Saltpeter

Product Description

This is the story of saltpeter the vital but mysterious substance craved by governments from the Tudors to the Victorians as an inestimable treasure. National security depended on control of this organic material
- that had both mystical & mineral properties. Derived from soil enriched with dung & urine it provided the heart or mother of gunpowder without which no musket or cannon could be fired. Its acquisition involved alchemical knowledge exotic technology intrusions into peoples lives & eventual dominance of the worlds oceans. The quest for saltpeter caused widespread vexation in Tudor & Stuart England as crown agents dug in homes & barns & even churches. Governments hungry for it purchased supplies from overseas merchants transferred skills from foreign experts & extended patronage to ingenious schemers while the hated saltpetermen intruded on private ground. Eventually huge saltpeter imports from India relieved this social pressure & by the eighteenth century positioned Britain as a global imperial power; the governments of revolutionary America & ancien regime France on the other hand were forced to find alternative sources of this treasured substance. In the end it was only with the development of chemical explosives in the late Victorian period that dependency on saltpeter finally declined. Saltpeter the Mother of Gunpowder tells this fascinating story for the first time. Lively & entertaining in its own right it is also a tale with far-reaching implications. As David Cressys engaging narrative makes clear the story of saltpeter is vital not only in explaining the inter-connected military scientific & political revolutions of the seventeenth century; it also played a key role in the formation of the centralized British nation state
- & that states subsequent dominance of the waves in the eighteenth & nineteenth centuries.