Guns, Sails and Empires

Why Europeans, after the end of the fifteenth century, managed to reach the distant Spice Islands, take control of the major sea routes and set up overseas empires is the question Carlo M. Cipolla sets out to answer. He treats motive as an insufficient explanation, since the wish to get around the Muslim blockade had existed in earlier centuries too. Cipolla instead points to two developments that supplied the means: ships able to sail to faraway oceans, and heavy guns that those ships could carry. The argument ties European expansion to the history of ordnance and sailing ships.

Paul Graham called it amazing while rereading it, and said on X that its being out of print was an indictment of publishing.