PublishedOxford University Press, January 2013 |
ISBN9780199695751 |
FormatHardcover, 256 pages |
Dimensions22.2cm × 14.8cm × 2cm |
The story of the science, the technology, the politics and the military applications of saltpeter, the vital but mysterious substance that governments from the Tudors to the Victorians regarded as an 'inestimable treasure.' Derived from soil enriched with dung and urine, saltpeter provided the heart or 'mother' of gunpowder, without which no musket or cannon could be fired. National security depended on control of this organic material that had both mystical and
mineral properties. The quest for it caused widespread 'vexation' in Tudor and Stuart England, as crown agents dug in homes and barns and even churches. Huge imports of saltpeter from India relieved
this social pressure, and by the eighteenth century positioned Britain as a global imperial power. Only with the development of chemical explosives in the late Victorian period did dependency on this much treasured substance decline. Previously untold, the story of saltpeter is not only lively and entertaining in its own rightSaltpeter, the Mother of Gunpowder tells this previously untold story, one which is not only lively and entertaining in its own right, but
which also has far wider implications, helping to explain the connections between the military, scientific, and political 'revolutions' of the seventeenth century, as well the formation of the centralized
British state and its eventual dominance of the waves in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
