The Ascension of Western Influence on the World essays

The Ascension of Western Influence on the World essays Fifteenth century improvements in the ability to wage war developed by leveraging gunpowder technology allowed western civilization to create the first truly global empires. As a result, between 1500 and 1800, these empires expanded their influence to about 35 percent of the world's surface.[1] Those civilizations that succumbed had no time to adopt western military technology, failed to integrate it into their existing system, or didn't properly deploy it in battle. The first of these improvements was the siege gun. Its use during the French invasion of Italy in 1494-1495 reduced the time it previously took an army to breach a town's walls from days to hours.[2] Cities once thought impregnable were captured with ease. In 1519, Niccolo Machiavelli wrote, "No wall exists... that artillery cannot destroy in a few days."[3] Invariably, this led to a new system of defense. First, fortress walls were built lower and thicker. The new wall design included artillery towers built at regular intervals to cover blind spots and interlock defensive fires. Then, a wide and deep ditch was dug around the fortification to keep enemy artillery at a greater distance and to increase the difficulty of mining the walls with gunpowder.[4] Capturing a stronghold defended by this new design, required sieges of months, if not years, effectively countering the technological advantage of gunpowder. These new fortresses changed the tactics of war. For every battle fought there were numerous sieges. This required the growth of western armies to At the same time that the army sizes were increasing, the advent of reliable small arms altered the tactics that armies used when they met in the field. The value of cavalry decreased and the infantry consisted of musketeers, ordered in ranks, volley firing. Again, new tactics were developed to counter this development, and armies began to spread out during ba...