Hong Wu wrote:The Japanese actually improved upon the Portuguese musket within a decade after first encountering it, but they didn't industrialize and become a military power until hundreds of years later.
Yep, in more serious posts I explained this before as well. The original matchlocks couldn't fire in the rain, so the Japanese variant solved this
(because country of awesomeness), and mass produced it. Except this mass production was not production line. Parts were not interchangeable because the tolerances were enormous. Production was still at the workshop phase.
The lack of production line industrialisation is because actually there was no way to do it.
Miniaturisation had not happened yet
(we take the vernier calipers for granted now, but back then none of that was in use), and did not happen until the British Army started mass producing rifles in which all of the parts were made 'like how you make small clocks'. When everyone else was going larger, the British Army wanted to look into the world of 'going smaller'. That innovation led to standardisation of parts and production lines, and it was only at that stage that transfers of this concept could happen, and it would only reach the east in the first part of the 1800s.
The history of industrialisation, is the history of
how the British Empire came to manufacture mass produced guns with interchangeable parts with tight tolerances. Many people think it's Ford, and they like to think it's Ford that did it first because his was a non-violent application. But the truth is that the history of industrial humanity is the history of the gun. Repeat the same story with Germans and boilers, and Germans and ship cannons.
Development of productive forces goes hand in hand with destructive force. It is what it is.
Hong Wu wrote:and become a military power until hundreds of years later.
Japan was a military power prior to industrialisation though. It fended off Mongols twice, and on the third time the wind did it. Japan also aligned itself with Baekje and Silla to attack parts of the Korean peninsula back in those days too. Japan also had a trade outpost and garrison in Vietnam
(by invitation), back when that was 'the Gulf of Aden of the East', and that outpost only was abandoned when the new trade routes made all of it irrelevant. Hoi An
(aka Champa City) was to the Edo Bafuku, as Colony of Aden
(aka South Yemen) was to the British Empire.
- By FiveofSwords
- By Pants-of-dog