better in some ways, the Chinese better in others. The Dutch, for example, had better navies for deep-water combat; the Chinese for shallow-water conflicts. The Dutch vessels were better at massing armaments to destroy enemy vessels; the Chinese were faster downwind and thus more efficient for trading and evading conflict. In regard to fortifications, the Chinese built longer and thicker walls to withstand frontal attacks; the Dutch (drawing on Italian designs) built more sophisticated configurations of defenses designed to frustrate sieges focused on urban strongholds. If we think for a moment about how these emerged, I would not think it justifiable to talk in terms of the Dutch being advanced in these areas; just different. Here is why. If we look at the naval context in the Atlantic in the 16th and 17th centuries, we have conflicts between nations--specifically Dutch, English, and Spanish navies fighting each other for control of deepwater sea lanes and capture of valuable cargoes. These cargoes were often treasure ships laden with extremely valuable gold and silver, meaning that the capture of a single ship brought immense wealth and was worth investment in heavy armament to capture and defend. Competition among these navies, financed by both consortiums of merchants (EIC and DEIC) and national governments, led to ships that bristled with cannon and which could both project and withstand massive firepower. In Asian waters, where there were no large consortiums of merchants or nationally funded navies (after the Ming ended the voyages of Admiral Zheng He), the biggest threat to individual trading ships were pirates. These could be best handled by building ships that were large and fast, so that they could withstand attacks from smaller ships and run away from them downwind. Moreover, the typical cargoes were cloth, ceramics, bulk spices, exotic wood, and animals, which (in Asia) were not so valuable as to justify huge investments in arms to capture a single ship. Thus the Chinese junks were ideally suited to their purposes--big, fast, and capable of moving huge cargoes of bulk goods safely downwind in stable monsoons. Andrade is also correct that sailing in the Mediterranean, and up the coasts of Africa and in the Atlantic, required ships that could effectively sail against the wind. The Europeans here benefitted from the Arab designs (lateen sails) and developed riggings that combined the best characteristics of square and lateen rigging in various combinations to develop large ships that were reasonably fast downwind, broadside, and upwind. …

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