Subscriber Essay: What Were the Gunpowder Empires?

This week’s question gave me grad school PTSD:

You occasionally refer to the Gunpowder Empires. Could you elaborate a bit on where this concept comes from and what it actually describes?

The first thing we need to say here is that the “Gunpowder Empires” were the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal Empires, moving west to east. from around the start of the 16th …