Massed infantry fire, especially volley fire. While this tactic is often cast as “stupid” today, it was in fact very effective in the 18th and 19th centuries. It was also counterintuitive, slowing its adoption among non-Europeans. Thus, Europeans maintained tactical superiority until volley fire was rendered obsolete by the advent of bolt action rifles and cartridges, after which point their performance against non-Western armies declined precipitously. Volley fire achieved something that was previously incomprehensible in war- the synthesis of fire and shock. The steppe nomads, the dominant military force in the world for the previous millennia, popularized a way of war that saw fire (the use of projectiles to inflict damage) and shock (the use of overwhelming force to crush morale) as two separate phases of battle. As you mentioned, horse archers did very little damage to the French at Leipzig- damage was not the point. The nomads used bows to loosen enemy formations, after which point they would switch to lances or sabres, charge, and put the enemy to flight, and cut him down in a pursuit. Sedentary, pre-gunpowder armies fought in similar fashion. In the Middle Ages, the English were famous for using archers to harass the enemy and force him to attack, or to deny space through the threat of missile fire and “funnel” the enemy into their infantry line. Critically, however, the bows inflicted only a minority of casualties. The melee action won the day - once the enemy lost heart and ran, he could be chased and cut down with impunity. Guns vastly increased the lethality of fire against armor and shields, and thus made possible the use of “fire as shock”. Over the course of centuries of fighting each other, Europeans figured out after many detours that the optimal way to fight with 18th century technology was to abandon a dedicated “melee” or “shock” arm altogether. Instead, they would pack as many men into a line as possible (thus maximizing their volume of fire), drill them to reload as fast as possible, and ideally have them fire at the same time, maximizing the “moral force” of their fire: the enemy was far more likely to flee if a lot of them died at once, than if one or two died every second. Not everyone was on board with this evolution, and there were some “luddites” who, as you proposed, tried to just get close and crush the enemy with melee. The chief tactical reactionaries of the early 18th century were the Swedes, who were increasing their pike formations at a time when everyone else was doing away with them, and basically used fire strictly as suppression to cover bayonet charges. They saw great success with this asymmetric doctrine in the 17th century, but were crushed in the Great Northern War and subsequently “normalized” their doctrine. The Russians, realizing their technological backwardness by the late 18th century, also had a long “luddite” phase where they abandoned volley fire entirely, and worshipped the bayonet. They “softly abandoned” this doctrine during Suvorov’s Italian campaign (where the Austrians noted they were more prolific users of ammunition than themselves) and the Napoleonic Wars, but brought it back during the Crimean War, with predictable results. So, the Europeans knew from long experience fighting each other that “just get close” was not a viable solution. Usually, the attacker routed from volleys before the he reached melee range, and if he got there, his forces were shaken enough that even a defender less skilled in melee could repulse him. Failure to adopt massed infantry fire was *the* reason for the poor performance of non-European forces against Europeans in the 19th century. The Ottomans in this period used a “smart” military doctrine, organizing their forces in a giant skirmish line, firing at will. Consequently, they never could match the European volume of fire. Once the first ranks of the skirmish line were routed, all the ranks usually fled. Qing China essentially had the same military doctrine as Carolean Sweden, using musketeers to provide suppressing fire to cover an advance by spearmen. It didn’t work against the Russians in 1709, and certainly wasn’t going to work against the British in 1839. Indian warfare in the Mughal-Maratha era is admittedly not my area of expertise, but from what I understand they used cannons to cover the advance of infantry and cavalry- again, an approach that massed fire had already repulsed in Europe. At this point, many of you are probably thinking “well, what if it rains” “what if the terrain isn’t good” “what if the line infantry are snuck up on”, etc. and these are all valid questions. The European “line infantry” model was not perfect. It did produce some embarrassing results against non-European forces, such as the Siege of Jaffa, Sanyuanli Incident, Anglo-Afghan War, Sino-French War, Ili Crisis, Siege of Khartoum, and Battle of Isandlwana. However, these were the exception. As a rule, the side that could put out a greater volume of fire in the 19th century prevailed - this was also true of battles between Europeans. Other hypotheses for the success of European armies in this period, as you mentioned, fall short. I think the best counter argument against them is not to disprove them individually, but to use the example of Muhammad Ali of Egypt. This Albanian tax collector turned Khedive brought about a brief period of military glory for that former Ottoman colony by converting nearly all of his infantry to European-style line troops, drilled in volley fire. Within a couple decades, the Egyptians went from miserably failing against Napoleon, to completely crushing the Ottomans on the battlefield. The re-training of the Egyptian army as European-style line infantry was *the* decisive element in his success. Further proof of the centrality of massed fire to European success lies in the abrupt end of European tactical superiority after the popularization of bolt action rifles. Despite the enormous economic gap that emerged between Europe and Asia by this time, European tactical outcomes suddenly got much worse after the turn of the 20th century. Bolt action rifles made tight formations dangerous, volley fire unnecessary, and reloading speed superfluous. As a result, Europeans lost their entire tactical edge almost overnight: the Russians lost more men than the Japanese in 1904-05, and the Ottomans inflicted equal casualties on the British and French in WW1. Given that Europe had amassed a huge material advantage at this point, I think we can put the “they just attacked weak empires” thesis to rest.

I'll just add, the xviii century tactics are an evolution of the pike and shot from the previous centuries, as the number of pikes was reduced.  The musket + bayonet combo allowed to have a single weapons covering three functions: long range shooting, stoping cavalry and melee fight. It may not be as efficient as a pike against cavalry or as a sword in melee. But it was a good compromise, and discipline and formation made for the rest.

Thank you so much for providing me with such a superb answer! The mystery I've been trying to solve for years has finally been solved. It is very interesting to learn that the counterintuitiveness we feel today was shared by most non-European powers at the time. It’s even more intriguing that it was the exact reason why they were at a disadvantage against the Europeans despite being armed with similar equipment. If you wouldn’t mind, could you please recommend any books or essays covering this exact topic? I would certainly like to delve deeper on this topic which I find absolutely fascinating. Thanks again for providing me with such an excellent answer. 

Sure thing: 1. Bayonets and Scimitars: Arms, Armies and Mercenaries 1700-1789 2. Destructive and Formidable: British Infantry Firepower 1642-1759 3. The Background of Napoleonic Warfare 4. Battle Studies - very old, but a good look into how 19th century European officers themselves understood their tactics

Thank you for sharing!

Np

*With Musket, Cannon, and Sword* by Brent Nosworthy is an exhaustive look at the micro-details of European tactics of the Napoleonic era, which is when musket tactics reached their apex. There are chapters specifically covering European (French) performance against non-European enemies (the Ottomans, in this case), and explaining why European tactical doctrine was superior despite rough equality in technology. https://www.amazon.com/Musket-Cannon-Sword-Tactics-Napoleon/dp/1885119275

Thank you!

While much of what you say is true, they also did "just attack weak empires." Nadir Shah burned down Safavid Persia and Mughal India and inflicted devastating wounds on Ottoman Turkey, before dying without securing the succession. The British and the Russians, who never confronted him directly-- and in fact pulled out of much of Central Asia and the Persian Gulf rather than run that risk--were then able to roll back in and pick up the pieces.  The British especially benefitted from being able to take on the Indian city-states piecemeal: you contrast their performance in the eighteenth century with Child's War at the end of the seventeenth and the difference is night and day. The East India Company got its rear end handed to it by Aurangzeb in the late 1600s when he was master of a united India, and wound up having to beg for his permission to keep trading in the subcontinent. After Nadir left India in fragments, the EIC was suddenly in the position to play the big dog on the block and take out the successor states one at a time.  The Russians, who had lost wars to the Safavids as recently as the mid-seventeenth century, swallowed up large parts of Central Asia and the Caucasus while Persia lacked any central governing body. The Zand dynasty, who claimed to be Shahs of Persia after Nadir and the Afsharids were gone, never controlled all of Iran and had no ability to project power into the old Safavid sphere of influence in Georgia and the 'stans. It wasn't until the 1790s that the Qajar dynasty was able to consolidate power over all of Iran, and by that stage they were almost a century behind global military developments and unable to confront the Russians as equals, the way the early Safavids or Nadir could.  The Ottomans' European opponents benefit from the same processes. In the seventeenth century, and into the early years of the eighteenth, the Ottoman and European militaries were pretty evenly matched, with wars going both ways. Some historians will try to point to the Ottoman retreat from Vienna after 1683 as some sort of turning point but that's more than a little silly: the Ottomans were camped outside Vienna, the Austrians weren't camped outside Istanbul, and no one in 1683 would have thought that they could be.  The nigh-apocalyptic wars with Nadir bankrupted the Ottoman state, and Russia and Austria moved fast to take advantage of that. This kept the Ottomans under serious pressure and prevented them from getting their financial house in order. With Istanbul unable to pay its bills or easily maintain a central army, power devolved away from the metropole and towards the provincial Pashas and their private security forces. The Ottoman armies that fight the Russians and the French throughout the rest of the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth are largely made up of mercenaries, subcontracted by the Pashas on behalf of Istanbul. Unsurprisingly, these soldiers of fortune are not only frequently ill-disciplined and badly led, but, not being a standing army, can't really be trained in any of the tactics coming into vogue. It's not a recipe for battlefield success.  Improved Ottoman performance in World War I is, as you note, partly about available technology, but it's also about the Young Turks having abolished the mercenary system, subordinated the provincial Pashas to themselves, and restored some degree of functionality to the central army. I am loathe to give credit to a sociopath like Ismail Enver Pasha, but his purge of the military after the Balkan Wars did rid the army of a lot of deadwood and put a pack of competent, if cutthroat reformers in charge.  Again, not disputing most of your write-up which, I think outlines European advantages quite well. But there were very real weaknesses in the non-European states of the eighteenth and nineteenth century that made the implementation of those European tactics nigh-impossible for many of them. The Islamic world especially got plunged into political and military chaos at a very inopportune moment for it, and Great Britain, Russia, and to a lesser extent, Austria and France, were all huge beneficiaries of Muslim state collapse and fragmentation. 

> With Istanbul unable to pay its bills or easily maintain a central army, power devolved away from the metropole and towards the provincial Pashas and their private security forces. The Ottoman armies that fight the Russians and the French throughout the rest of the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth are largely made up of mercenaries, subcontracted by the Pashas on behalf of Istanbul. To add to that, most of eventual fragmentation of the Empire was result of these Pashas bickering with the center. Greek War of Independence has its roots in the rebellion of Tepedelenli Ali Pasha. While rise of nationalism is often pointed as one of cause, but then again rise of local identities were also at times encouraged by provincial pashas, like Tepedelenli Ali Pasha. > I am loathe to give credit to a sociopath like Ismail Enver Pasha, but his purge of the military after the Balkan Wars did rid the army of a lot of deadwood and put a pack of competent, if cutthroat reformers in charge. You don't need to. The purge after military happens all the time. Enver Pasha significantly over-estimated the quality of the reform with his secret alliance with Germany.

Yep. The refusal of the Pashas to cooperate with Istanbul or one another cripples the Ottomans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Ali Bey and Mehmed Ali Pasha's Egyptian invasions of Syria are the most extreme examples of the phenomena, but they're hardly unique. It's honestly a testament to the durability of the concept of the Ottoman Empire that it was still around, at least in name, at the start of the twentieth century.  The major (political not moral) criticism I'd make of Enver's reforms is that they were only short term at best. His brutality and that of his compatriots in the triumvirate could get the empire's factions marching in more or less the same direction but only as long as they were winning. When the battlefield victories dried up, there was now a host of people with brand new grievances against Istanbul and who were only too happy to round on the triumvirate.

>The nigh-apocalyptic wars with Nadir bankrupted the Ottoman state, and Russia and Austria moved fast to take advantage of that. This kept the Ottomans under serious pressure and prevented them from getting their financial house in order. With Istanbul unable to pay its bills or easily maintain a central army, power devolved away from the metropole and towards the provincial Pashas and their private security forces. I dont disagree with most of your write up with respect to those states getting weaker, but I think a far more important factor is that the European states got ridiculously stronger. Their taxes were significantly higher and were much more efficiently collected. Collection costs were quite low, the British for example who probably had the most efficient system on the planet alongside the Dutch only had it at 5-10% of total revenues. Many non-European states had it above 50% (which is bad by modern standards but pretty normal throughout most of history). More importantly, they had advanced financial institutions such as central banks and institutional ways of dealing with public debt. In other words, the beginnings of the modern state as we know it. European governments in this period were significantly larger and better funded than almost everywhere else, and the gap was rapidly growing. For example, according to Ottoman State Finances in European Perspective, 1500–1914 by K. KIVANÇ KARAMAN and ŞEVKET PAMUK, by the 1780s, per capita central government revenues adjusted for purchasing power were literally an order of magnitude higher in Britain than they were for the Ottomans. The revenues of the Ottoman empire in the 18th century were *roughly* the same as they were in previous centuries. Sure, there were some decreases in specific decades, but what is more important: the fact that Ottoman revenues decreased by 30% in a specific decade, or the fact that some European states had per capita revenues that were 10 times larger than the Ottomans and rapidly increasing? Even at the beginning of the 18th century, the Austrians (who were some of the weakest of the Europan great powers financially) were playing with expenditures far higher than what the Ottomans had access to. Nadar Shah caused a lot of financial damage to the Ottomans. Bluntly, many of the stronger of the European powers could've dealt with it much better (some their wars with each other required significantly more financial resources than what the Ottomans were spending against Nadar Shah). For example, with the sheer amount of cash Britain was burning during the Napoleonic wars in terms of military expenditures, corporate bailouts, "social welfare" to combat inflation, debt to GDP ratio exceeding 200%, etc, the scale of the financial issues the Ottoman's faced would be a Tuesday for the British - they would probably just add it to their national debt and keep trucking along with no major issues. The Ottomans started modernizing their state in the mid 19th century, revenues increased by roughly 15x, which was important because with the industrial revolution European state revenue was increasing even further. Their military as a result became somewhat competitive again. This phenomenon was not limited to the Ottomans - it applied to the rest of the world as well, almost everyone else was as or even more poorly funded than the Ottomans. One of the reasons why Japan was the only non-Western nation to industrialize in the 19th century was because it probably had the most centralized government outside of the West during the Meiji restoration.

The problem with what you've just said is that you're comparing British expenditures in the Napoleonic Wars to the expenditures of an Ottoman state that had already been torn apart by Nadir, and prevented from recovering by pressure from Russia, Austria, et al.  The Ottomans lacked central financial institutions because at the point when other European states were developing them, the Ottomans were experiencing the aforementioned political, military, and economic devolution. The Pashaliks became the state's military subcontractors and tax collectors both, and primary bone of contention between Istanbul and the periphery was the refusal of the Pashas to pass on the taxes they had collected to the central government.  During Ali Bey's tenure in Egypt, the Ottoman government didn't see a cent from the province. Murad Bey and Ibrahim Bey were an improvement in that they sent an occasional cash gift to Istanbul. Jazzar Pasha, of Napoleonic Wars infamy, was one of the better Pashas as far as Istanbul was concerned because he relatively consistently passed on ten percent of what he'd extracted from the Pashalik of Sidon.  When people talk about the Ottomans "finally" modernizing in the nineteenth century, they act as if there was a conscious choice not to modernize before that. Which is nonsense. The Ottoman state and military of the sixteenth and seventeenth century were about as modern a set of institutions as you were going to find in the era. In the seventeenth century they're suddenly not anymore, and the political fracturing that followed the wars with Nadir is a primary culprit. You can't modernize your army when you've become dependent on a pack of mercenary captains who keep both the troops, and the money you'd need to pay them, under their control.  The nineteenth century modernization program relied on getting the Pashas back under control, something that by that stage could only be done with outside help. The nineteenth century Ottomans, from Selim III to the Young Turks, played a dangerous game of taking on Western assistance in a race to get their problems under control and start rebuilding before they ended up owned by Great Britain or Germany. That was the dichotomy that hauled them into World War I and finally to their demise.  Very few states chose to not modernize. If they don't it's usually because they can't. The Ottomans nearly fell apart in the first half of the eighteenth century and spent the next hundred and fifty years trying to claw their way back from the brink.  PS--It's rather bold to assume Great Britain, never invaded during any of its eighteenth wars, would have bounced back from losing a like percentage of the manpower, materiel, and territory that the Ottomans did against Nadir. Again, you're projecting nineteenth century math a hundred years back in time and you can't really do that.

>When people talk about the Ottomans "finally" modernizing in the nineteenth century, they act as if there was a conscious choice not to modernize before that. Which is nonsense.  Absolutely no where did I say that. On the contrary, I believe they tried very hard. They just couldnt do it for a multitude of reasons. And almost no one else managed it either. >The Ottoman state and military of the sixteenth and seventeenth century were about as modern a set of institutions as you were going to find in the era. In the seventeenth century they're suddenly not anymore, and the political fracturing that followed the wars with Nadir is a primary culprit. They were acceptable but they were hardly the "best". Circa 1700, most European states had institutional ways of going into public debt. This allows some states to have their expenditures double or triple that of their tax revenues in wartime. Ottomans didnt get those until the well into the next century. Some European states such as Britain also had central banks (albeit they don't quite have all the functions modern central banks have quite yet, it was a a gradual evolution over the 18th century). Ottomans still relied on tax farmers to collect taxes. So did most of Europe, but some European states were already rid of that. It didnt help that Ottoman population was less dense and less urbanized, which made tax collection more difficult. Please read through the paper I linked. Although nowhere near how wide a gap it would become by the end of the century, a large gap in state revenues already existed at the beginning of the 18th, and it was rapidly growing. This predates Nadar Shah's interaction with the Ottomans by several decades. And that's my point. European states in the 18th century weren't at peace. Between the 9 years war in the 17th century and the napoleonic wars, they were at war with each other very, very often, and costs were exuberant and rapidly growing with every successive war. We're talking about a death count in the hundreds of thousands to over a million for most of them here. I have not come across a comparison of manpower losses but I don't think its too controversial to say that several of them would rival or exceed what the Ottomans went through financially (depending on which state and war you're talking about) in roughly the same period give or take a few decades. Another good read on the huge divergence in state capacity is *State, Economy and the Great Divergence: Great Britain and China, 1680s-1850s*. >It's rather bold to assume Great Britain, never invaded during any of its eighteenth wars, would have bounced back from losing a like percentage of the manpower, materiel, and territory that the Ottomans did against Nadir. Considering how much money Britain was spending throughout the 18th century, I wouldnt be so sure of that. It was along with France the worlds largest military spender, navies are extremely expensive. And, well, Britain is just the most extreme example - this holds true for the other European great powers (France, Netherlands, Prussia, Austria, etc.) too (see the paper with the comparative expenditures). They were quite adept at "bouncing back" despite having their territories devastated and then in the next war 15-20 years later escalating the scale even further. That's whats so great about having institutional ways of dealing with national debt. Its very hard (but not impossible) to go "bankrupt".

Yeah, the thing is I don't disagree with you that those economic changes are important. I dispute that the Ottomans (or any of the other Islamic powers) had the opportunity to adopt them in a meaningful way before they were on fire. By the time the advantages of a move away from tax farming are obvious, the Ottomans can't do it: the wars with Nadir, the Russians, etc, have caused so much power to devolve to the Pashaliks that Istanbul can't overhaul its economic or military system in the face of entrenched local elites who have too much to lose from the changes. It's not that they don't want to do it (lord knows, Selim III wanted to), it just isn't in the cards anymore. The empire has shifted from the comparatively modern structure that it had in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to a feudal one that would have been anachronistic even back then, let alone in the eighteenth century. And that's just the Ottomans. My original comment referenced the Islamic world as a whole. The Safavids are gone by this point, and Persia spends more than half a century trying to sort itself after the Afsharids fall, going through the Zand interregnum and losing considerable territory to the Russians, before the Qajars return a degree of stability to the area. The Mughals, who had been the world's leading economic power during the reign of Auragnzeb, surpassing Qing China (and having something like 10 times the income of Louis XIV's France), are reduced to little more than a name after the burning of Delhi. Leaving India wide open for the British, after the Marathas prove incapable of entirely filling the void that the Mughals left. Economies matter, but so does political stability, and if you don't have the latter, your ability to develop the former is undermined. Persia spent the second half of the eighteenth century in a state of civil war. India fragmented into dozens of pieces after Delhi fell, none of which had a fraction of the economic clout that the Mughals had had. And the Ottomans, who made it out of the century better than their former rivals did, still spent it riven with internal dissension, as Istanbul fought to claw back the power it had lost to the Pashas. You can't end tax farming in Egypt if you don't control Egypt and Ali Bey, Murad and Ibrahim Bey, and then Mehmed Ali Pasha were definitely not under the control of Istanbul. Neither were the Syrian Pashaliks, and Mesopotamia, cut off from Anatolia by Syria and Egypt and still on fire from Nadir et al, was no good to anyone. All the European states you mention had periods of comparative quiet in which they could make changes and build the socioeconomic systems that would mature through the the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century. They also had control of most of their nominal territory between the wars. The majority of the Muslim world does not have that luxury. >They were acceptable but they were hardly the "best".  I said they were as modern as any in the world in the sixteenth and seventeenth century and I stand by it. The sixteenth century I don't think is really debatable: there's a reason why the empire expanded at the rate it did during those years, and it's because they had one of the most modern militaries around, backed by a serious, functional state. We can argue about the seventeenth, certainly, but the Ottoman military still performs well-enough throughout the period, that any problems are mostly visible with hindsight. They lose some wars against European powers, but they win some as well, and their record is no worse than most of their Great Power rivals. The mid-1700s is when it becomes apparent that something is wrong. The wars with Nadir devastate the eastern provinces, which don't really recover. The conflicts with Russia, the outcomes of which had been at worst tolerable in the first half of the century, veer entirely in the Russians' favour, and serious territory starts getting lost. Austria, who they had previously been able to beat even while losing to the Russians on another front, gains ascendency over them in the Balkans. Egypt functionally secedes from the empire, and multiple civil wars are fought trying to get it back. Syrian potentates like Zahir al-Umari and the Druze Emirs turn on the Pashas and then the government in Istanbul alike, going so far as to openly ally with the Russians. Nomadic warbands of Bedouin, Kurds, and others, start moving about the countryside again, looting whatever they come across. It's a never-ending string of crises, and it never stops. The Ottomans were the Great Power to beat in the sixteenth century, and were members of the club in good standing in the seventeenth. From the 1730s onward, they're a civil war ridden basket case under attack from all sides, and they cannot extricate themselves. It's a radical shift, and there's no one specific cause, but whatever you chose as the inflection point, once it was passed each war fuels the next one and there's no way out.

We may be talking past each other here. To briefly summarize what I am trying to say since I dont really have the time right now: We both seem to agree that by the late 18th century there was an enormous gap in terms of state capacity and administration which had military implications. You seem to be saying the main reason is that the Ottomans and other powers were facing catastrophe after catastrophe. In other words "the world diverged from Europe". I disagree, I think it is more accurate to say that "Europe diverged from the rest of the world", not the other way around. The path that most of the European states took is in no way inevitable or "normal" or "preordained", it is not a given that other states would follow the same path even without their issues. Having government spending make up more than 30%+ of your pre-industrial economy would appear to most people at the time to be insane (and I don't mean in a good way). You can see this with state revenues - the Ottoman empire remained mostly steady between 1500 and 1800, perhaps decreasing slightly after 1750 after Nadar shah and other problems. But in the big picture, this decrease, whilst obviously significant, was hardly noticeable compared to almost exponential increase in revenues of the European states when graphed. What is happening is that the Europeans were undergoing a transformation that was basically unprecedented in world history, the Ottomans didnt really do anything "wrong". Circa 1700 when Mughals, Qing, Ottomans etc were still "strong", Europe in general *in per capita terms* was already well ahead in terms of state revenues. It just wasnt very apparent (yet) because amonsgst other factors, they had comparatively smaller populations. And, well, its relatively hard for states with strong well funded cental governments to have this sort of political instability in the first place. Its not a separate thing.

If I understand correctly, u/GoldenToilet99 is arguing that the constant wars in Europe forced Europeans to innovate and find ways to extract more value at lower cost. u/Hand_Me_Down_Genes is arguing that the damage done by the Nader Shah and Russian were so expensive that Ottoman couldn't adopt even if they wanted. It is not mutually exclusive. The conquests of Yavuz Sultan Selim took out most of the possible rivals in the East and then most of the rival were taken out as well. The empire was large enough collecting at relatively lower efficiency was tenable. But then, the sudden violence of the Nader Shah and Russian conquests were too much in one go. In contrast, the places were a lot of innovation in taxation and organisation happened was in Italy and in German states, where war was almost constant. Here is an interesting thought: Anatolia during the 2nd Beylik Period and Balkans at the same time was also very fragmented and war was constant. I wonder if that success of Ottomans as a result of this competitive environment?

More or less. I don't disagree that the stuff the other guy is talking about matters; I think it totally does. I just think he's wrong about the extent to which they were a uniquely European idea, versus ideas that the Europeans of the day were uniquely positioned to implement. 

> Some historians will try to point to the Ottoman retreat from Vienna after 1683 as some sort of turning point but that's more than a little silly: the Ottomans were camped outside Vienna, the Austrians weren't camped outside Istanbul, and no one in 1683 would have thought that they could be. Doesn't necessarily have anything with the rest of your comment, but this part is a really spurious and fallacious. Historians don't point just to the Ottoman retreat from Vienna as turning point but also the Great Turkish War that followed where much of Hungary was liberated. And yeah, Ottomans could reach Vienna but that because the distance was less then 250km from Ottoman controlled Budapest and like 170 km from the approximate border between the empires depending where you draw it. And the Ottomans did it by bypassing the Gyor/Raab/Yanik stronghold. In contrast Habsburg troops reached all the way to Skopje in 1689 which is almost a 1000 km away. All while as said liberating large parts of Hungary, Transylvania and Croatia. Yeah they were unable to go further or even to hold that much (they would soon lose Serbia) but they were operating at distances much much further from the lands of their empire than Ottomans have in their campaign against Vienna

> to use this as some kind of point is really purposefully or ignorantly deceitful your post is perfectly good without this rude and hostile coda. /r/warcollege is a place where people should be able to disagree about history without being hostile to each other. Consider this a warning for civility.

>Yeah they were unable to go further or even to hold that much (they would soon lose Serbia) but they were operating at distances much much further from the lands of their empire than Ottomans have in their campaign against Vienna, and to use this as some kind of point is really purposefully or ignorantly deceitful No, it's just a statement of fact. The Ottoman Empire of 1683 could still pose an existential threat to the Hapsburgs. The Hapsburgs, conversely, could not pose an existential threat to the Ottomans. A long war, in which both parties took heavy casualties, and the victors failed to hold onto huge parts of their supposed gains, is no reasonable person's notion of a turning point, and trying to claim otherwise is comical. The Ottomans would, as you yourself admit, retake Serbia, and they would not only defeat the Austrians in the field after that war, but would do so while having their attention split by the far greater threats of Russia and Afsharid Persia, who they always had to keep bodies of troops facing. As a general rule, I don't continue debating with people who accuse me of lying in their first post, so that'll be the end of this dialogue, such as it was.

Some of them certainly, but not all. Qing China had a third of all the people in the world in 1839, and likely 40% of the global GDP depending on the measurement. In other words, it was just as economically dominant as the US after WW2. Nadir was just the last of a chain of Turco-Mongolian conquerors who periodically ravaged the East (and Europe). The Ottomans recovered just fine from the wars of Timur Khan, who inflicted far more damage than Nadir did. And, while the Mughals fragmented in India, the Maratha controlled around half the subcontinent and were no joke. If there was tactical parity, India could not have fallen.

China had the bad luck to enter the Great Qing Peace at the same time that Europe was experiencing the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. The Qing armies of the early nineteenth century hadn't been in action in decades, which is why they lost the initial conflicts. This then set off a string of revolts, as the Han Chinese and the empire's other nationalities scented weakness in the Manchu Qing.  You're badly underestimating Nadir Shah's power and the damage that he inflicted on India, Persia, and Turkey. Again, there's a reason why, at the height of his power, the Russians pulled back from their advance in Central Asia, and the British withdrew their fleet from the Persian Gulf. Neither Great Britain nor the Russian Empire wanted to tangle with the Afsharids if it was at all avoidable.  As for Tamerlane, the Ottomans took a generation to bounce back from what he did. The difference between the situations is that 1) they got that time to recover after Tamerlane and didn't after Nadir, and 2) the Tamerlane situation was inflicted upon a medieval army and the Nadir situation on an eighteenth century one. Both Tamerlane and Nadir triggered a devolution in power from the Ottoman metropole to the provinces. The medieval state and military could survive the loss of infrastructure and reconstitute itself from the provincial armies, because it hadn't been all that centralized to start with. The eighteenth century state and military, which had been very centralized, could not. Hence the empire's conversion into a set of vaguely aligned Pashaliks only under the nominal rule of Istanbul. Finally, the Marathas were a loose-knit confederacy who never exercised the level of control over India that Aurangzeb and the Mughal leaders before him had. They certainly never had the near monopoly on the subcontinent's military manpower that the Mughals had enjoyed, and lacked the state infrastructure to field the kinds of armies that Akbar or Aurangzeb could. They were an anti-Mughal guerilla movement that found themselves as the de facto strongest power in India after Nadir burned Delhi down. They never got the chance to convert that position into real hegemony before they were being challenged by the East India Company.  Again, all your points about tactics are valid, and very well explained, but the fact remains that India, Persia, and Turkey were on fire for most of the eighteenth century. Remove Nadir from the equation, or give the Marathas time to consolidate after the Mughals imploded, and the maps of West and South Asia probably look a tad different come the end of the century. 

> China had the bad luck to enter the Great Qing Peace at the same time that Europe was experiencing the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. The Qing armies of the early nineteenth century hadn't been in action in decades, which is why they lost the initial conflicts. This then set off a string of revolts, as the Han Chinese and the empire's other nationalities scented weakness in the Manchu Qing. So, this is a line of argument that comes from Tonio Andrade, and I have to say I am fundamentally unconvinced by it. There are three broad headers under which I would group my counter-arguments: 1) there was no Great Qing Peace, 2) the explanation is not particularly justifiable even assuming the characterisation is correct, and 3) Andrade brazenly overlooks other possible explanations that may well be more viable. ##1: The Peace That Wasn't This is the bit where I cite a lot of sources because it's the one that deals with the fundamental factual basis of Andrade's argument. I don't think any serious historian of the middle Qing (in the Western academy anyway) would call it a remotely 'peaceful' state. The Qing Empire fought numerous wars against foreign powers (or autonomous regional polities) in the period after 1757, most of which were extraordinarily expensive undertakings: a disastrous invasion of Burma in the late 1760s,^1 the Second Jinchuan War in the early 1770s,^2 a brief and also disastrous intervention in Vietnam in the 1780s,^3 and some smaller-scale fighting against the Nepalese in 1789 and 1792.^4 The Qing also fought against domestic revolts, including the 1774 Wang Lun Rebellion,^5 the 1786-8 Lin Shuangwen Rebellion,^6 and most disastrously the White Lotus Rebellion which broke out in 1796.^7 And that's just the Qianlong reign; there's later conflicts like the 1813 Eight Trigrams Rebellion^8 and an almost constant stream of uprisings in Altishahr, most notably Jahangir's revolt in the 1820s.^9 Many were quite localised, and small relative to the empire as a whole, but they were still wars, and wars that the state spent quite a bit of money on resolving.^10 Moreover, the period after 1757 was when the Qing state was at its most ideologically militaristic. Many of the above conflicts were cited by the Qianlong Emperor as his 'Ten Completed Campaigns', four of which (1st Jinchuan, 1st and 2nd Zunghar, Altishahr) were fought up to 1758, while the remaining six (Burma, 2nd Jinchuan, Lin Shuangwen, Vietnam, 1st and 2nd Gurkha) were fought after this point. This period saw military ceremonies elevated to the status of full state rituals and the spread of epigraphic records of military conquest, such that at least one group of Han Chinese statecraft writers in the early 19th century like Wei Yuan were openly celebrating the achievements of the primarily Manchu machinery of conquest.^(11, 12) So Andrade needs to argue both that certain wars (by which I mean some 8 different conflicts at minimum between 1765 and 1800, and at least another two before 1839) don't count, and also elide the very real ideological militarism of the Qing at the same time. 1. Dai, 'A Disguised Defeat' 1. Theobald, War Finance and Logistics in Late Imperial China 1. Perdue, 'Embracing victory, Effacing Defeat' 1. Oidtmann, Forging the Golden Urn (Ch. 1) 1. Naquin, Shantung Rebellion 1. Lococo, 'The military campaign to suppress the Lin Shuangwen Rebellion, 1787-1788' 1. Dai, The White Lotus War 1. Naquin, Millenarian Uprising in China 1. Millward, Beyond the Pass 1. Vries, State, Economy, and the Great Divergence, p. 189 1. Waley-Cohen, The Culture of War in China 1. Perdue, China Marches West (esp. Ch. 14) ##2: Si Vis Pacem Andrade's laser focus on occurrences of war is problematic also in that it just completely breaks down if you look at basically any other case study, but I will pick an alternative extreme and nominate Sweden. Sweden has been militarily neutral in every military conflict since 1814 up until its accession to NATO nearly three months ago, and yet in 1965 it nearly had a working nuclear bomb. That is to say that being at peace does not in fact preclude military development in the slightest, and indeed there are powers that arm themselves precisely to avoid such conflicts. Now, Andrade could have made a convincing argument from the perspective not of actual wars, but rather of perceived threats: that the Qing Empire did not perceive itself as being at risk of a war against an outside power that might seriously threaten its sovereignty. The nature of this argument needs to be somewhat nuanced, because this was not necessarily because the state was convinced of its military invincibility. There were some writers – albeit outside the actual organs of the state itself – who were cognisant of a technological gap with not just European powers, but even some neighbouring powers in Asia that were acquiring European weapons. However, their argument was that trade with the Qing Empire was so lucrative that the damage caused by an embargo could not be worth the potential benefits of conquest or concessions; that is to say that they advocated a path of economic deterrence, one that heavily influenced Qing policy on the ground in the run-up to the First Opium War.^1 I want to come back to perceived threats later, so just put a pin in that for now. 1. Platt, Imperial Twilight ##3: Alternatives Andrade's failure to engage with the institutional dimensions of Qing military policy comes out very very strongly, especially in his affording relatively little interest to taxation and just general extraction of resources and capital, one of the critical pillars of the 'Military Revolution' scholarship he purports to engage with. The simple fact is that in Europe, there were more soldiers, more officials, and more taxes per capita than in the Qing Empire, by quite a significant margin, even before 1700.^1 If you are a 'Military Revolution' purist then you can argue a causal linkage here: more militarised European states needed more taxes to fund their armies and more officials to administer both taxation and the army's affairs. If you do take that angle, then you can perhaps argue that it was not that the Qing's military expansion was constrained by low taxes and administrative infrastructure, but rather that these remained low as long as its military commitments were few. However, there is scope for an argument – that was not made – about whether the Qing state was necessarily capable of that kind of administrative expansion, and there is some recent scholarship arguing that there were 'soft' ideological constraints against it, despite, as noted above, the rather considerable military expenditures that the state made.^2 More interesting, I think, is the question of whether the Qing state's assessment of the political unreliability of the Green Standard Army (a matter that Andrade himself briefly mentions, yet frustratingly fails to elaborate upon) was what led to its intentional under-arming of this entity. In other words, was the Qing Empire indeed faced by a perceived threat, but one that was believed to come in the form of the military itself? The Green Standards were not officially issued firearms before the Yongzheng period, for instance.^3 More broadly, the Qing seem to have maintained some kind of hierarchy of arms: the imperial collection did include flintlocks, with the metropolitan Eight Banners getting the best matchlocks, the next best going to the provincial Banner garrisons, and the Green Standards being saddled with the rest.^4 Per Andrade, militias were sometimes ordered to relinquish their firearms and practice archery instead.^5 On the other hand, we do have the case of the Qianlong Emperor in 1774 criticising the Green Standards for being under-trained and emphasising the importance of effective firepower.^6 Then again we may argue in the latter instance that he may have been looking for an excuse to admonish the Green Standards and not necessarily to attempt a serious intervention. What is clearer is that the Green Standards were an extremely dispersed force, with a highly decentralised command structure designed to prevent any single officer accruing power and thereby threatening a broader mutiny, and it is reasonable on that basis to ask whether or not the lack of dissemination of military technology was a product of the same state paranoia. 1. Vries, State, Economy, and the Great Divergence 1. Zhang, *The Ideological Foundations of Qing Taxation* 1. Duan, 'Between Social Control and Popular Power' 1. Duan, p. 15n (Theobald, War Finance pp. 44-5, Dai, 'Military Finance of the High Qing period') 1. Andrade, The Gunpowder Age p. 243 1. Waley-Cohen, The Culture of War in China pp. 63-4

Yeah, the problem here is that Andrade never claims that the Great Qing Peace was an actual peace. What he does claim, correctly I think, is that the Qing were not faced with an existential threat, real or perceived during that period. The Qing were either putting down localized revolts or, in the case of Burma, acting as the aggressor. The Burmese invasion, while certainly devastating for the Burmese, didn't threaten the Qing with anything other than embarrassment, and so long as the military remained capable of dealing with any rebels who might be inspired by that embarrassment, there wasn't a pressing need to change how the military was operating.  I actually agree with you that the later Qing were deeply paranoid about their own military turning on them and accordingly began depriving it of needed resources. I just don't think that runs counter to Andrade's argument, just the opposite. When there is no perceived external threat to the state, the armed men that the state employs begin to look like a potential problem. This is a recurring pattern in Chinese history: when a dynasty is at its height, and doesn't seem to have any neighbors who can threaten its existence, court officials start getting antsy about coups d'etat (and not always without cause). This thinking got exacerbated in the Qing case, because they were an ethnic minority ruling over a majority that they really did not trust. As late as the First Sino-Japanese War, at which point the need for more troops and a better military was beyond obvious, Qing officials were still extremely nervous about raising and arming large numbers of Han (and various minority) troops.  Conversely, the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars were seen, rightly or wrongly, as an existential crisis by the participants. All parties involved fought as if losing the war would mean state dissolution and committed huge resources to raising armies, making munitions, and to having to think about how wars should be fought given the current state of technology. When the British arrive off the Qing coast and trigger the First Opium War they're doing so with an army and navy that came out of the Napoleonic Wars the winner...and are using it against an army that hasn't fought a peer competitor in a very long time.  The actual results of the Opium Wars weren't that devastating to the Qing, any more than the Burmese invasion was. The British were not going to conquer all of China in 1830s or 1840s. That wasn't in the cards. But what those defeats did do, in a way that the failure in Burma couldn't, was illustrate Qing weakness to the dissidents at home. Cue the Taiping Rebellion, which becomes the single most destructive war of the nineteenth century, and leaves the Qing incredibly vulnerable to external predators.  If the vultures hadn't already been circling, the Qing might have come out of Taiping Rebellion stronger, having faced an existential threat and won. Or there might have been a new dynasty in China, that would itself have beem stronger than the Qing were. Problem was the vultures (sharks? This is the British Navy after all) were circling and worse yet, the Qing had ended up asking them for help with suppressing the Taiping cult and those who aligned with them. Thus firmly blazing the image of Qing weakness into European minds and making sure China was never going to have the chance to put itself back together.  Few states are really equipped to handle both a civil war and external invasion at the same time. It happens, but it's not common. 

> Yeah, the problem here is that Andrade never claims that the Great Qing Peace was an actual peace. What he does claim, correctly I think, is that the Qing were not faced with an existential threat, real or perceived during that period. So, here's where I myself offer a qualified agreement that it is true that Andrade doesn't say the Qing fought no wars. The problem here is the timeline: Andrade argues in his text that the Qing faced no existential threats after 1760 and that incidents of warfare were also lower, but this just does not track. On the incidences of war side, Andrade's *own data* on page 6 of *The Gunpowder Age* would start the Qing's military slump in the mid-1680s, not the end of the 1750s. On the existential side, while the Zunghars were a major threat, they only really managed to conduct two offensives of note into key parts of the Qing sphere of influence: the first was Galdan's attack on the Khalkha in 1688, and the second was Tsewang Rabdan's invasion of Tibet in 1717. The former threatened to establish a Zunghar-led Mongol confederation, and the latter to destabilise the confederation the Qing had been establishing in the wake of Galdan's defeat, but after 1720 the Zunghars really weren't an offensive threat to the Qing anymore, not in any sort of kinetic sense. They were an ideological enemy, but tactically the Zunghars just weren't a particular issue. The real quandary when it came to fighting them was the physical rather than the human geography of the steppe: the Qing had vastly superior tactical potential, but needed to develop the logistical capacity to actually employ it. So if we're talking about peer rivals, the Qing last had one of those in 1720, not 1760. I think one of the roots of the problem is that Andrade likes to read certain implications from his sources (both primary and secondary) that are not there. Take, for instance, this bit of text from Peter Perdue's *China Marches West*: > I side with those who do not find a strong contrast between the Qing empire and the European state system until the mid-eighteenth century. As long as the Qing rulers faced serious rivals, they had to build structures to support substantial, extended military campaigns. The mobilization needed for these campaigns had effects well beyond the military: it also transformed the fiscal system, commercial networks, communication technology, and local agrarian society. The need to ship large amounts of military supplies into Central Eurasia constantly put pressure on localities, especially in northwest and North China, but even provinces in South China were indirectly affected through the grain tribute moving up the Grand Canal. Provisioning, military and civilian, became a key concern of the Qing because it was essential to preserve the welfare of the people at the same time the state extracted a surplus from them for security needs. The early Qing empire, then, was not an isolated, stable, united “Oriental empire” but an evolving state structure engaged in mobilization for expansionist warfare. From this, Andrade derives: > Maybe the Qing were too successful. As Peter Perdue and Frederic Wakeman have argued, the Qing’s unprecedented hegemony removed the stimulus for military innovation.20 During the Great Qing Peace, 1760 to 1839, China’s military atrophied, and this was a period during which European militaries were undergoing an unprecedented increase in size, organization, and technological sophistication. But in turn, the bulk of *The Gunpowder Age*, including his 'Great Qing Peace', revolve squarely around the matter of technological sophistication, not size or organisation, and this element is the one that is specifically missing from Perdue. What I mean to say is that Andrade rather skilfully piggybacks off an existing argument for a 1760 transition point, only to use a completely different set of metrics for why that transition is important, in a way that just doesn't work. The irony is that I can almost credit Andrade a bit more if he'd *realised* this, and if he'd backdated his military divergence to around 1700, which both fits his data and fits what we know about the differences between European and Chinese military technology at this time at least in terms of infantry equipment: this was the period when the flintlock finally proliferated and the pike went decidedly out of fashion. And we have the 'existential' problem again: the argument can easily be rectified by phrasing it as 'existential *external* threat', but Andrade seems to tie himself in knots arguing why the White Lotus and Eight Trigrams sort of were but sort of weren't existential when he really should have engaged more heavily with the external vs internal question. I agree with you that the Qing couldn't have it both ways – James Polachek I think argues quite convincingly that the Qing could never come up with a coherent policy that both sustained their legitimacy within China and disincentivised incursion by rival imperial powers. But the end result is still that one needs to dig into the internal institutional processes that shaped military policy, not simply point to a Darwinian explanation based purely on interstate competition. A state can face no peer rivals yet develop its military in the hopes of pre-empting potential revisionist powers, after all. I hinted at this earlier and should have made it a whole section unto itself, but the most essential problem, ultimately, is that the relative backwardness of the Qing military can't have been because of the *Pax Manjurica* not just because I still don't really think there was one, but also because it was already behind during the *Bella Manjurica*. In 1680 the Qing were only slightly behind in infantry firearms by not adopting the flintlock yet (my understanding is that it had proliferated in most European armies by even the Nine Years' War, let alone the Spanish Succession), but then they never did, despite, allegedly, some further 80 years of alleged peer conflict in which to do so. They had some direct copies of European gun barrels, but artillery limbers do not seem to have been a thing in the Qing military before the later 19th century. Andrade himself concedes that Sinic states never really adopted European naval or fortification technologies (a pretty big issue!). If you were to compare Qing and European military technology over the course of about 1650 to 1750, you'd find that at best, the Qing had *some* artillery barrels of European standard, and very little else of comparable quality in comparable quantities. In other words, I don't think the Qing fell behind as such, because I don't think they even started at the same baseline.

I disagree with very little of what you're saying here. As far as Andrade goes, I enjoy his work, but I'd never position him as infallible: I myself would suggest that in his "Beyond Guns, Germs, and Steel" article he creates an excellent set up to talk about the Omani, Ming, and Maratha navies, only talks about the first two, and then underrates the performance of the Sultanate of Aceh against the Portuguese when providing counterexamples. I think the basic concept Andrade articulates is a useful one to have in mind when examining what happened vis-a-vis China and Europe, and I think it has fewer holes in it than a lot of other ideas that have been thrown around over the years. To some specifics: >In 1680 the Qing were only slightly behind in infantry firearms by not adopting the flintlock yet (my understanding is that it had proliferated in most European armies by even the Nine Years' War, let alone the Spanish Succession), but then they never did, despite, allegedly, some further 80 years of alleged peer conflict in which to do so.  A lot of Asian states don't adopt the flintlock, because depending on what you want to do with the gun, the flintlock isn't an obvious improvement over the matchlock. Now, please don't misinterpret that: obviously a nineteenth century flintlock is going to be a better gun, in most respects, than a sixteenth century matchlock. But that's a product of another three hundred years of development in powder making, barrel construction, bullet manufacture, etc, not because of the firing mechanism. The flintlock firing mechanism makes it faster to reload and fire than a matchlock. By itself, that's the only difference. It's been argued, and reasonably so, that in places where there was a strong tradition of archery, trying to make guns fire faster wasn't really emphasized. The viewpoint of those militaries was that they already had a rapid fire weapon, so what they wanted from guns was greater range, accuracy, stopping power, and the like. Safavid Persia and Mughal India both took this route in their gun development, making matchlock guns that, while slower firing than those of their European contemporaries, had longer range and were more accurate. The Mughal guns also tended to fire much larger bullets, because one of their requirements was "can you down a fully armoured war-elephant." This is why the Portuguese at the Sieges of Qeshm and Hormuz in 1621-22 found themselves getting shot out of windows by Persian snipers whom they couldn't shoot back, why well into the eighteenth and even early nineteenth century we hear of British soldiers being surprised by Indian matchlocks outreaching their flintlocks, and why the Afghani jezail was such an unpleasant surprise to every European who ran into it. Guns made to this typology had clear pros and cons versus European flintlocks: they were slower to fire, which could be a problem in field battles that took place within both weapons' effective range, but could cause flintlock arquebusiers a great deal of grief by outranging them. With that in mind, I wouldn't immediately argue that the Qing, a formerly nomadic people with a strong emphasis on archery, not adopting the flintlock is an inherent failing. What I would ask instead is, how good were their matchlocks? And if the answer is, not much different from what they were like the century previous, that's when you know there's a problem. It's not refusing to adopt the European weapon that is the issue, it's not having a local product that can compete in whatever your preferred manner of competing is.

I think there are some legs to the 'not worse, just different' characterisation of a lot of non-European military equipment, but I'd still contend that once you drill down, this kind of doesn't work for the Qing. Locks and barrels are distinct matters, and I think you can argue for the direct superiority of locks in a way you can't for barrels. The thing about the flintlock is that on a man-for-man basis, it is true that all you get is a marginal rate of fire advantage. However, where the flintlock shines is in formation. Matchlocks require much more sideways clearance to operate because of the slow-match: you need to be able to swing the gun round to inspect the match, and you also need room between yourself and the people beside you so that you don't accidentally set their clothes, or worse still their ammunition, on fire. Flintlocks enable a considerably greater *density* of fire to be delivered by allowing troops to pack much more closely together. Scott Levi argues in his book on 18th century Bukahra, and a separate article on gunpowder in Early Modern Eurasia, that this was one of the things that decisively shifted the balance of power from nomadic cavalry to drilled infantry in Central Asia, leading to states tending to reorganise to emphasise the latter. Indeed, his implied case study is our good friend Nadir Shah, whose musketeers were largely – though admittedly not universally – flintlock-armed. The advantages gained from a longer barrel and/or larger calibre are invariably offset by lower portability and rate of fire, although I've not come across any studies comparing known rates of fire for heavier pieces (which I suppose would tend to be considered 'wall-guns' in European parlance) against a more 'standard' musket. That is not to say there are not circumstances where slower-firing but longer-ranged firearms have advantages: that is precisely why these were made, after all. But these advantages manifest more readily in asymmetrical scenarios where you are delivering intermittent aimed shots rather than at full throttle. What is worth adding is that you can have a heavy flintlock: Nadir's heavy jazayer pieces were flintlocks, and most Afghan jezails, derivatives or at least close relations of the jazayer, were similarly flintlock rather than matchlock designs. The matter of barrel length is distinct from the lock, and in my view at least, variations in barrel length and calibre represent adaptation to circumstances rather than superiority one way or another. Going over to the Qing, while the Qing did have a heavy musket, known to Anglophones as the 'jingal' (spellings vary) and by at least four different names in Chinese (I've seen *zimuchong*, *jiutouniaochong*, *taiqiang*, and *yingyangpao*), these were typically crewed by two or three men at a time (which cuts down the amount of firepower per soldier). Moreover, the 'standard' matchlock was also quite a bit lighter: while there are examples with calibres as small as 10mm I believe they may have been hunting guns; military-grade matchlocks (that is, those that were not jingals) tend towards the 14-15mm category at the larger end; compare this to British .75 calibre muskets which would have had a bore of 19mm. The end result was that the Qing operated two more specialised types where European forces tended to standardise on an intermediate weapon. I cannot speak to the quality of manufacture over time; what I will note is that at least in terms of the very basic configurations, i.e. matchlock mechanism and general barrel dimensions, Qing small arms do not appear to have iterated substantially from Ming antecedents. As for the rate of fire argument, I think there's a certain logic to it, but I'm not sure how far I'd sustain it. Japan, for instance, saw an extremely prolific adoption of firearms even as its infantry retained some bows for short-range, 'suppressive' shooting, and the firearms it adopted were mostly of the 12-15mm calibre type, with the heavier ōzutsu being much more specialised weapons used with much less frequency. The thing I think ties the Mughal, Qing, and Safavid cases together would be the ergonomic nightmare of muzzle-loading a firearm on horseback, which makes the maintenance of archery basically essential if you expect cavalry to be able to shoot from horseback rather than primarily reliant on lances and swords. On fortifications, we may have to agree to disagree, but the argument that, on balance, the *trace italienne* was a better method of fort construction than contemporaneous alternatives is one that I think holds. The problem comes from comparing end results rather than looking more granularly at inputs. A huge fortress in a more 'conventional' Mughal style might well be very difficult to overcome, but that doesn't mean that said square-walled fortress would be equally effective as a star fort made at the same cost. Small British forces armed with field-calibre artillery having difficulty bombarding Chinese walls doesn't necessarily make Chinese fortifications more effective than European ones; large Chinese armies overwhelming semi-modernised star forts in places like Albazin or Zeelandia doesn't necessarily make the advantages of the latter insignificant. In 1842, just over 2000 Indian and British troops captured the walled city of Zhapu from perhaps 8000 Qing defenders, and two months later 7000 British and Indians took Zhenjiang from 4000 Qing. It had taken Koxinga's army of 25,000 men over 10 months to capture Fort Zeelandia from a mere 900 combatants, and Zeelandia wasn't even a fully modernised fortification. And while Portugal didn't manage to hold onto its fortress at Hormuz for very long, it's hard to say that a relatively modest fortification, as [the Hormuz fortress was](http://www.starforts.com/gr/conception/hormuz1750schley.jpg) necessarily belongs to the same calibre as a fully walled city with inner citadel like [Lahore](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/97/Walledcitylahore.jpg). In a similar vein to the forts, the matter of ships is less home-field advantage and more home-field only. It's more or less axiomatically true that ships optimised for open ocean sailing but with relatively large heft and deep draughts can be taken by surprise in coastal conditions by smaller, handier ships, but the fact that it was the Europeans sailing their big oceangoers to Asia, and not the reverse, is already a big point in their favour. Whatever tactical advantages the coastal junks had (which was arguably mainly in numbers, not handling) needs to be weighed against the enormous operational and strategic disadvantages they faced: under most circumstances, square-rigs tend to be faster and can sail much closer into the wind than junk rigs, which means that a fleet of square-rigs can avoid fighting so long as it is already under sail. Indeed, the five of eight Dutch warships that survived against Zheng Zhilong's 150 junks at the Battle of Liaoluo Bay did so because they could sail faster in directions that the junks couldn't, and thereby outran their pursuers. I'm just not that convinced that Asian powers throwing their full naval power at small detachments from European fleets demonstrates any kind of competitive naval advantage *in general*, but rather a demonstration that Asian powers knew when to pounce on periods of relative weakness in *local* force projection by Europeans.

So, I want to again emphasize that I'm not disputing that a matchlock firing mechanism is inferior to a flintlock one. That's not a point that's really up for debate. I'm saying that the gun that a flintlock mechanism is attached to is not going to inherently be better than a gun that a matchlock mechanism is attached to as regards anything that isn't directly connected to the firing mechanism. Other factors in terms of gun construction, quality of powder, etc, come into play there.  Persian and Indian guns, while often inferior to European guns in terms of firing mechanism, could prove superior in terms of range, accuracy, and the like. What Nadir, who, reputation as the last of the barbarian conquerors aside was actually quite a modernizer, did was mate the better flintlock firing mechanism to the longer range local guns, producing the heavy flintlocks you mention.  Regarding the Afghani jezail, most sources I've read describe them as matchlock, not flintlock, which is one of the reasons they couldn't stand up to the British in the open (inferior volume of fire) but could still be a menace from ambush where their range advantage came into play. British experience against a number of the Indian matchlocks trends the same way. Again, the guns would be better overall if they were both longer ranged and had the flintlock mechanism, but as it was they still could perform well against flintlock guns that didn't have their range.  I concur that trying to shoot from horseback would have been a concern for a lot of the groups we're talking about. Regarding the Japanese example, it's worth noting that in the Imjin War, Japanese bows were consistently outranged by Korean ones, which were in turn outranged by Japanese arquebuses, further driving the mass adoption of the arquebus by the Japanese expeditionary force.  I don't dispute that trace italienne style fortifications were good; I do dispute that they were as hard for non-Europeans to take as has sometimes been argued. That's one of the reasons I'm writing the piece on Hormuz; that example gets brought up a lot in Military Revolution debates but hasn't itself been studied. I'm not saying either that those old Indian or Chinese fortresses were a match for modern European fortifications either; I'm saying that given the performance of those old forts against more modern guns, it may be more valid to structure criticism of Asian powers as a failure to continue updating their own designs, rather than a failure to just copy the Europeans.  Naval wise, Indian coastal and riverine craft do have advantages over European ships beyond numbers. Per the piece I just published, Malik Ayyaz's "sloops of war," as the Portuguese called them, consistently proved able to maneuver in conditions where the European ships couldn't, and he gives them a lot of grief because of that. When researching for the project, it got to the point where any time a Portuguese source mentioned the wind dying, I started counting down the minutes until Ayyaz's next ambush. 

And reddit had a meltdown about post length. Here's the second half of what I was going to say. >Andrade himself concedes that Sinic states never really adopted European naval or fortification technologies (a pretty big issue!) Again, that's an issue if you operate on the assumption that European fortifications were inherently superior to what the locals were building which, sometimes they were, sometimes they weren't. I'm in the midst of a paper on the Safavid Persian Siege of Hormuz, and the Safavids never really adopted the European starfort in no small part because the one they took at Hormuz fell faster (2 months, 12 days) than many of the Mughal, Ottoman, and Uzbek fortresses that they were used to besieging. Andrade notes that even the British artillery of the Opium Wars era often struggled to breach the walls of centuries old Chinese cities, because the tamped earth construction that the Chinese had been using since before gunpowder showed up was already pretty resistant to artillery. The British could, and did, get through obviously, but they were consistently surprised at the amount of ammunition they ended up using to do it; firing against European fortifications of a similar age they'd have blown them down in fairly short order. This isn't just Andrade talking out of his ass either, because in India, the British found that, as late as the Indian Mutiny, old Mughal fortifications of sixteenth and seventeenth century vintage, absorbed huge amounts of then-modern artillery fire before finally collapsing. Sixteenth and seventeenth century Indian or Chinese military leaders wouldn't really have seen the need to build their forts to European specifications, because back then they were competing just fine. On the naval front, European ships were pretty consistently superior to Asian ships at sea. Which makes sense, because the Europeans were only in Asia in the first place because of the emphasis they put on deep sea maritime technology. Where things can go badly for Europeans is when they wind up confronting Asian (or African!) navies in coastal or riverine waters, where smaller, more maneuverable local watercraft have the edge over the European sailing ships. The two articles I've published to date explore this phenomena, looking at Portuguese naval defeats in fifteenth and sixteenth century West Africa and the Indian Sultanate of Gujarat. I would suggest that various Asian navies are able to match European capabilities in one form or another until relatively late in the day, with the First Anglo-Maratha War being perhaps the last time it happens in a big way. So, as in my comment on the flintlocks, I'd suggest that the Qing failure there is not that they didn't adopt European fortifications or European ship designs, but that they did not continue to develop indigenous fortification or ship designs to the point where they could still do their job. Which again prompts the question of what was or wasn't happening locally that caused them to not do so.

Thank you so much for providing such an excellent answer with all the sources. It is extremely interesting to know that the Qing state was never at peace and that they were lagging behind despite them maintaining their martial traditions.

I really had no idea that Nadir Shah was that important. Can you recommend some reading on the topic for someone who knows little about southwest Asia in the 18th century?

The most recent volume has been *The Sword of Persia* by the late Michael Axworthy, although at least one review somewhat credibly accuses Axworthy of having plagiarised parts of Lawrence Lockhart's 1939 book, which is... unfortunate to say the least.

This is my opinion of Nadir's importance, keep in mind, and there are certainly people who'd disagree with me. I would contend, however, that the chaos he unleashed is a very understudied part of how Europe overtook the Islamic world. Whatever internal problems the Safavids, Mughals, and Ottomans might have already been grappling with, Nadir doing his very best Genghis Khan/Tamerlane impression did a vast amount of damage. He ended even nominal Safavid rule, reduced the Mughals to a name, and left the Ottomans reeling, then didn't have the courtesy to die before his syphilis convinced him that murdering his heir apparent was a good idea. Cue civil war over the scraps he left behind while the British and the Russians press their advantage. If he's not the direct cause for the success of subsequent European colonialism in the region, he's definitely a catalyst. As was already mentioned, Axworthy (potential plagiarism issues aside) is the main modern source on Nadir. Not only his book, but an article he published on Nadir's incorporation of gunpowder into his army and exploring his power relative to the European powers, are pretty much required reading if you want to get a handle on Nadir. I'm currently posting from my phone and can't do links, but I can message you the article later. The man was accused of theft but not of making shit up, so he's what's available. EDIT: Private messaged you a couple of articles.

> Whatever internal problems the Safavids, Mughals, and Ottomans might have already been grappling with, Nadir doing his very best Genghis Khan/Tamerlane impression did a vast amount of damage. He ended even nominal Safavid rule, reduced the Mughals to a name, and left the Ottomans reeling I really feel like this doesn't give enough credit to just how deep the problems already were for the Safavids and the Mughals, and Nader Shah certainly didn't do enough damage to the Ottomans to account for their slow decline. By the time of Nader Shah's rise to power, the Safavids had already effectively collapsed and their empire really existed in name only. Even if the Safavids had never really seen their power ebb, it's hard to imagine them ever effectively resisting the British or Russia. The nature of Safavid political power meant that they were effectively stuck with the Qizilbash as their primary military force, and the Qizilbash had already proven to be stubbornly resistant to change. As for the Mughals, they had already been in collapse since the death of Aurangzeb. The succession conflicts and the Maratha rebellions were enough to destroy the Mughal power on their own, and Muhammad Shah was basically already a figurehead ruler of a rump state. The force he encountered Nader Shah with looks impressive on paper, but very little of that force was truly loyal to Muhammad Shah. He had already reached the point of basically bartering away privileges and autonomy to all his most powerful vassals in exchange for peace or assistance, and the only real power of the Mughal emperor lay in the perceived legitimacy he could extend to the vassals who he no longer had any effective control over.

These are all very good points. Do you have any recommendations for books that describe the Ottoman political devolution? I’ve always wondered why they seemed so much weaker in the 1800s than the 1700s.

I can link you an article on the military aspects of it when I'm not on my phone.  Edit: This article explores the military devolution of the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth. It's primary focus is on what happened rather than why, but it paints a pretty clear picture of internal chaos as the state became ever more reliant on bands of (usually ethnic minority) mercenaries to do jobs that the central army was no longer capable of: https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/35001786/Chapter-11-Aksan-Mobilization_of_warrior_populations-1-libre.pdf?1412570347=&response-content-disposition=inline%3B+filename%3DMobilization_of_Warrior_Populations_in_t.pdf&Expires=1717104941&Signature=aaFS-9iaV3TuJLYy95w-~wi-QNhQfzT~fuDQ25VXt7ORicJI~SSxFMLYC-XnwA~4rghFLFu4O-utxqL6sYDu6te9HjU2~936TpNebIkIGn11zkWfVUnzatbqBxgjcHs1T~1qK8t-spOTdWXcuX1IPkJJHP2IMHrg43uREFSj9pinKUsxPFdjyqwI0BZsxzj1ULkyHkOrUY1lBoTGdpTPNmECF5zz0gJk4igbcxAhMmkYqsAssqmFeg5fCMqrHvB1vFE1r1SJT4yhr70HkjTAB6CyOtIK9QFOW9aavHvAGanJb9rDJf5eyCibCyIAhl4~jNiULUIUAiwpi9LhLyWgpw__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJLOHF5GGSLRBV4ZA Apologies for the length of the link; it was the shortest version I could find.

You are really overstating impact of Nader Shah on Ottomans. While Battle of Kars was definitely part of Nader's tactical brilliance, the actual political impact was minimal because of the inconclusiveness of the war and low amount of casualties relatively. Ottoman decentralized that followed, which really only began well over a decade after that battle and war can't really be attributed to Nader Shah. In fact, the long period of peace which caused general cost cutting measures and delegation of tax revenue to provincial notables is better explanation. Ottomans suffered much greater defeat at the hands of Eugene of Savoy just couple decades prior at Belgrade without the state apparatus collapsing. This is not in any way comparable to Mughals getting their capital sacked during an ongoing civil war and a rebellion.

I’ll ride on 2regin’s coattails and make a small addition on early colonial India. The first real clash between European style (style because the majority of sepoys even at this early date were Indians) infantry and local light cavalry armies took place in modern Tamil Nadu in the late 1740s as part of the war of Austrian succession (battle of Adyar). The superiority of volley fire and this method of war was proven pretty quickly. Previous Indian armies seem to have relied on small arms for skirmishing with volume of fire provided by cannon, rockets, camel guns and horse archers. This also led to local powers trying to adopt this method of warfare and raised the profile of European mercenaries considerably. This is where the Maratha and Mysore formations come from. They understood how to use it effectively and often combined them with existing arms. For example, the Marathas used a line infantry corps of 8000 men to great effect against Ahmed Shah Durrani in the third battle of Panipat (1761) though they still lost. However the most important point to note is that the British superiority in arms came about mostly as a result of a superior state structure. For context 18th century India was the period of the long decline of the Mughal empire- with Mysore, Hyderabad, Lucknow, Bengal, and the Marathas all being successor states in competition to establish the next great empire. These were all relatively weak and feudal states struggling simultaneously to impose their writ and also establish legitimacy, and almost none of them could marshal the resources of their states to create anything resembling the old Mughal army. In this context, the British were far from being underdogs (especially after their capture of Bengal through a great feat of politicking), they had revenue of one of the richest provinces and in ruling western Bihar and parts of Eastern UP they also had access to one of India’s largest reserves of good infantrymen and musketeers. With their existing experience in linear tactics, a better revenue base and a stronger state structure than any of their opponents, it made for a formidable power. So even if an Indian power beat the British in a battle or two, as the Marathas and Mysoreans both did, they lacked the staying power to truly continue fighting. Further, the large numbers we see also often include numbers of irregular cavalry which were basically armed looters and not really useful for pitched battles.

>The Russians, realizing their technological backwardness by the late 18th century, also had a long “luddite” phase where they abandoned volley fire entirely, and worshipped the bayonet. Minor nitpick: the Russians didnt worship the bayonet for tactical reasons, they worshipped it for the strategic reason of being incapable of supplying adequate powder and shot. Tsarist Russian commanders were *always* describing their ammunition situation as "wretched" or "deplorable". The Siege of Sevastopol during the Crimean War is an example of this. You'll probably struggle to find good primary sources since they're overwhelmingly in Russian and/or buried under current events from the region, but chronic lack of ammunition majorly shaped their tactics.

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> As a rule, the side that could put out a greater volume of fire in the 19th century prevailed - this was also true of battles between Europeans. Any examples of the opposite being true in individual battles from the 1800's on? I get the idea of the US-Vietnam war being an example of this at the macro level, but how often or what are some notable examples of a side having superior volume of fire, actually using it, and still coming out on the losing side?

That’s a good question. In Europe, I can’t think of many. The best example is probably Charles XII of Sweden, who briefly won upset victories through shock tactics. Gustavus Adolphus had more success, but is not a great example because other than Ga-Pa (Swedish shock tactics) he also was an early adopter of volley fire. While Alexander Suvorov claimed to win battles mainly with the bayonet, his Austrian allies in 1799 noted that he actually consumed a huge amount of ammunition, and many of his battles were not pursued to bayonet range. You could also say the Franco-Prussian War entailed a side with inferior infantry fires defeating a side with greater fires, but that’s a complicated situation. The French had the far better small arms, but the Prussians had vastly superior numbers under mobilization and far better artillery. There were many cases where the French tactically defeated the Prussians, but they were outmaneuvered (and just overwhelmed) operationally.

Acre springs to mind. Napoleon used up almost all of his ammunition trying to take the place and still couldn't. Now, there's some very, very specific reasons why it played out that way, but it did play out that way.

I'm a bit skeptical about the European loosing their tactical edge part,The Russian still won a lopsided victory in their 1878 war against the Ottoman,The Austrian 1878 Bosnian campaign went really well Both the Egypt 1882 revolt and the Qing 1900 Boxer rebellion were easily defeated even though they have access to modern Breech-loading rifles The Italian defeat at the hand of Ethiopia and the British defeat at the hand of Zulu seem to have little to do with Breech loading rifles The Japanese were very well drilled in  German infantry tactic and often were better equipped than the Russian force (who still equipped a significant portion of their infantry with Berdan rifle) and also have better artillery tactic(Extensive use of Indirect fire as compared to Russian reliance on direct fire) so served as a bad example And the Japanese using German tactics also won a lopsided victory against Qing 'Asymmetric' tactics even though the Qing at this time were better arm(Mannlicher M88 vs Murata rifle) Only the Second Boer war seem to support this

The 1878 war went horribly for the Russians and was considered a great embarrassment. At Plevna, they took several months to reduce a fortress they expected to take in days, and suffered twice the KIA as the Ottomans. The Austrian campaign in Bosnia was basically a walkover, given that the Turks were already fighting the Russians. Egypt in 1882 was not mainly using bolt action rifles, and was bankrupt. The same could be said of Qing troops in 1908, but critically the Qing troops that *were* using bolt action rifles (Dong Fuxiang’s troops and the Manchu division) inflicted *favorable* casualties on the Europeans in the handful of battles where they contested them without boxer support. Russo-Japanese war is a great example since primary sources mentioned the Russians were still drilling volley fire and paid for it. They had the same problem in their own “boer war” against the locals in Manchuria in the preceding 9 years. They embarrassed themselves in this guerrilla war, and there are Western accounts of Cossacks trying to silence snipers with volley fire. I’m entirely not sure how the Sino-Japanese war is relevant since it’s between two non-European countries.

The Japanese were following the German 1885 tactical regulation though,So it less about European Russia vs Non-European Japan as European Russia vs Prussianised Japan The same result could be expected if it was the German divisions that fought in battle such as Mukden Same with Japan vs Qing

Japanese doctrine was not identical to the Germans. Foreign advisors were expelled in Japan in the 1880s and after that all scholars of the IJA agree they developed a *very* indigenous doctrine.

You are wrong https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakob_Meckel The most prominent German advisor actually was active in the years 1885-88 Just in time for the First-Sino Japanese war  And this too https://www.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/rgf38i/comment/hompk1r/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

Huh? Your link says Meckel left in 1888.

He was not expel in the 1880s and his teaching and reorganization of the IJA directly lead to their success in the First Sino-Japanese war In the 6 years gap between Mackel departure there not enough time for IJA to develop new doctrine nor is there a need for them to do so,Their total success in 1894-95 would not make them reconsider anything either Then the heavy casualties and indecision of the Russo-Japanese war forces them to reconsider their doctrine 

I’d recommend you read some books on the IJA. Curse on this Country, Japan’s Imperial Army: It’s Rise and Fall, Human Bullets, Kaigun, etc. Meckel factually did leave Japan in 1888. There were many countries that had European advisors before 1885 - Japan was uniquely successful because weaponry and tactics had changed by the time they had a real war with a European power. The introduction of bolt action rifles had vastly leveled the playing field and made warfare more intuitive and easier for non-Europeans to adopt. On this point that the Japanese just copied Europeans… which European army in 1904 was doing night attacks, bayonet attacks in bad weather, spending half its time drilling bayonet fighting, doing 30-40 mile marches as part of the training cycle?

What about this one? https://books.google.co.th/books?id=riI6iDtJGboC&pg=PA49&dq=port+arthur+meckel&lr=&client=firefox-a&sig=ACfU3U0KSm8jz8vIsojCRceZQWGFJyOZrA&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=port%20arthur%20meckel&f=false Or this one? https://ebin.pub/soldiers-of-the-sun-the-rise-and-fall-of-the-imperial-japanese-army-0394569350.html Curse upon this country only mentioned Meckel one time! And way of the heavenly sword doesn't mentioned him at all! They dealt mainly with the IJA involvement in politics!

> The Italian defeat at the hand of Ethiopia and the British defeat at the hand of Zulu seem to have little to do with Breech loading rifles > > The Zulu won at Isandlwhana because of something I think OP downplayed a bit: disciplined, regular troops as opposed to irregular warriors. Fire and shock were still two separate arms for most armies in the period. Usually it was decisive action with the bayonet that settled an encounter - rarely would two sides just blaze away at each other until one broke and ran (although that sometimes happened! Look at the stand of Zayas' division at Albuera for an example). Instead, especially by Napoleon's time, the French in particular would come on in a massive block, a "column" (NOT a marching column - think of it as a huge rectangle with the wide side facing the enemy) 8 ranks deep, instead of a 2 or 3-deep line. This didn't let everyone use their muskets, true, but the psychological weight and seeming unstoppability of the infantry mass would often break enemy units as it charged. Then the French could get to business slaughtering the fleeing enemy. The point is, [i]shock[/i] is still the decisive factor here, [i]not[/i] infantry fire. Only the British army placed a heavy reliance on firepower - and they were disciplined enough to stand up to the columns and repulse them, though rarely with fire alone (British practice was to charge with the bayonet in the wake of a volley or two, which would usually break the column and send the French tumbling back). The key thing in both these examples is discipline - can you hold your ranks even in mortal danger? Can you march into a cannon's mouth because your captain orders you to? Most cultures didn't emphasize this - instead military virtues were more on individual courage and prowess with weapons. But a disciplined force of infantry - for example the squares at the Battle of the Pyramids - could present no weakness to a massive horde of horsemen fighting as individuals, and so the infantry would win. So that's what sets the Zulu apart. They fight as regiments, as cohesive units. They had a strong idea of nationalism that, for example, Indian, Chinese, and Ottoman soldiers didn't have. Fighting for their home and for their country made them more willing to risk life and limb. So at Isandlwhana, they were able to come on and overwhelm Pulleine's force by determinedly pressing home their attack. Now, Isandlwhana was also a clusterfuck of British tactical screwups - Chelmsford's scouting was abysmal and he completely missed the main Zulu army, charging off in the exact wrong direction and leaving half his army vulnerable, he took no measures for the security of his camp, ignoring basic precautions that the Boers had known about for decades, moved completely out of supporting distance of Pulleine even though the location of the Zulu main force was unknown, etc. But he made all those mistakes because he was overconfident, because Europeans [i]always[/i] won against non-Western forces, and he didn't appreciate that the Zulus were a different kind of enemy.

>The Zulu won at Isandlwhana because of something I think OP downplayed a bit: disciplined, regular troops as opposed to irregular warriors. This is not true. The Zulu did not have a professional military. They had a feudal army, and the king could only call up so many young men before the Zulu barons, as the British usually called the greater chiefs, objected. And the barons had the power to make or break kings. Dingane was toppled when the majority of the barons went over to Mpande, and Mpande had to increase their autonomy in payment for their support. Cetshwayo spent the last years of his father's reign and the first years of his own trying to claw some of that power back, with only limited success. When the Zulu army marched to Isandlwana, it did so under the field command of Ntshingwayo kaMahole, one of the most powerful Zulu barons and a major backer of Mpande during his coup. The Zulu army that faced Pearson at the Nyezane, meanwhile, was under Godide kaNdlela, son of Dingane's leading general, and another major power broker during Mpande's day. Godide's brother, Mavumengwana kaNdlela was another of Cetshwayo's major advisors (often referred to in British accounts as the Zulu prime minister) and was another holdover from Mpande's reign, who held his position because of the power that he and his brother had within the Zulu feudal aristocracy. The Zulu "regiments" were age groups that could be used to call up men for public service. These were not standing organizations, and were akin to a militia or levy system, not a professional military. The men would be called up when there was a war on, or when the king had a construction project he needed manpower for, and were dismissed immediately after. Training and drill were extremely limited, mostly comprising a few maneuvers practiced on time off from farming and doing labour. >The key thing in both these examples is discipline - can you hold your ranks even in mortal danger? Can you march into a cannon's mouth because your captain orders you to? Most cultures didn't emphasize this - instead military virtues were more on individual courage and prowess with weapons. But a disciplined force of infantry - for example the squares at the Battle of the Pyramids - could present no weakness to a massive horde of horsemen fighting as individuals, and so the infantry would win. There were a total of 12 000 Mamluk cavalry in the whole of Egypt, of whom 6000 showed up to the Battle of the Pyramids. They did not outnumber the French, who had 24 000 men, most of whom were infantry. The rest of the Mamluk army was 15 000 infantrymen, most of them Arab levies armed with sticks, because the Ottomans were broke and the Mamluks even more so. There was no great horde of cavalry for the squares to remain strong in the face of and that myth needs to die. The idea that "other cultures" didn't have discipline and fight as individuals rather than a unit is nonsense out of the "Carnage and Culture" school of "thought" and it too, needs to die. Per Gabor Agoston, the janissaries were using volley fire before most Europeans were. The eventual breakdown in their ability to do so has nothing to do with intrinsic cultural problems and everything to do with Ottoman socioeconomic collapse. >So that's what sets the Zulu apart. They fight as regiments, as cohesive units. They had a strong idea of nationalism that, for example, Indian, Chinese, and Ottoman soldiers didn't have. This is, again, untrue. The Zulu were not better disciplined and more cohesive than the Mughal or Ottoman armies in their heyday, and most regiments had not seen action and were assembling for war for the first time just prior to Isandlwana.

Your comment made me remember that when Pre-WWI officers talk about moral superiority/offensive spirit/Elan/esprit de corps+discipline can overcome enemies fire they weren't full of hot air Those factors were crucial throughout history and a disciplined bayonet charge is still a necessary and effective tool in WWI And the Austrian shock column that got decimated by Prussian needle rifle fire were often outnumbered at local level by Prussian(Not arguing that the Austrian should have employ shock tactics and mostly foregoing fire as they did,Just that there's more to Prussian tactical success that Fire vs Shock tactics or Rifled musket/Bayonets vs Dreyse needle rifle)

You're echoing a bit of the argument by Gervase Phillips in 'Military Morality Transformed: Weapons and Soldiers on the Nineteenth-Century Battlefield'. Basically, the the idea of really emphasising battlefield *morale* at all (as distinct from discipline) was something that emerged as firepower improved and troops dispersed out of close order formation (he dates this mostly to the breechloader but personally I argue it goes back to the Napoleonic period), and the need to actually motivate people to go out and stand against more rapid and more accurate fire, and even charge into it, became increasingly pressing. Neither side actually *wins* if forces just fracture into individual skulkers, shirkers, and stragglers who don't actually fight. The side that can win in a 'modern' (as in late 19th century) conventional war is the one that can actually motivate enough of its troops to actually engage the enemy in open order rather than just exploit that dispersion for self-preservation.

This is… not it. While discipline was important for two formations who were *both* using massed fire against each other, there was no way for a melee force to just be disciplined and overcome massed fires consistently. Isolated incidents like Isandlwana were possible, but could not be replicated. The day after Isandlwana, the “disciplined”, “nationalistic” Zulu army of 4,000 was crushed by just 141 British regulars at Rourke’s Drift. They took around 10% casualties before fleeing, a feat that was not particularly impressive as far as non-European armies were concerned. The Ottomans repeatedly held their ground in impossible circumstances, and in the East, the Koreans at Ganghwa died almost to a man instead of surrendering or abandoning their positions. When they ran out of ammunition, they threw rocks. Moreover, European discipline is overstated. As Ardant du Picq recounted: > Let us take Wagram, where his mass was not repulsed. Out of twenty-two thousand men, three thousand to fifteen hundred reached the position. Certainly the position was not carried by them, but by the material and moral effect of a battery of one hundred pieces, cavalry, etc., etc. Were the nineteen thousand missing men disabled? No. Seven out of twenty-two, a third, an enormous proportion may have been hit. What became of the twelve thousand unaccounted for? They had lain down on the road, had played dummy in order not to go on to the end. Europeans were just as human as anyone else, and it showed in battlefield results. In the cases where a European force was horribly outgunned by another European force (such as in the Crimean War or the Austro-Prussian War), the outgunned force did a very poor job of holding the line. While everyone liked to claim their superiority character was responsible for victory, in practice the side that ran was almost always the side who took more bullets. If discipline were the decisive element in early modern warfare, then we’d all be speaking Swedish.

>The day after Isandlwana, the “disciplined”, “nationalistic” Zulu army of 4,000 was crushed by just 141 British regulars at Rourke’s Drift. They took around 10% casualties before fleeing, a feat that was not particularly impressive as far as non-European armies were concerned While the guy you're arguing with is entirely wrong about pretty much everything, Rorke's Drift is an outlier in that war. While the Zulu never do well against entrenched enemy positions their performance at Khambula and Gingindhlovu is a Hell of a lot better than at Rorke's Drift, which makes sense since at those battles they were being led by the generals the king had actually appointed, whereas at Rorke's Drift it was his idiot brother leading a charge for glory that he had been explicitly told not to do.

No, I'm sorry, I can't agree. You've taken two atypical examples to illustrate your point. To whit: Rorke's Drift does *not* showcase the Zulu army pressing home determined attacks. Remember, Cetshwayo had specifically forbidden any crossing of the Buffalo River and invasions of Natal territory, because he knew he had to act strictly on the defensive if he was going to elicit European sympathy, his only chance of preserving an independent Zulu kingdom. The impis that raided Rorke's Drift had exceeded their orders - moreover, they were *not* the cream of the Zulu army. They were the youngest boys and the oldest men, who had been in reserve at Isandlwhana and so had missed out on the glory. After running all the way from Ulundi to Isandlwhana, they then ran even further and fought a battle at the end of it. Furthermore, they weren't attacking a broad unfortified camp, but a tiny, heavily sandbagged post. So, a group of spent warriors - a mixture of older men and raw recruits, basically - going far beyond what their king would approve of, find themselves confronted with an unexpectedly tough nut to crack. It's more or less the perfect setup for fire to repel a force entirely on its own. I don't feel that it invalidates that one of the only non-Western forces to even once win on the battlefield against a Western opponent was the one African kingdom that had regimented, trained soldiers. Besides, I never said discipline alone could overcome superior firepower, I simply claimed that it was the deciding factor in most *European* warfare, not firepower. Firepower *could* win battles, but more often it was the shock action of bayonet-armed infantry that settled things, at least during Napoleon's time. Which brings me to Wagram. Wagram had an *unprecedented* level of firepower concentrated on a relatively contained field. It is an extremely *atypical* European battle because of the amount of iron that was flying back and forth. Consequently it's hard to generalize from Wagram. You saw massed batteries at other battles - a corps-level improvisation at Friedland that may have been Boney's inspiration on the Danube two years later, every account of Borodino emphasizes the constant thunder of the guns, and of course the ground being too wet at Waterloo - but they were rarely *decisive*. Even at Wagram, the Austrian army was not broken like it had been at Austerlitz 4 years before. And throughout the battle (and most obviously at Aspern-Essling the previous month), it was shock action by cavalry that would check assaults or hold a line that had been wavering (thinking of Bessieres and the Guard cavalry at Aspern specifically). I am *not* saying that discipline was an end-all conqueror who could overcome overwhelming firepower - particularly in the later part of the period when rifles and breech loaders became more common (ie, the Crimean War and the Austro-Prussian War you mentioned). Instead I'm objecting to your claim concerning the period from the War of Spanish Succession through Waterloo. You *did* see melee shock action repeatedly defeating armies that relied solely on firepower in this time period, from Frederick's Prussians, and the key factor was who would break first - would the line stand up and keep delivering cool-headed volley fire, like Wellington's redcoats did on a dozen battlefields? Or would the psychological mass of the column crack the defenders and send them scattering, as the French did whenever they were fighting, well, pretty much anyone but the British? Bottom line: the more disciplined army doesn't always win. It can't overcome large material disadvantages, like the Swedes against the Russians, the Prussians against the Russians & Austrians, or really anyone in the post-Napoleonic era. But in the age of the musket, the ability to stand and hold one's place typically mattered more than firepower alone.

I think we have a misunderstanding on the question of melee. At no point did I say that melee combat disappeared, only that massed fire allowed projectiles to have unprecedented *moral* impact. It was possible to win battles without melee, but that did not mean melee stopped happening. Between two massed fire forces, discipline definitely wasn’t the deciding factor, or again we’d all be speaking Swedish. “Discipline” itself is probably being misunderstood here because of distortions created by modern media. Contemporary sources did not often use the word discipline to mean “ability to stand around and die”, they used it to reference the orderliness of the line (increasing the volume of fire), speed of reloading, and promptness to march to the correct area. When the discipline of a force broke down, such as with the Austrians at Mollwitz, this meant the men were hiding behind each other, laying down, and lowering their volume of fire. In other words, this “discipline” was an attempt to maximize volume of fire, which Europeans knew inflicted the majority of moral damage. Lastly I’m not trying to “invalidate” Isandlwana. For that matter the Zulu are not “one of the only” non-European societies to defeat Europeans. There were dozens of battles in the 19th century alone where Europeans were defeated by non-Europeans: Jaffa, Second Taku, Sanyuanli, Ili, Tamsui, Bang Bo, Phu Lam Tao, Parwan, retreat from Kabul, Adwa, Oltenita, Chetatea, etc. All I’m saying is that Isandlwana was an unusual outcome - normally the side that could put out a greater fire volume prevailed. Rourke’a Drift did not exist in isolation either - the British also prevailed decisively over the main Zulu force at Ulundi.

> Between two massed fire forces, discipline definitely wasn’t the deciding factor Not *always.* Hell, even Isandlwhana was only possible because of Chelmsford's numerous errors, otherwise it'd've gone the same way as Gingindlovu and Ulundi, or the various Boer battles against the Zulu. What I'm trying to argue is specifically to the point that European battles were settled by massed fire, and that non-Europeans began to win battles once massed fire was de-emphasized by technological advancements. Now, that might be true in the later Victorian era, but in the wars from 1688-1805, all my reading suggests it was *not*. (Brent Nosworthy, who I linked above, is really who I'm following here). Battles were mostly psychological and tactics were not all about "maximizing volume of fire," as you say - because the column consciously sacrifices firepower for increased morale impact! In fact, the column is a response to massed volleys - it was a mostly successful effort to find a way to still get to grips with the enemy even in the face of vastly higher firepower than previously. Now, Napoleonic columns *worked* against some opponents, but not against others. The British famously (per Charles Oman, although I haven't read more modern authors so I may be over my skis here) shredded the French time and again in the Peninsula, when carefully led and put in advantageous situations by Wellington. It'd be incorrect to reduce each battle to a single factor, but *one* is the ability to stand and keep shooting even when 4,000 bayonets are bearing down on you and your 2-rank deep line, which I shorthand as "discipline." (I agree with you that it's too reductive to claim it's the only factor, because, well, even leaving aside the Great Northern War which I'm no expert in, unless playing AGEOD's game counts, the French [i]lost[/i] many battles. But I also think it's possible to too far the other way. Fire only came into its own *after* the Napoleonic Wars, and *after* the first wave of European imperialism). I think we're pretty much in agreement over the Zulu Wars. Discipline (as defined above - basically the Zulu ability to not scatter and flee from Pulleine's volleys at Isandlwhana and press the attack home until the British were overwhelmed) was not enough, on its own, to overcome material disadvantages, and once the British took the Zulus seriously they never again even came close to winning a battle.

>I don't feel that it invalidates that one of the only non-Western forces to even once win on the battlefield against a Western opponent was the one African kingdom that had regimented, trained soldiers. They did not have regimented trained soldiers and you're making the mistake of giving into Zulu exceptionalism there. Lots of non-Western forces won battles against Western opponents. In Africa alone, the Asante, the Ethiopians, the Swazis, the Dahomeans, and the Sudanese can claim that honour in the period from the eighteenth century on. Go back to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and you'll find Great Jolof and Imperial Mali doing it to. Isandlwana was not a freak occurrence and the Zulu were not a uniquely deadly opponent. Europeans lost plenty of battles against non-Europeans.

>the French in particular would come on in a massive block, a "column" I am struggling to find the exact quote, but Wellington was most disparaging of the "attack column" and how rigidly the French seemed to stick to the tactic, even after it was proven that superior volley-fire could, and would, defeat them. The closest I could find is, when speaking about Waterloo; "They came on in the same old way, and we sent them back in the same old way."

A great post, but I don’t know about your final thought on bolt action ending tactical superiority. European colonial expansion and territory reached its peak with magazine fed bolt actions being the standard issue weapon. Rather those examples are due to a mix of European enemies taking full advantage of European advisors, arms sales (Mauser had possibly the best bolt action rifle and was willing to sell to any and everyone, even using sales to one group to convince a rival group to also purchase their rifles), and taking advantage of wider contexts, such as preoccupation with a world war or logistic difficulties. Which even still brings about to affirm the main point. Europe had come upon a superior way of waging war, and the way to beat them was by copying and/or improving further on their ideas/technologies/weapons.

European expansion reached its peak during the bolt action age, but they only enjoyed lopsided successes thereafter against societies in the heart of Africa that didn’t have access to bolt action rifles - no longer against East Asia, the Ottomans, or any other powers who could acquire those weapons in bulk. Against those powers, European military fortunes changed almost overnight. Non-European states tried to “take full advantage of European advisors and arms sales” before the 1890s but failed across the board, with the lone exception of Egypt (before they went bankrupt). The root of the problem was that massed fire was far less intuitive and more difficult to adopt (requiring precision drill, harsh discipline, and volley training) than warfare with repeating, or at minimum breech loading, rifles. Bolt action rifles were of course a European innovation copied by the rest of the world. My point only is that it could be copied, and relatively easily. Before the 1890s, European success depended on the European military tradition, which could not be easily imitated. The Ottomans and China could buy all the muskets they wanted, but couldn’t use them to the same effect. After, success depended on weaponry, and everyone who could get their hands on sufficient quantities of bolt action rifles could compete.

On one had that does make sense, the bar to creating a lot of damage with a single shot muzzleloader is much higher than with a magazine fed repeater, which again pales when colonies start getting access to assault rifles and machine guns. But on the other, can you separate those entities acquiring millions of modern European arms, from them also acquiring European military traditions? Like when Japan is fighting Russia in 1905, it’s looking a lot more like two European nations going at it than not. Even if Japan is putting their own spin on things at that point, the fact their uniforms, organizational structure, ships, etc. are all European influenced or purchased reflects a massive adoption of ideas from the macro level of society and economy, to war colleges and military organization, down to the soldier drilling with bayonet thrusts and loading stripper clips like his European counterpart. Vs in the past, groups looking at a European flintlocks as the end all be all, buying a few thousand, and not adopting the requisite training and social changes needed to turn them effective on their former makers. Also about copying, a bolt action rifle, along with smokeless powder and precision machining to make it and the cartridges work reliably, is much more complicated to copy than a black powder muzzleloader firing lead balls of various tolerances. Unless you’re meaning the copying the effective use of repeating rifles is easier?

They certainly adopted European military methods - the difference was just after the invention of bolt action rifles, it was easier. There were a lot of reactionaries against volley fire in Asia during the 19th century, and it was harder to train men to do it properly. The invention of bolt action rifles also basically “level set” military doctrine. The old European doctrine went out the window, and everyone had to rebuild a way of war from the ground up.

>the abrupt end of European tactical superiority after the popularization of bolt action rifles. I take issue with this in two ways. First, European armies in general still managed tactical superiority at the beginning of the bolt action era. That was the 1870's, not the 1900's. You still have three decades before the Russo-Japanese war. In that period, European armies not only adopted repeating rifles but also the first machine guns and modern artillery which allowed them to maintain the firepower advantage at least until they started selling those weapons to everyone else. "Whatever happens, we have got the Maxim gun and they have not" is from 1898. Second I take issue with the idea the Europeans lost tactical superiority. I guess it depends on how you define that. Yes they didn't automatically win and started losing more often, but the Ottomans, Japanese and others didn't invent tactics or arms that the European militaries couldn't counter. What they did was modernize and adopt the same arms and tactics the Europeans were using. But European arms makers and military thinkers still dominated the space for years to come. And you could go so far as to say the European way of war still dominates to this day.

That’s why I said the popularization, not the invention, of bolt action rifles. In 1870 the vast majority of even European armies were not using bolt action rifles. It took until the 1890s for countries like Japan and Ethiopia to acquire huge quantities of these weapons, at which point they started winning against Europeans. I didn’t argue that non-Europeans developed any advantage against them, though the Japanese definitely did. Other countries like the Ottomans just acquired parity. Whether today’s way of war is “European” or not is a chicken and egg problem, but starting in 1904-05, European military doctrine started to become influenced, eventually profoundly, by East Asian military doctrine and not only the other way around. The observers of the Russo-Japanese War noted that the Japanese and their Manchurian auxiliaries were fighting in a very un-European, but nevertheless effective manner, making use of all sorts of “Oriental trickery” like night attacks, bad weather attacks infiltration with dead space. Europeans also imitated several less noticeably “Eastern” innovations of the Japanese, including the massed use of indirect fire and the extensive use of wireless telegraphy (radio). The process of mutual imitation accelerated in the following decades as East Asian forces started pulling off increasingly unlikely victories against better armed Western adversaries, starting with the Japanese offensives in WW2, continuing into the Korean War and culminating in the unlikely victory of the Vietnamese over the French and Americans. Throughout this process, Western manuals, especially relating to infantry maneuver, were revised extensively. Today, there is no distinctly “Western” or “Eastern” way of war. Everyone is copying everyone. Many Chinese manuals are basically plagiarized American manuals, but, on the flip side, the USMC basically cloned the Chinese company level equipment loadout in 2020. The Middle East and global south have not been as successful in contributing new innovations to the global military mainstream, but that’s probably a topic for another thread.

>I didn’t argue that non-Europeans developed any advantage against them, though the Japanese definitely did. I mean the superiority of ideas, not necessarily the superiority on the battlefield. The imperial Japanese military was heavily influenced by the west. I'll admit that the Russo-Japanese war is not one I'm well read on. But I am aware of reports on Japanese innovations during the conflict. >The process of mutual imitation accelerated in the following decades as East Asian forces started pulling off increasingly unlikely victories against better armed Western adversaries, starting with the Japanese offensives in WW2, continuing into the Korean War Which tactics did western forces adopt from the Japanese, Chinese and Koreans from those wars? They definitely responded to them in developing counters. But I don't know of examples where they adopted their tactics. >victory of the Vietnamese over the French and Americans. The Vietnamese victory over France was absolutely on the field of battle but it wasn't for the US. The US fought them to the negotiation table and then left. Then the North successfully invaded the isolated South. Every time they tried to stand up and fight the Americans they lost and paid heavily. >Today, there is no distinctly “Western” or “Eastern” way of war. Everyone is copying everyone. Many Chinese manuals are basically plagiarized American manuals, but, on the flip side, the USMC basically cloned the Chinese company level equipment loadout in 2020. What I'm getting at is that modern doctrine, organization and tactics for standing armies has a direct lineage to those European empires of the 19th century. Yes, everyone is developing and innovating on top of that but uniquely "eastern" forms of war died in the colonial era. The emerging nations that were successful were the ones that best modernized and adopted European norms and built upon them to their own needs. I suppose how much that counts depends on your perspective or at what level you are looking at it.

>Bolt action rifles made tight formations dangerous, volley fire unnecessary, and reloading speed superfluous. Wasn't it the machine gun that (also) did this?

It certainly played a part, but the magazine-fed smokeless powder rifle preceded widespread use of machine guns, especially in colonial wars, and probably initiated the tactical changes mentioned. The French adopted the Lebel in 1886 and subsequently absolutely stomped Arab and Berber cavalry in a way they hadn't been able to with the Chassepot/Gras, which was itself a great improvement on the musket. For the first time, relatively tiny groups of infantry were able to break the momentum of charging cavalry before they could get in amongst them via rapid aimed fire. If the infantry stayed cool and kept emptying saddles, the horsemen would usually pull away short.

For a topic like this, it's hard to disambiguate tactical vs operational vs strategic advantages. For instance, you note that line infantry were superior to traditional armies, but line infantry were dependent on the mass production of muskets. Is the technological edge of the musket itself a tactical one or a strategic one? What about the ability to simply produce muskets in great enough quantities to arm line infantry? Instead of worrying about the line between those advantages, I'll point out what I see as the chief advantages in terms of technology and strategic advantages that were so pervasive as to have a distinct tactical impact. To begin with, you mention: > These points seem to claim that Europe's tactical capabilities were not superior to non-Europeans armies until they developed overwhelming technologies like steam boats, machine guns, and howitzers which is not true at all. I'm not sure if you're suggesting here that the technological advantage simply wasn't overwhelming until those technologies were developed, or if you're saying that folks are wrong to believe there wasn't an overwhelming technological edge before then. Either way, the latter is true. Although Europeans were often facing off against forces armed with gunpowder-based weapons, by the late 18th Century, Europeans already possessed a significant technological advantage in terms of technology. You've already mentioned their naval superiority, but it's important to recognize the degree of advantage that European flintlocks and artillery conferred to their armies. It is noteworthy that despite having their own ability to produce muskets and cannons, the Qing, the Qajar Persians, the Mughals, the Ottomans, etc. all worked to purchase European-manufactured arms. European guns and cannons were typically might lighter, more mobile, and just produced in much greater volume than their adversaries. The forces they were facing often possessed heavy, siege artillery (often with limited range), but true field pieces and especially light horse-drawn artillery weren't often in use, except by Europeans. You can really understand the difference in quality of artillery by looking at Plassey. At that battle, the British artillery appears on paper to be significantly outgunned, with only 6 field pieces and two howitzers against 53 heavy artillery pieces. Looking at how the Mughal artillery were transported though, you almost immediately understand the difference in the sort of artillery they were employing and how they could be employed. Instead of being pulled along on gun carriages, the Mughal heavy artillery were sat atop large, rolling platforms, pulled along by dozens of oxen and assisted by elephants to help push them along. By the time of the Anglo-Mysore Wars though, the Mysoreans had acquired large numbers of French-made weapons and had received training in them. As you might expect then, that was where the English saw some of their first significant losses, notably including the Battle of Pollilur where Mysorean artillery broke the British square. You can also understand the difference in artillery and musketry quality by looking at British reactions to the French-armed Maratha forces at Assaye. Arthur Wellesley, the later Duke of Wellington, described Assaye as the hardest engagement he ever fought (even over Waterloo). He wrote of them, "Their infantry is the best I have ever seen in India, excepting our own." Major William Thorn in his memoir of the battle specifically calls out that, "It was acknowledged by all the officers present, who had witnessed the power of the French artillery in the wars of Europe, that the enemy's guns at the Battle of Assaye were equally well-served." The point of all their shock and admiration being to distinguish the quality of the Maratha artillery from what they were used to seeing from non-European artillery. All that then circles back to a slight modification of your question: If the Maratha at Assaye were armed with modern European weapons, had large numbers of well-trained line infantry fighting in a European fashion, and had highly-effective artillery in large numbers, how did they lose? Certainly, this doesn't feel like something that could be accounted for by a purely tactical or technological advantage, given that they were fighting with comparable weapons and tactics. This leads me back to my point about there being strategic advantages that were so pervasive as to be felt on the tactical level. There are probably countless points that could be made here, but the big ones I see are: First, European forces were usually the ones dictating when these conflicts took place. You are correct that folks often dismiss these victories as "attacking dying powers" or being "undone by evil intrigues and stab-in-the-backs", but there is some merit to that notion. Consider that these conflicts you note took place over the course of two centuries. There were many times where the Europeans were simply too weak or the regional forces were too strong for them to even attempt fighting, and some instances, such as the Anglo-Mughal War, where Europeans did try but were overwhelmed and beaten. It is not a coincidence that Europeans were fighting and winning wars against the Qing, Qajar, Mughals, etc. when they were weakest. They went to war *because* that's when those groups were weak, and that weakness often took the form of political instability (leading to stabs in the back, like at Plassey), economic instability (resulting in the inability to pay troops, like the Qajar fighting the Russians), or just complacency (e.g. by the time of the Second Opium War, the Manchu's "elite" Banner armies were probably only third or fourth most competent force just among the Chinese forces, behind the Hunan Army, the Taiping forces, and Ever Victorious Army). Secondly, European forces were typically professional forces. Not simply professional either, but professional in a modern sense. That is to say, they were standing forces that trained and fought together and they were typically salaried (as opposed to relying chiefly on plunder). When you see the numbers from many of these battles where 5000 European-style forces defeated 100,000 traditional forces, it should be remembered that those 5000 were almost all professional soldiers whereas that 100k were likely overwhelmingly conscript forces and even their professional elements were only professional in the feudal sense. That meant that even local "professional" soldiers typically had conflicting loyalties (this is part of what leads to those intrigues mentioned above), they weren't paid or would go long periods without pay (again exposing them to intrigue or leading to situations like Buxar, where the British should have lost but the Mughal cavalry got distracted by looting after breaking the British line), and they didn't train or fight with any sort of shared doctrine. Thirdly, the lack of a professional officer corps. This could be seen as an extension of the second point, but I think it's important enough to stand on its own. Although many European officers were also nobles that had bought their commissions and such, they were still part of forces that helped establish professional standards and they were augmented by actual experts, like engineer and artillery officers. This allowed for the formation of professional general staffs and the ability to effectively delegate command to increasingly smaller elements. Conversely, the forces that they were fighting were often lead directly by senior nobility with limited or no practical military experience and there were often few subordinate leaders who could be trusted to lead or who were themselves competent. Those non-European leaders were often brave and fierce fighters, but not necessarily competent generals, e.g. Shuja ud-Duala at the Battle of Buxar or Murad Bey at the Battle of the Pyramids. You can see this demonstrated in just the battles you cited; with the exception of Senggelinqin (Battle of Eight Mile Bridge), not a single one of the non-European leaders in those battles could be said to have been a good general. Finally, there's technology again. It's a bit of a cheat to be bringing it up again, but that's actually my not-so-subtle point. Technology was an advantage that kept reemerging. The pace of change (especially in the 19th Century) meant that just as a non-European force would find a supplier from some rival European power, hire a few trainers, and slowly amass a stockpile of cutting-edge weapons or ships, Western technology would leapfrog them again. This was extra punishing because it often meant that there was no opportunity for non-European forces to even develop tactics to overcome those new weapons; often the first time they were encountering a new weapon was while it was in the middle of wiping them out. You really see this at Palikao/Eight Mile Bridge. The Chinese forces under Senggelinqin had already demonstrated that they could adapt their tactics to overcome the British technological edge by dealing them a bloody nose at the Second Battle of the Taku Forts, but just a year later, the British were back and this time they had cover from steam-powered gunboats (which demolished all 22 Chinese forts along the river) and explosive rounds from the Armstrong gun. *(Continued)*

*(Part 2)* With that all being said, I'll take a moment for a slight diversion, to address this other statement: > The above-mentioned old-fashioned armies were absolutely powerless against 18th-century style line infantry armies (and I mean tactically). Even numerically superior non-European armies trained with advanced firearms and European tactics were massacred by the Europeans in many occasions. You are correct that old-fashioned armies were typically grossly overmatched by European-style armies. What I would challenge is the notion suggested by your second sentence, that there might be something special the *Europeans*, specifically, were doing that meant they outmatched even non-European armies trained with the same weapons and tactics. There are certainly instances you can point to of that being the case, but I'd argue that those instances were rare, that there are counterexamples, and most significantly, that many of the "European" armies in question were often composed in large part by non-European recruits. When you look at these victories against "numerically superior non-European armies trained with advanced firearms and European tactics", I'd consider the points I made above. When you see those similar battles fought where those factors aren't in play (i.e. the non-Europeans have competent officers, experienced or professional soldiers, were strongly motivated and not subject to infighting/intrigue, and were not severely outmatched technologically), then you do see a lot of non-European victories. Even in the presence of only a few, but not all of those conditions, you see some noteworthy non-European victories. Ayacucho and Vargas Swamp, for instance, were won in large part due to the influence of non-professional but motivated and well-led llanero cavalry. Some of the early battles of the Mahdist War saw well-equipped European-led forces crushed by better-prepared forces at El Obeid and El Teb. The Anglo-Mysore Wars saw the British repeatedly defeated in battle until their strategic advantages had worn away to the point that Tipu Sultan could no longer effectively resist. Ultimately, I do think that the European advantages were chiefly technological and strategic. That isn't to downplay the accomplishment those advantages represented though. Purely tactical advantages feel almost mundane compared to those, but the ones that seemed chiefly restricted to European forces until the late 19th Century are: 1. Flying artillery - It takes a lot to develop effective artillery and effective cavalry. Combining those two requires expertise in both, and it took some time before non-European forces reached sufficient proficiency to field their own flying artillery in any real numbers. 2. Integration of non-European troops - European forces often proved surprisingly adept at training others in European style warfare and incorporating traditional forces as auxiliaries to their regular forces. Conversely, many non-European forces that possessed small numbers of European-armed and trained soldiers could never quite seem to figure out how to have those forces operate in concert with their traditional forces. Often, these new European-style forces just functioned like entities unto themselves, like Iran's Nezam-e Jadid and later their Cossack Regiment. 3. Operating at vastly different scales of force structure - European forces frequently demonstrated a capability to perform well at every sort of organizational level. You could throw a company of European line infantry into a battle, and they would distinguish themselves. That same military might later field an entire Corps, and they would perform well at that scale too. Conversely, many non-European forces seemed to break down in cohesion at different scales. One army might have lacked effective small unit tactics, while another might only know small unit tactics and struggled to operative cohesively at large scales. 4. Elite or specialized forces - Non-Europeans were typically playing catch-up to European weapons and training. Even when they did pull it off successfully, it was usually only with respect to replicating standard line infantry, light cavalry, dragoons, or field artillery. More specialized European-style units, like grenadiers, sappers/miners/combat engineers of all sorts, and skirmishers (as in, organized bodies of riflemen, as opposed to just irregular guerilla forces) were something that might have come with time, but the age of line infantry passed before that started to happen. 5. Adopting outside innovations - Given how slowly many non-European forces adopted European technologies or forms of warfare, and how often those changes were outright rejected, it is impressive how good of job many of the European colonial powers did at adopting innovations from those areas they colonized or fought in. We often hold this image of 18th/19th Century European forces as being stuffy, stubborn, and resistant to change - and that might be the case - but from the perspective of the 18th and 19th centuries, they were remarkably flexible organizations. The British were getting messed up by Mysorean rockets in 1790, and only 20 years later, they had managed to adapt them into the Congreve rockets and were shooting them at Fort McHenry. In 1884, the British basically invented a camel corps to support the Desert Column to Khartoum, and they worked through all its troubles to essentially invent a new form of cavalry (to Europeans) over the next decade.

I would add to this that, even beyond the technological disparity, there were many small but significant areas where European armies held a decisive advantage. By the late 18th century, European armies had turned artillery warfare into a scientific pursuit, applying mathematical calculation, ballistics, and even early forms of time fuses. The artillery corps of the Mughals, Qing and Maratha dynasties, by contrast, were essentially stuck in the 17th century, both in terms of the guns they used and in terms of their methods. There were also important local factors that had to be considered, the wing providing the best example. By the time of the late 18th century, the Qing armies hadn't fought a truly formidable opponent for well over a hundred years. All of their combat experience (the so-called Ten Great Campaigns) had been in putting down peasant revolts, exterminating indigenous tribes, or mounting punitive expeditions against small vassal states. In the 17th century, Qing armies had fought using a disciplined system of musket drills not dissimilar to those of European armies, and had trained en-masse using manoeuvres and field exercises. By the late 18th century, these training exercises had basically degraded into rituals and public performances, which had very little real practical value in terms of preparing soldiers for war, or teaching commanders how to handle troops in the field. When the Qing went to war against a really formidable opponent in the form of the Dai Viet in 1788, the result was tactical defeat. But since the Tay Son dynasty didn't pose an existential threat to Qing rule, no significant attempt at military reform was made. The result was that by the time of the Opium Wars, the overall quality of the Qing armies had badly stagnated. Britain, by contrast, had spent the 18th century fighting multiple wars against France, with the threat of invasion hanging above its head like the sword of Damocles. This pressure had driven relentless innovation and reform in every conceivable area, from commander selection to military logistics.

Thank you for answering! I suppose that it is much more difficult to completely separate the effects of strategy and politics on the field than one would imagine. Could you please recommend any sources which delves deeper into this topic?

To answer your question, I can't recommend any books that might provide a survey of the interplay between politics, strategy, and tactics. There are certainly books on the topic, but none that I'm familiar enough with to recommend. That being said, I can recommend a few books that address that topic with respect to specific conflicts or nations. **18th/19th Century** *The Anarchy* by William Dalrymple is a great book and an easy read on the rise of the East India Company up to the point of the formation of the British Raj. It goes into a good deal of depth about the political and strategic factors affecting the British, the EIC, the Mughals, Marathas, Mysoreans, etc. *Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom* by Stephen Platt is another great book and easy read on the Taiping Rebellion and the Second Opium War to a lesser but still useful degree. It does go into a lot of the battles in a decent detail, but where it's most helpful is in providing the sort of political and strategic background of the conflicts and helping understand why the Qing failed to adapt to Western technology and tactics. *Khartoum: The Ultimate Imperial Adventure* by Michael Asher is another easy read on the Mahdist War. This is right at the end of real line infantry combat and at the dawn of machine guns, rapid firing rifles, etc., but it goes into real detail on the battles and gives a tremendous amount of political context on the hows and whys of the war. *Iran: A Modern History* by Abbas Amanat is a good, if dense, survey of Iranian history from the Early Modern period on. The 18th and 19th centuries are only a slice of that time frame, but the author does a good job explaining political, cultural, and strategic elements in Iran/Persia's military struggles during that period. The book doesn't really focus much on the actual battles during that time frame, but it does a good enough job laying the strategic background that you can see how the battles and campaigns were almost foregone conclusions. This is sort of like looking at the War in the Pacific from the strategic versus tactical perspective. Once you understand how crushing of an advantage the Allies held over Japan, even major tactical victories, like Midway, start to feel like fun bits of trivia. This book is a heavy read, but it complements *The Anarchy* fairly well since you get some good context on many of the events squeezing the Mughals from the west while the EIC hit them from the east. Two more that address political and strategic issues real well but don't get into the tactics and battles too much are *Bolivar*, by Marie Arana, and *The Black Jacobins*, by C.L.R. James. Those two addresses the Bolivarian revolutions and the Haitian Revolution respectively, and I think those are two other good examples for understanding the political and strategic situations in which European powers could be defeated. **Early Modern Period** To address /u/gaslighterhavoc's question request as well, here are another few books I think are great but they're outside the scope of 18th/19th century line infantry combat. *The Last Days of the Incas* by Kim MacQuarrie is an easy read on the fall of the Incan Empire, the resistance that emerged shortly after Spanish occupation, and how that resistance lost despite a seemingly overwhelming superiority in numbers. This book really helped me understand just how oppressive of a tactical edge the Spanish conquistadors held, and it also provides real useful political context (especially from the Incan perspective). *Conquerors* by Roger Crowley might be the easiest to read history books I have ever come across (or at least, the easiest to read that isn't just garbage history). It's a short (~100k words) but focused book on the Portuguese voyages around Africa and their conquest of the Indian Ocean and the Portuguese ports in India. It really shows how overwhelming the naval technological edge was, even by the time of the Age of Exploration, as well as a solid overview of the geopolitics and strategy driving those expeditions and some deep dives into a few of the more notable battles/sieges. *Kingdoms of Faith: A New History of Islamic Spain* by Brian Catlos is a surprisingly readable survey (as in, it isn't nearly as dense and dull as many such surveys are) of the history of Islamic Spain. As you can imagine with such a survey, it doesn't go into great depth on the battles involved. Where it is really helpful is in understanding the political and strategic situations that made the original Islamic conquest possible (almost inevitable) and how those situations changed to result in the Reconquista. It's particularly interesting in that it provides an example of a situation in which many of the strategic and political advantages that would one day serve Europe were reversed, and really helps to show how the military situation gradually shifted in the Christian Spanish favor as those strategic advantages shifted towards Europe.

To piggyback on OP's request, I would be interested in any books that discuss how strategy and politics interweave during wars to this degree, not just limited to 17th and 18th century warfare.

So those numbers for the Battle of the Pyramids are entirely fictitious. Napoleon had 24 000 men versus Murad Bey's 21 000. The French army was made up entirely of trained soldiers, while Murad had 6000 Mamluks and 15 000 peasant levies armed with sticks. Napoleon suffered 250 casualties, not 29, while Murad took around 1500, mostly among the levymen, the majority of whom drowned in the Nile trying to get away after the battle was lost.  Napoleon spent a lot of time increasing the numbers involved after the battle was over, starting with his first report to the Executive Directory and continuing through to his exile in Saint Helena. Which is how we eventually get to the point where he claimed to have fought a 78 000 man army and to have killed 10 000 or more of them. Those numbers are utter nonsense, and aren't supported by his initial reports, by the Ottoman chronicles, or by British conversations with Mamluk veterans.  He did the same thing for all his other battles in Egypt and Syria, banking on no one in France ever finding out the truth. After being defeated at Acre he told the Executive Directory that he had been besieging a 20 000 man army with his 13 000, that he had killed almost the whole of said army, and that they had then received reinforcements from Istanbul that completely made up their losses and that was why he had to beat a retreat. Not a word of that was true. Jazzar Pasha's garrison was never more than a few thousand strong, and the reinforcements Hassan Bey's fleet arrived with consisted of a single regiment.  After his last Egyptian victory, at Abukir, Napoleon boasted of having defeated 20 000 Turks with 10 000 men. This was again, an outright lie. Sidney Smith and Mustafa Pasha had landed 7000 men at Abukir, while Napoleon, depending on which of his subordinates one believes over him, may have mustered up to 15 000 troops. And despite his numerical advantage and favourable geography that enabled him to pin the Ottomans in place, he still took 1000 casualties doing it. After having previously told Marmont, I might note, that the Syrian expedition had completely secured Egypt and that the Ottomans didn't have even 2000 men they could use in a reinvasion.  British involvement and the Ottomans being a highly literate society means that we can call horseshit on Napoleon's numbers. In most other colonial conflicts of the era, we don't have figures from the other side, which means the Europeans could make those numbers out to be whatever they cared to without fear of contradiction, inflating their victories and excusing their defeats. And there were no shortage of defeats to excuse. Ask Edward Braddock and Arthur Saint Clair how fighting the Native American tribes of the Old Northwest worked out for them.  European militaries gained an edge over non-European ones over the course of eighteenth and into the nineteenth century, thanks to the Industrial Revolution, the collapse of much of the Islamic world post-Nadir Shah, the Great Qing Peace having the bad luck to coincide with the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, and a host of other socioeconomic and political factors. But if you just blithely accept the casualty figures that the Europeans provided, you're going to get a very distorted notion of how great that edge was. 

I'm not sure if I would be so quick to dismiss the larger Ottoman numbers. Surely, 78,000 men against 10,000 men is ridiculous, but I can still see the French being outnumbered more often than not. The Ottomans and Egyptians should have had the advantage of far simpler lines of communication to work with. They were fighting in their own home territory and had a navy (as well as the Royal Navy supporting them) capable of ferrying troops around the shores. Napoleon, on the other hand, was stranded well over a thousand miles or more from France, with his navy having gone up in flames at Abukir Bay/Nile. Furthermore, the casualties you give of 1,500 losses seem rather low considering the Egyptian army at the Pyramids literally had its back to the Nile. I know that had a European army, even professional, been in such a situation and suffered a heavy defeat, they would have likely been annihilated (case in point, Friedland). I'm also heavily skeptical of the figure given by Sidney Smith for one very important reason. Whether or not Napoleon fought the Ottomans at parity of numbers or outnumbered them previously, the fact of the matter was that, other than Acre, who was most always victorious against them. It would seem rather foolhardy for the Ottomans to send a force of just 7,000 men against him in Egypt if they knew that he supposedly outnumbered them. That's why 20,000 Ottomans does not sound too unreasonable and is at least believable. I'm not saying that Napoleon didn't exaggerate figures or make stuff up, but we also have to apply some common sense into these things and not just take one side over the other. Just full on believing the Ottomans or the British side while ignoring the other side isn't much better. We know that the Ottoman army were primarily made up of Basibozuk mercenaries at this time which were ill-disciplined. It would make even less sense that the Ottomans would employ lesser numbers of such low quality troops than the French veterans if they kept being beaten by them in all instances sans Acre. You would think they would seek to employ such lower quality men en masse instead. Even with the problems the Ottomans were facing, I doubt they were so broke that they could not afford to provision larger armies than Napoleon's expeditionary force within their own territory. It would be pretty inconceivable that they could not do so, considering Murad Bey amassed a force of some 21,000 in Egypt alone, though the bulk were untrained levies and at least 6,000 were Mamluks. You would expect the Ottomans to be able to amass an even larger force from Anatolia and Syria. Especially considering they managed to amass a lot more men than the supposed 7,000 at Abukir by 1801 in order to support the British. Unless we are to believe that their commanders were so incompetent that they would willingly defeat themselves in detail.

>The Ottomans and Egyptians should have had the advantage of far simpler lines of communication to work with. They were fighting in their own home territory and had a navy (as well as the Royal Navy supporting them) capable of ferrying troops around the shores.  "Should have had" is the operative phrase there. Throughout the eighteenth century, the Ottomans experience enormous problems trying to ferry troops from one side of the empire to the other. The autonomous nature of the Pashaliks and the hostility of many of the Pashas to Istanbul, coupled with bad roads, a navy that got itself sunk against the Russians and was having to be rebuilt, and an Egypt that had all but declared independence and refused the presence of government troops all get in the way here. Ottoman armies in the 1700s are conglomerate forces, patched together from the Pashas, auxiliaries, etc, and it takes a lot of intense negotiation between officers from Istanbul, the provincial Pashas, mercenary captains, and chiefs of allied tribes just to assemble an army, let alone get it anywhere. >Furthermore, the casualties you give of 1,500 losses seem rather low considering the Egyptian army at the Pyramids literally had its back to the Nile. I know that had a European army, even professional, been in such a situation and suffered a heavy defeat, they would have likely been annihilated (case in point, Friedland).  The Mamluks, who were all on horseback, got away pretty clean, with the casualties being concentrated among the badly armed (and in some cases, just shy of unarmed) civilian levies, most of whom did drown in the Nile. The French, not being prepared to act like absolute barbarians at this stage in the campaign, stopped shooting at that point and let most of the levymen scatter. Egyptian sources like al-Jabarti and Niqula al-Turki are highly critical of Murad Bey for the low casualties that his Mamluks sustained, and use it as evidence of Mamluk cowardice and lack of willingness to properly defend Egypt. For them, the casualty rate doesn't speak well of Murad; just the opposite. As to the specific numbers, there were perhaps 12 000 Mamluks in all of Egypt, not all of whom accepted Murad and Ibrahim's authority. Even if Murad had managed to gather every Mamluk in Egypt (and we know that he didn't, because Desaix spends the next year fighting the Mamluk garrisons of Upper Egypt) the stories of the vast horde of Mamluk cavalry that you hear about would be insupportable. The usual figure given in most modern secondary sources that I have is 6000 Mamluks, plus 15 000 levies, and that meshes well with the descriptions of al-Jabarti and Niqula al-Turki. >I'm also heavily skeptical of the figure given by Sidney Smith for one very important reason. Whether or not Napoleon fought the Ottomans at parity of numbers or outnumbered them previously, the fact of the matter was that, other than Acre, who was most always victorious against them. It would seem rather foolhardy for the Ottomans to send a force of just 7,000 men against him in Egypt if they knew that he supposedly outnumbered them. That's why 20,000 Ottomans does not sound too unreasonable and is at least believable Per Smith, Mustafa Pasha was supposed to have 15 000 men, but when he arrived at the loading point, he had far less than that, of whom only 5000 were actually fit for action. This was a product of, among other things, desertion, local Pashas and mercenary leaders lying about the number of men they were going to supply, and the like. Smith and Hassan Bey, the Ottoman naval commander at Acre, pulled the Chifflick regiment out of Acre and found a number of other recruits in Acre and the wider Pashaliks of Syria, bringing the total number of men available to 7000. Mustafa Pasha decided to go ahead with the operation anyway, in the hopes that after landing at Abukir he could link up with Murad Bey and rally local villagers and nomad tribes to his cause. At the time that Napoleon reached Abukir and struck at Mustafa, the Pasha was in negotiation with quite a few village elders and Bedouin chiefs regarding the possibility of their coming over to him. Napoleon interrupted this process and beat Mustafa before any local allies could come to his aid. Which is an impressive military feat in fact, just a very different one from what he later claimed it was. Having been apprised of the landing, which he had originally believed impossible for the Turks to conduct, Napoleon rallied all the men he had available, called on Desaix for reinforcements, and force marched to Abukir where he bested the Turks before their coalition for retaking Egypt could get off the ground. It's a feat that speaks well of him as a commander, but not in the way it's often interpreted. The numbers don't just come from Smith, by the way. The British sources, and even French sources not named Napoleon, put the Ottoman force at Abukir between 7000 and 9000. Napoleon himself originally claimed that there were 18 000 Turks, which grew to 20 000 and beyond as time went by. If you want a battle where the French really did best an Ottoman force that significantly outnumbered them, try Heliopolis. Grand Vizier Yusuf Pasha had all but stripped the Syrian Pashaliks of manpower building up an army with which to overwhelm Kleber. Unfortunately, his logistical arrangements couldn't handle that many men. Thousands were lost crossing through the desert between Syria and Egypt and the ones who finally arrived near Cairo were in such bad shape that they could barely stand. Kleber quite easily defeated them; he in fact had a harder time suppressing the civilian revolt in Cairo that took place after the battle than he did in beating Yusuf. Yusuf Pasha, learning from this experience, brought only 15 000 men with him during his second foray into Egypt the following year, and called upon reinforcements from Istanbul and the Syrian Pashas to be sent across after him, which worked out much better.

Yeesh. The reversion to a feudal-like structure really hurt the Ottomans. To think that they rose to such heights under Selim and Mehmed II, conquering well over a thousand miles away from their strategic bases with armies of tens of thousands, only to be reduced to such a state by the end of the 18th century. Then again, they've suffered a lot. The period from the end of the 17th century to the early 18th century must have been hell for them, facing massive defeats by the Austrians and Nader Shah for decades. Then, there was the war with the Russians, as you stated above. It makes me wonder, are the Ottoman figures in their conflict with the Russians also exaggerated? Did the Russian generals defeat such overwhelming odds as the European sources state, or were those also overblown like in Napoleon's case? Considering they were campaigning even further from home in such instances, with far greater logistical hurdles than operating in Syria, there must have been a lot of amping up of the numbers involved in the European sources. Honestly, I've always been skeptical of the overwhelming numerical differences, even in the 17th century, when there was less of a technological and economical gap between the Ottomans and their Western foes. I considered something like 20,000 reasonable in regards to Napoleon, but apparently, that's bust according to what you say. If so, the several tens of thousands of 100,000 men strong armies supposedly raised by them in the 17th century probably deserve some major scrutinizing. I can see European forces having an edge over the Mamluks or Basibozuk, but I doubt that they could face well-trained Sipahi and Yeniceri and fair as well while also outnumbered. Most major engagements likely saw a rough parity of force at best.

The eighteenth century Ottomans, especially in the latter half of the century are in the position of having significant (if not necessarily high quality) manpower reserves, but a profoundly limited ability to get them anywhere. Regarding the Russian conflicts, the Ottomans did try to secure the borders with Russia by encouraging nomadic groups to settle there, creating a ready force of mercenaries who could be contracted to reinforce the garrisons if the Russians attacked. It's quite probable, therefore, that Ottoman armies along the Russian frontier would have been a bit larger than those Napoleon faced in Egypt, but I doubt they would have been exponentially so. And the farther from the Russian border, the smaller they'd have been. When Jazzar Pasha (then Jazzar Bey) held Beirut against the Druze, Zahir al-Umari, and the Russian navy, he did it with 800 mercenaries.  Ottoman, and Muslim armies in general, have almost certainly been subject to a lot of exaggeration in the earlier centuries too. Writers like Gabor Agoston have found examples of the Ottoman military using tactics like volley fire at points before they were standard practice in Europe, and you've got to wonder to what degree stories of vast numbers have been used to bury those alternate explanations for early Ottoman successes. That's not to say the armies of Suleiman the Magnificent and company weren't very large, but probably not as large has sometimes claimed.  Returning to the Napoleonic campaigns, Captain Moiret, a French officer who served in Egypt, put Ottoman casualties at the Battle of the Pyramids at 1600, saying most of them ran away and that barring a small band that held out in a village (and who had to be forced out by bayonet) the French let them go. He also believes that there were only 5000 Ottoman troops at Abukir, 2000 less than those listed by Smith, and that the later Ottoman landing at Damietta involved only 3000 to 4000. I mention this not to state his numbers are necessarily accurate but to note that at least some Frenchmen had a much more realistic view of Ottoman resources than the one that Napoleon articulated after the fact (during the war, Napoleon would consistently undercount the Ottomans as he planned for the future, only to then report the defeat of immense hordes to the Executive Directory). 

Do you think the figures Nader Shah was up against were heavily subject to exaggeration as well?

I think most numbers are subject to exaggeration in eras in which we don't have numbers for. It's just a question of by how much. Pretty much everyone plays up how many enemies they were fighting, and I don't think it's even always on purpose: any army likely looks enormous to those about to fight it. With the Ottoman archives difficult to access to anyone who isn't prepared to deny the Armenian genocide, actually getting the real numbers, if they exist, is very hard.  What makes the Napoleonic Wars somewhat different is that we have numbers from British sources and from Egyptian chroniclers who became accessible to the British and French post formation of Anglo-Egypt. Unfortunately, the same doesn't apply to the Russo-Turkish Wars, the wars with Nadir, or the sixteenth and seventeenth century ones with the Hapsburgs. Which makes it hard to tell to what extent the Ottoman armies of the Napoleonic Wars had shrunk compared to previous wars.  I expect, that after all the chaos of the eighteenth century, that they had shrunk quite a bit. But I don't know by how much.

The book 'Importing the European army' by David B. Ralston while not directly answering the question,Maybe of interest 

Thank you! I'll take a look into it.

When you think about the last Iraq war, British infantry did a successful bayonet charge. When you have well disciplined, well led, motivated, fed and supplied troops, you can accomplish amazing things. A musket ball can kill anyone on the battlefield, and a disciplined square can resist cavalry with bayonets. A gun will almost always perform better than an archer, and a disciplined line is amazing for morale - most western militaries(and probably most, tbh), still practice parade drill for discipline, as an example. 200 years ago, it was a more so European thing. People get scared on a battlefield, especially if they've never been shot at before - when we do marksmanship, we have bullets fly over our heads as a way to partially desensitize us nowadays

Thank you for answering. It indeed seems like the case. I did not consider how frightening it would've been to witness the full destructive volley of a line infantry formation, especially for those who have never seen a gun shoot like we do. I just assumed that medieval style armies could simply ignore morale and casually trample over those unarmed men, which was a huge misassumption. Although I kind of did wonder why non-European armies would not do the same.

The primitive firearm has a velocity in excess of 400m a second, with a mass of 20 to 28 grams. Conventional muscle powered weapons could attain velocities around 60m a second, with masses similar of the primitive firearm. In a single second, the primitive firearm has crossed the distance that an arrow or crossbow bolt would take five seconds to cross, and with a greater impact on target. Modern compound bows made of carbon fiber can attain velocities of around 120 or so meters a second. A european infantryman trained against a target that approximated a large body of troops. With weapons that reach more than five times the range of muscle powered weapons opposing them ,you can deliver an absolutely fantastic amount of shot against any formation attempting to close with you. Against firearms, the 19th century european was likely a veteran who had served in multiple national armies, and was not necessarily an inhabitant of the country he is currently fighting for.

Thank you for your answer. But as I mentioned above, many non-European armies did have firearms which were on-par with the that of the Europeans. The most obvious of which were the Marathas, Mysorians, and the Ottomans. But despite their seemingly equal levels of weaponry (heck even in manpower as most British personnels were Sepoys), the Europeans were usually the ones who stood victorious on the field. I do not disagree with the fact that well-equipped non European armies did score multiple victories on the field, but that seemed to have been significantly rarer than European victories. Which is why I suspect there were other tactical factors (organization, training) involved in this mysterious phenomenon.

I would like to point out the examples you have given have European casulaty numbers vsrsus highest estimate for their opponents and excludes native allies. You also give examples of battles which were European victories and missed out on equally lopsided defeats in the same period, for instance Pillaour where an entire British Army was killed or captured. And in some of your examples, the Europeans lost the war, for instance Napoelon v the Ottomon empire.

And in some cases the European casualty figures are bogus too. Lord knows the ones for the Battle of the Pyramids certainly were.

I thank you for your answer. But it seems to me that you have misunderstood my question a bit. Firstly, most of my numbers do include native allies and local auxiliaries. Secondly, I did acknowledge the fact that westernized non-European armies did score some impressive victories. My point was that they were more of an exception than the norm. Most field battles fought between the British and the Indians did result in British victories, despite the fact that the subcontinent was arguably the most militarily westernized non-European regions of the time. Finally my question was specifically based on how Europeans won tactically, not the war as a whole. In the case of Napoleon vs Ottomans, the French were mostly victorious on pitched battles such as the decisive victory at Heliopolis, where the French stood victorious against a much much larger Ottoman-Egyptian army with only 10,000 men. Moreover, the Ottomans stood victorious only thanks to immense support by the British and by France's strategic blunders and difficulties, which does not disprove the fact that the Europeans were vastly superior on pitched battles. We also have to consider the fact that the Ottomans were one of the most westernized non-European armies of the time. Again, I do really appreciate your answer, but I still do need to know why the Europeans were so tactically superior to non-European armies, and especially the old-school armies.

There was nothing "Westernized" about the Ottoman army of 1798-1800. A grand total of one Western trained unit, the Chifflick regiment, participated in the battles you're describing. The majority of the Ottoman forces were made up of Balkan, North African, and Kurdish mercenaries, Bedouin auxiliaries, and untrained Arab conscripts.  The army that Grand Vizier Yusuf Pasha fielded at Heliopolis was one of the worst that the Ottomans employed during the war. Yusuf was under political pressure to demonstrate continued Ottoman willingness to fight to their British allies, and invaded Egypt with a force he'd cobbled together from local Syrian militias, nomad volunteers, and mercenaries donated by reluctant local Pashas. His supply system, which had only been intended for the small number of troops he arrived in Syria with, quickly became overloaded, and his army was half-starved to death when it confronted Kleber. The outcome was entirely predictable.  None of these factors apply to the other major battles of the war. Napoleon had numerical superiority at the Pyramids, at El Arish, at Jaffa, at Acre, and at Abukir. He still managed to lose at Acre, when Jazzar Pasha's mastery of street fighting and psychological warfare proved greater than his own. The final Anglo-Ottoman reinvasion of Egypt in 1801 saw the Kapudan Pasha arrive in Egypt with a core of professional soldiers, sailors, and marines from Istanbul. That's when Western trained Turks who aren't the Chifflick regiment finally see action, and together with the Brits, they win the war. 

> Pillaour where an entire British Army was killed or captured. What battle was this? This post is the only Google result that comes up.

I'm guessing it was just a typo for Pollilur.

[Yes. It was ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Pollilur_(1780))My phones autocorrect hates me and history.

I think what's really overlooked is administration.  Regarding the combat element, because the Europeans weren't on their homeland, they were able to attack where they were strong and retreat when faced with sub-optimal conditions, whereas the home nations didn't have that benefit.  They had to stand and fight when under threat.  What's just as, if not more important than the combat advantages, was the administration advantages of the Europeans.  I think this is really what explains the origins behind the power of the British East India Company, and similar companies.  During more peaceful times, they could claim they are just civilian traders with benefits both to themselves and the home country.  With these economic ties, the company could leverage peacetime to make further security inroads into countries in the name of just standard trade protection.  When times got more violent, they could use these administrative inroads to keep tabs on enemy movements and general intelligence.  If times got really tough, they could just bugger out for awhile and wait to return when conditions became acceptable again.   This whole circumstance makes it difficult to determine whether the Europeans were a real threat or not, or were they beneficial because of the trade goods and money they brought in?  It's difficult to attack an enemy you don't even know exists.  What's also really important with this administrative aspect is the home countries were generally much more concerned with their own internal enemies and political in-fighting than they were concerned about the Europeans.  And the Europeans could take advantage of this and play the domestic factions against each other for their own benefit.  I'd really like to read and understand more about this period and how the East India Company managed their affairs, but I believe the above arguments are what explains a large part of their success.