The weapons we use to fight wars are, in their own way, tools; and, like any other tools, somebody needs to make them. I remember learning in Ninth-Grade World History that anonymous Chinese scientists invented gunpowder, which subsequently made its way to Europe through means unknown. But high school never taught me who did the laborious work of compounding early handmade gunpowder, or what effect it had on their peoples.
Jack Kelly is both a pop historian and a historical novelist, dedicating his career to glamorizing largely forgotten corners of humanity’s past. His nonfiction works are unified by themes rather than by personalities. This volume traces the arc of gunpowder—known as “black powder” to shooters and historical reenactors, to distinguish it from modern synthetic, “smokeless” powder—from China in the Twelfth Century AD to the early Twentieth Century.
That’s not to say that Kelly doesn’t consider individuals and their influence. He introduces us to the potentates who brought gunpowder into warfare, from nameless Chinese alchemists, through to King Edward III, Sultan Mehmet of Constantinople, and Hernán Cortés (gunpowder and imperialism are inextricable). But also the early gunsmiths who fashioned the weapons these potentates used: early cannons were so elaborate, and so individual, that armies gave their guns individual, usually feminine, names.
Rather, with each personality that utilized gunpowder and improved guns, the themes of power and technology advance. To give just one example, artisanal workers needed to collect black powder ingredients and compound the powder manually. The need to standardize gunpowder and bring prices down helped princes kick-start the industrialization that defined rising capitalism. Besides a weapon, gunpowder was also a technological and economic driver.
It's probably uncontroversial to say that gunpowder, always a weapon, was never morally neutral. In Kelly’s telling, however, it also isn’t administratively neutral. Scaling up gunpowder production sufficiently to make it useful, required massive bureaucratic organization. The number of saltpeter farms, charcoal burners, and artisanal powder-makers necessary required massive advancements in government administration. Gunpowder arguably contributed to the development of the modern technocratic state.
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| Jack Kelly |
Similarly, Kelly sees gunpowder as advancing the development of modern science. Artisanal powder-makers didn’t really understand how their product worked, and experimented casually with manufacturing techniques. But early chemists like Hooke and Boyle tested gunpowder and its ingredients to better understand how physical reality works. As “natural philosophy” gave way to experiment and documentation, black powder seems present at every stage. Gunpowder, Kelly suggests, was instrumental to Boyle’s discovery of oxygen.
These claims may seem far-fetched, and indeed, Kelly frequently performs the pop historian’s fallacy of assuming everything is explainable through whatever lens he currently employs. For instance, his history of chemistry overlooks the influence of those newfangled hydrocarbons that England found so valuable in rising heavy industry. His descriptions of lurid Renaissance theatre pyrotechnics overlooks that other period-specific innovation, gaslight. Kelly is somewhat overfond of the totalizing narrative, that seeks one cause for multiple effects.
However, he does support his claims with evidence and documentation. Sometimes that documentation is sketchy—the scanty records of Sultan Mehmet, to give one example, teem with mythmaking and hindsight bias. But Kelly uses the best available sources to construct a story supported by facts and evidence. That famous unlocked door might’ve made the fall of Constantinople inevitable, but the siege was powered by Mehmet’s cannons.
Kelly’s narrative continues through to modernity. Multiple technological advances stemmed from attempts to both use gunpowder, and protect against it. Engineers redesigned cities to withstand cannon fire. Industrial-age inventors like Samuel Colt (a textile maker) and Richard Gatling (an agronomist) are more famous for their improvements to firearms manufacture. DuPont Chemical was founded as a mass-scale powder mill driven by a water wheel.
Unsurprisingly, since Kelly doubles as a novelist, his history has a narrative through-line, the epic sweep of novelists like John Jakes and James Clavell. It’s difficult to avoid wondering if Kelly hasn’t somewhat sanded off false starts and simplified events to keep the story moving. Yet within that standard, Kelly does tell an engaging, well-sourced story. Even if events weren’t this morally concise, Kelly at least illuminates the trends.
It’s difficult to avoid noticing the quantity of “history” being written today by journalists, novelists, and attorneys, rather than credentialled historians. Much as I appreciate historians like Kevin M. Kruse or Greg Grandin, they aren’t producing the bulk of today’s accessible history. Timothy Egan, Richard Gergel, and now Jack Kelly present history as comprehensible, fast-moving, and relevant to today’s audiences, and that’s something modern readers need.
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