'Lost Colony: The Untold Story of China’s First Great Victory Over the West'
Tonio Andrade
Princeton University Press 456pp £24.95

Taiwan, once again a site of confrontation between China and the West, was for nearly four decades the pride of the Dutch Indies. Then, two centuries before the Opium Wars, a warlord called Koxinga kicked the Dutch colonists out. The Dutch blamed the defeat on their commander, Frederick Coyet. Having been subjected to a mock execution in Batavia, Coyet in turn pointed the finger at the arrogant neglect of his government. In Lost Colony, Tonio Andrade asks if the true explanation might lie in the might of Koxinga’s 150,000-strong army.

Andrade abandons an assumption of western military superiority over the armies of Asia, which has prevailed for three centuries. The Chinese, we now know, were the inventors of the gun – in the 1100s – as well as of gunpowder. The ‘military revolution’ ascribed to early modern Europe should, Chinese historians have shown, be seen as a Eurasian phenomenon.

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More importantly, it sheds fresh light on the question of why the West rose to global dominance. Andrade finds support for the view that Europe’s technological superiority was no more than marginal by the mid-17th century: only by 1800 was the great divergence between the West and the rest beyond denial.