RousseauX
Donor
The problem is that once you hit a certain techological level the steppe peoples cease to be a threat and can be defeated permanently.Hello everyone,
I had a thought I'd like to discuss.
It's often said that Europe got an advantage in tech because there were competing states and the wars helped them hone each others' skills. On the other hand, China stagnated because they didn't have "serious" enemies for a while.
I'm simplifying but I see it often, and then people coming and said "oh but if China had reformed earlier/was more powerful/etc... we'd say unity is the great factor".
But I was thinking, China still had massive advances in tech and warfare, and a lot o it came from their fight against steppe people. So my thought was this: can we equate the threat of steppe people with the interstate wars of Europe in term of drive to innovate or is China's drive for tech an actually different model?
China hit this point in the 1740s when the Qing marched a gunpowder based infantry army into Xinjiang, defeated and imposed a "final solution" on the Dzungar Mongols who were the last great nomadic empire on the planet. At the same time, the Russians marched down south and east and between those two empires they were able to close the steppes and bring its people who had invaded sedimentary civilization for mellenias under its control. Afterwards the Qing settled into a long period of peace in which little was done to improve the military.
So by the mid 1800s the Chinese military was definitely behind that of Europes. The only sustainable scenario in the early modern era where you get continuous wars driving innovations are inter-state wars between relative equals.