“Arms races are a fact of global life. The first guns had been invented in about 1290, when the Chinese learned how to harness the propulsive powers of gunpowder. Yet the business of armaments grew and prospered much more rapidly in the West than in the East. The reason, William McNeill theorizes, can be summed up in a single word: capitalism. In the market-based economies of the West, there was ample incentive for craftsmen to continuously improve weapons for wealthy and impatient kings. The Chinese, while innovative in the laboratory, lacked the entrepreneurial urge that sparked so much Western achievement. Chinese culture in these early centuries taught that the concentration of too much money in too few private hands was immoral. Gunmakers in the West, bound by no such scruples, got down to work. The perfecting of deadly weapons held the promise of a big payday.” – Julia Keller, Mr. Gatling’s Terrible Marvel