Essays analyze the connections between science and technology and military power in the late medieval, Renaissance, and Enlightenment periods. The integration of scientific knowledge and military power began long before the Manhattan Project. In the third century BC, Archimedes was renowned for his research in mechanics and mathematics as well as for his design and coordination of defensive siegecraft for Syracuse during the Second Punic War. This collection of essays examines the emergence during the early modern era of mathematicians, chemists, and natural philosophers who, along with military engineers, navigators, and artillery officers, followed in the footsteps of Archimedes and synthesized scientific theory and military practice.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Facing the new technology : gunpowder defenses in military architecture before the trace Italienne, 1350-1500 / Kelly DeVries -- The French reluctance to adopt firearms technology in the early modern period / Frederic J. Baumgartner -- Gunpowder and the changing military order : the Islamic gunpowder empires, ca. 1450-ca. 1650 / Barton C. Hacker -- Behind the Turkish war machine : gunpowder technology and war industry in the Ottoman Empire, 1450-1700 / Gabor Agoston -- The Mary Rose : a tale of two centuries / Alexzandra Hildred -- Mathematics and empire : the military impulse and the scientific revolution / Lesley B. Cormack -- Harriot and Dee on exploration and mathematics : did scientific imagery make for new scientific practice? / Amir Alexander -- Charting the globe and tracking the heavens : navigation and the sciences in the early modern era / Michael S. Mahoney -- "The art and mystery of making gunpowder" : the English experience in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries / Brenda J. Buchanan -- Chemistry in the war machine : saltpeter production in eighteenth-century Sweden / Thomas Kaiserfeld -- Chemistry in the arsenal : state regulation and scientific methodology of gunpowder in eighteenth-century England and France / Seymour H. Mauskopf -- Eighteenth-century French fortification theory after Vauban : the case of Montalembert / Janis Langins -- Military "progress" and Newtonian science in the age of enlightenment / Brett D. Steele.