ABSTRACT
In recent years, scholars have developed a new appreciation for Ming warfare. The early Ming state was, they have shown, the world’s most powerful gunpowder empire, possessing gun-bearing infantry that were more numerous and effective than those of any other state in the world. 1 Nor did the Ming lose its military mojo over the following centuries. Whereas previously the mid- and late-Ming Dynasty military was seen as backwards, conservative, and ineffective, recent work has established that throughout the 1500s and early 1600s the Ming undertook a series of strikingly innovative reforms and adaptations, which kept it a major military power until its sudden military collapse in the late 1630s. 2
