People have a nice tendency to kill each other. For most of human history, battles were fought by groups clashing and fighting in hand to hand combat. Then, something changed. A new invention, which when lit, could react with tremendous force. "We know it's gunpowder, get on with it!" Yeah, gunpowder was the new invention. From its journey from China to the rest of the world, Gunpowder weapons evolved to become the dominant and only force of the battlefield. Cannons destroyed armies, Guns destroyed cavalry, Bombs wiped out entire cities, The way that people kill each other would never be the same. What a time to be alive. So, as is tradition, this raises an interesting question. What if in an alternate timeline, gunpowder never existed? It's simply removed from ever being invented. First, as usual, some context. Where did gunpowder come from? China. It was invented by Taoist monks in the 9th century. The most accepted theory is that they were attempting to make a potion for everlasting life, and in the process, burned down their house. But from the ash heap, the monks in China saw they created something special. In the grim darkness of the 9th century, there is only war. And the Chinese had been fighting Mongol raids ever since China had been created. Gunpowder was immediately utilized against the Mongols in different ways. It wasn't explosive at first, but it sure was flammable, so the first weapons were pretty much flamethrowers. As time went on, technology improved, and the Chinese invented more explosive powder. This was used to create the first cannons, grenades and bombs. To a battle-hardened Mongolian soldier, the only fighting they've ever known was from pointy weapons. But this new type of warfare sounded like thunder and killed with flames. If you've never heard of fireworks before, you'd think the world was ending. But, gunpowder wasn't enough to stop Genghis and the Mongol Empire from conquering China. And soon, the secret was out. The Mongols spread across Eurasia, bringing gunpowder with them. After conquering basically everything, they established a trade route which Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Gunpowder was adopted by the Islamic world, and Europe, after seeing this new foreign technology used against them, knew they had to adapt. Medieval Europe, not surprisingly, was a place of conflict and war. It's a general rule in warfare that most of the time, the less technologically advanced army is going to lose. You can have the greatest fighters in the world, but if they're equipped with stones, going up against bronze, or bronze going up against iron, they're most likely going to lose. For millennia, this meant armies had to improve the quality of swords, armor, and arrows that they had. Military evolution meant sharper and more durable steel, but it also meant the skill of the man wielding it, which would also be an important factor. (I'll talk more about this later.) Cannons changed the game. Eventually. By their introduction in the 14th century, they were pretty useless and dangerous at first in Europe. But soon, they were shrunk down, made more portable, and we saw the introduction of mortars, handcannons, and soon enough, portable handguns, the first guns. (Very much oversimplifying for the sake of time), gunpowder changed the dynamic of how people fight. Be it cannons or guns, few people now had the capability to cause much more destruction with less training. Before guns, a soldier strength was determined by his size, power, and ability to fight. Of course, an arrow could kill soldiers at a long range, but most war was hand-to-hand combat. The stronger soldier usually won. More war means more investment. Guns were improved, until eventually, an average soldier was able to wield a firearm instead of a spear. However, the firearm still required a long time to reload, and on the battlefield, anything can happen in those few seconds. Sweden solved this problem: a wall of bullets. This new tactic required two rows of soldiers all armed with guns. After the first row shoots, they crouch down, reload as the second above them fires, and in the process, the first row gets back up and fires again. This was the musket volley fire tactic. It was a constant flow of gunfire. Gunpowder became an equalizer. With the invention of guns, ANYONE can become a soldier. Without much training, a man armed with a gun can kill the most skilled warrior on foot, or a knight on horseback. What did Europeans love more than anything? Fighting other Europeans, of course! And so the arms race to fight each other continued. Constant war meant that technology improved, and so Europeans as a collective whole had far better gun technology, than even China and the rest of the world. Europeans put cannons onto boats. They used these boats to attack enemy vessels. (This would come in handy later down the line.) Europe didn't conquer the world with the Industrial Revolution. It was the moment it invested more to guns than everyone else. With better guns, fewer people can have more destructive power. Conquistadors can conquer the Aztec Empire. More colonies are created, more war, more resources to improve military technology, which allowed for more land to conquer and the cycle continues until you reach the Industrial Revolution. (THAT was the most oversimplified I could go. Now, let's remove all of that.) What if gunpowder never existed? Here is one scenario. In this alternate timeline, nobody ever invents gunpowder. (Maybe nobody even can, but that's not the point.) The point is that this invention, along with the effects it has on history, is completely removed from the timeline. By removing gunpowder from the timeline, you significantly affect every battle or war that gunpowder was ever used in. (No surprise.) I can't go through each and every battle that would be affected because; 1. I don't have the time for that, and 2. Many battles would just never happen anyway. The point is, the more dependent warfare has on the use of guns, the bigger the change will be in this alternate world. Make sense? GOOD. Removing gunpowder has too broad (and I mean, very broad) effects on how warfare is waged. 1. War is far less devastating in scale. And 2. There's much more of it. For the most part, war was fought the same way ever since civilization began. Everyone just used a weapon with a sharp tip. Before guns, war changed in different ways. Technology and metallurgy & projectiles evolved, but the relationship between war and its destruction of cities and the landscape around it, never really changed in those thousands of years. Gunpowder brought war into a new league. In football terms, it brought war from the NCAA, to the NFL. The rules of war are now different, and so its effects on society are too. No new weapon had that type of impact before. Introduction of guns and musket volley fire sent battlefield mortalities up drastically. War no longer was hand-to-hand combat, or knights on the field. It was much more random violence. As were destructions of the cities before gunpowder, cities could be burned, pillaged, or destroyed, but this was violence occurring over a period of days. With the invention of gunpowder, and the evolution of bombs, by World War I (1914-1918) and World War II (1939-1945), people had the ability to devastate entire landscapes and cities in a matter of hours. The killing capacity of man pretty much went up. In this alternate timeline, war is still fought with sharp weapons, armor, and a not too different style of war of the Renaissance age. Crossbows, armored soldiers, cavalry, all of that still live on the battlefield. Without the devastation of WW1 and the sheer brutal slaughter of gun warfare, fighting remains another "noble" endeavor by the state for multiple reasons. In our timeline, today we are seeing the most peaceful time in human history. Even though there is civil wars, terrorism, and uprisings, compared to the violence of centuries ago, this is the best there ever was. The World Wars were only possible because of gunpowder technology. Europe had always had the tradition of fighting in convoluted wars, but with the invention of guns, it shattered the old European aristocracy idea of a "noble war". In this alternate timeline, even up into our alternate 21st century, it's likely war is still thought of as a noble endeavor. Since it's far less costly, there's bound to be more of it. But it's also within the boundaries of a typical battlefield. The cannon made city walls obsolete, which is why today, there is no more importance structures surrounded by great walls or star forts, as an explosive shell can destroy all that. In this alternate timeline, we would see city walls, even up into the 21st century. Because, why fix what isn't broken? If war is fought by Medieval style fighting, then there's going to be different results. But some events still would occur, no matter what. In our timeline, by the 1450s, guns existed, but were really only used for cannons. By this time, the Byzantine Empire was a small enclave surrounded by the now dominant Ottoman Empire. The only thing preventing the fall of the capital; the Great Walls of Constantinople. The Ottomans had imported an invention used in Europe since the beginning of the 1400s: the Dardanelles gun. This cannon was able to tear a hole through Constantinople's wall, and the city fell. In this alternate timeline, even without this cannon, Constantinople may hold out for a few more decades, but it still would have fell to the Turks. In this alternate timeline, what changes the most is the relationship between Europe and the rest of the world. In our timeline, the last 5 centuries have been pretty good for Europe. It went from a continent on the same basic technological level as the Middle East/East Asia, to the center of the Industrial world. Even before the Industrial Revolution, Europeans had colonies on the African coast, India, and the Americas. The Portuguese were able to conquer African trade ports by firing cannons onto port cities. Now, European economics played a part into their global prestige, but this trade primarily came from being able to now dominate over valuable lands. Europeans could now invest into global colonies, and this gave them a trade advantage over China for the first time. In this alternate timeline, Europe never has the dominant power. In some parts of the world, Europe still can have an advantage, like in the Americas, (as the population would be ravaged by smallpox, and calvary warfare is still extremely efficient against tribal warriors), but in the Old World, Europe simply can't take control on the scale that they did in our timeline. Putting foot soldiers on the ground is much more risky when there isn't much of a difference between them and the native population. Fun fact: Europe is a peninsula, with a whole bunch of peninsulas coming out of it. So, unsurprisingly, Europeans became pretty good ship builders. In our timeline, attaching cannons to ships allowed Europe to conquer any coastal areas they wanted. Without gunpowder, this doesn't happen. Naval warfare before cannons was literally ramming your ship into the enemy and storming their ship with swords and arrows. So that stays the same in this alternate timeline. Without gunboats, Europeans never impress the Japanese with their technology, and so Japan remains a samurai style society for the time being. China never deals with the spheres of European influence like in our timeline. And so China remains a much more prominent player in global politics. As for the Americas, even with smallpox ravaging the native population, it's extremely difficult to fight and establish colonies in the New World. The Aztec and Inca still could fall, since the Europeans had calvary and an advantage over the foot soldiers of the new world, but it's much more dangerous and slower to establish a colony. Without gunpowder, military technology still advances. Crossbows were becoming far more common on the battlefield in our timeline. It's likely they would be more powerful. Yet arrows are expensive to craft, and never would be used on the same scale as bullets, (Though it'd still be cool to see an Operation Overlord style invasion with arrows and armor). In this alternate timeline, calvary in the New World would die out just as it did in our own. Arrows usually killed horses, and the armored knights would dismount to become tanks against unskilled infantry. But against the Native Americans, who had never seen a horse before, calvary could still be utilized. Now you might say, "Well, wouldn't military technology advance farther than that?" Yeah, it would. Just in a different way. Without gunpowder, technology would advance to allow us to have better and stronger metal for personal armor. We'd see stronger arrows and swords to counteract that armor, but other than that, that's basically it. Now, why does everything stagnate in this alternate timeline? This doesn't mean technology doesn't advance, the Industrial Revolution may have taken place anyway down the line, even if it wasn't in Britain or in the 18th century. There's no way to predict when it could have happened, but there's a chance technology advances even without guns. Maybe these alternate modern wars are the equivalent of Medieval steampunk battles, who knows. But the point is without gunpowder, military history may have taken a stranger turn as society continues to evolve. The question about whether gunpowder affected society, capitalism, and the modern nation state, is a debate historians still discuss today. As we go further into the 21st century, our view of how guns changed the world will change as well. I can't predict how democracy, capitalism, or the modern economy would differ, as the institutions that created them may not exist at all. What do you think would have happened, had gunpowder never existed? V Say in the comments. V This is Cody, of AlternateHistoryHub.
Guns don't need gunpowder.
The first civilization to master metallurgy enough to build air rifles would have all the advantages that the first countries to have regular guns would. Not having bombs and artillery would be VERY interesting, we'd probably using giant catapults with napalm/greek fire rounds instead. Walls would be very hard to destroy, so forts and castles would be very strong.
With air rifles, you could feasibly have European-levels of colonization on other continents. It would just be happening ~300 years later than in our timeline. However, repeating air rifles would be much more effective for infantry than muskets were.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_cannon
Bit of an oversimplification with the history (as he says), as early guns needed a lot of protection and actually couldn't penetrate through plate, but an interesting concept that I can't believe I've never thought of.
If gunpowder never existed, I'd be very terrified of all the chemicals involved that don't exist, and I'd be curious how my body would work without them.
Saltpeter is Potassium Nitrate, and if you live in a world where that molecule is incapable of forming... there would be many problems.
Pretty interesting. Gave me a few ideas for a world of mine. Groups discovering a new weapon similar to gunpowder and putting it into use in their own ways. That early flamethrower thing is pretty cool...
For the world to not have gunpowder, you need to lack the materials to create it. Because if not, someone would invent it at some point anyway.
And even lacking the material for gunpowder, you would still find another reactive explosion. I mean, modern cars and missiles are not propelled by gunpowder nor the warheads of those missiles made of gunpowder.