King Harkinian said:
nox said:
If you think you're unhappy about this, imagine how the whole cultures and societies felt who had invested much in traditions that involved swords and cavalry? When a dirt poor peasant can end your deal with a mass produced firearm, you become a lot less special.
Mass production didn't exist at the time -- heck, there wasn't even such a thing as a "factory".
I'm sick and tired of always seeing the same old hackneyed tropes when talking about the early modern period.
Maybe the mass production wasn't correct but the rest of what he said was spot on.
Pretty much sums up the late Sengoku Jidai era.
Oda Nobunaga used firearms extensively as one farmer with a gun could take out (in theory) a samurai elite who spent his whole life training for battle, costing his employer a fortune in rice to feed and pay - as opposed to the peasant who's motivation for battle was "if you don't fight for me I will stab you in the face".
Evidence: See "Battle of Nagashino" wherein Oda Nobunaga used guns to devastating effect against the legendary Takeda Cavalry.
Choice quote from http://www.samurai-archives.com/ban.html:
Oda Nobunaga gave the important job of controlling the 3,000 peasant-footsoldier matchlockmen to seven members of his personal bodyguard. They managed to keep the sometimes unreliable ashigaru in formation. The Takeda, on the other hand, had their best commanders with the forward cavalry units. Usually this worked since the cavalry led the charge, but it was the cavalry that was to suffer devastating casualties, and Katsuyori lost many of his most valuable commanders this way.
Basically the same all around the world as the gun replaced the sword.
Still, when professional sword troops eg. Katana Samurai reached the ashigaru (peasant) lines it was a massacre in hand to hand so it balanced out.
So basically, although the weapons weren't "mass produced" by today's standards - guns around the world certainly were produced en masse to fuel the ever-present warfare in feudal Japan alone.