You and the Atom Bomb by George Orwell

Suggested: Add [1945] to the title.

> In particular, the connection between the discovery of gunpowder and the overthrow of feudalism by the bourgeoisie has been pointed out over and over again.

Wow - TIL. But skimming through Google's AI summary of the history of this (evidently extremely popular) idea, it sure sounds like a very-convenient-but-false meme.

The Roman Republic was famously non-feudal, and dominated by its equivalent of the later bourgeoisie. Many other pre-gunpowder societies were also non-feudal.

Marxist History is extremely fond of the concept...but subsequent history has shown Marxism's understanding of history to be rather lacking.

The "peasant with gun kills knight" meme pushes a lot of buttons - but only idiots obsessed with tradition would don armor and lead from atop horses, out front, on a battlefield with lots of effective guns. Vs., say, using their wealth and power to arm and train squads of gun-armed infantry, then mostly lead from the rear.

The undercurrent I see is that Europe was feudal when it was backward enough (both socially and technologically) and isolated enough so that control of the land meant control of most of the possible wealth. And no large and more-competent neighbor (Persians, Monguls, whoever) could sweep in and conquer. But unfortunately for the feudal ruling class, social and technological advances kept reducing the fraction of wealth that land ownership gave them. And their foundation stone of noble blood being superior proved itself wrong over and over and over and over and ... Meanwhile, non-land-derived wealth kept rising, and that was controlled by a relatively meritocratic social class, who had rather little reason to support the blueblood idiots.