Articles tagged with gunpowder

Bengal: saltpetre

A seventeenth-century army increasingly relied on gunpowder, and the production of that vital resource required three mineral ingredients - charcoal, sulphur and saltpetre. Of these, the two minority ingredients were charcoal, which could be obtained readily wherever there were trees, and sulphur, which was mined in many places and was fairly cheap. However, three-quarters or so of the mix was taken up by saltpetre, the mineral potassium nitrate. Saltpetre forms naturally in small quantities in some locations, but for regular supply it had to be 'farmed' by heaping animal dung with earth in large beds that were then treated with urine for a period of months. Bacterial action produces potassium nitrate, which with the right technique can be refined to a relatively pure crystalline product.

The Mughal army was as gunpowder-based as the European armies. At the start of the sixteenth century the technologies were very similar, with European powers making …

Year 1688

The so-called 'Glorious Revolution' in England in 1688 was a pivotal event in the country's history. It also began a train of events leading to almost twenty years of war in Europe and the emergence of Britain as a major power. This is why elsewhere I cover the life of Thomas Pitt who, living from 1653 to 1726, straddled this period of rapid social and economic change in Europe and the world.

Wills, 1688: a global history

To take an overview of the deepening connections between parts of the world, I will often go back to a short but highly interesting book, John Wills' global history of the year 1688. He speculates that: In 1688 a full sense of the variety of the world's places and peoples, of their separations and their connections, was confined to a few, referring to the small number of travellers as well as the literate …